Debian 11 "Bullseye" KDE Stack Settling On Plasma 5.20

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian 11 "Bullseye" KDE Stack Settling On Plasma 5.20

Ahead of the upcoming freezes set to begin around Debian 11 "Bullseye", the Debian developers working on KDE packaging have been working to get all the latest components updated in time...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Debian-11-KDE-Plasma-5.20

[skeevy420]

While I'm not a big fan of rocking the Unstable and Testing repos (these days), what's being planned is a lot better than I expected. I just hope it keeps on getting updates once 11 is released and it doesn't fall victim to version freeze. I wonder what this will mean for Kubuntu, etc in the future?

and made them available for Debian/unstable and Debian/testing via the OBS build server.

Now that's just funny right there.

[andyprough]

Norbert Preining deserves a lot of credit for jumpstarting Debian KDE, which appeared to be languishing with a 5.18.x target for KDE apps on Bullseye. Starting with about 5.18.5, Norbert put up his own repos for Debian on opensuse Build Service and got a lot of us to test his KDE packages on Debian, Devuan, MX and other Debian based distros. He's been able to make the latest offerings within a few days of KDE release available for most of 2020. At the same time he's also been bringing the Cinnamon desktop up to the latest version, and I think that work is also going to make it into Bullseye.

[skeevy420]

Norbert Preining deserves a lot of credit for jumpstarting Debian KDE, which appeared to be languishing with a 5.18.x target for KDE apps on Bullseye. Starting with about 5.18.5, Norbert put up his own repos for Debian on opensuse Build Service and got a lot of us to test his KDE packages on Debian, Devuan, MX and other Debian based distros. He's been able to make the latest offerings within a few days of KDE release available for most of 2020. At the same time he's also been bringing the Cinnamon desktop up to the latest version, and I think that work is also going to make it into Bullseye.

As a current KDE user and someone who started on Debian almost decades ago: this actually makes me wish that I wasn't so invested in the Pacman ecosystem. COVID and distro hopping taught me that nothing is going to change that. But Plasma is literally why I got into Arch and Pacman and I've stuck with distributions that had good Plasma support since.

While I won't directly use his work, I really appreciate it because I know that with the ripple effect that it will help me long-term -- what he does on Debian will get picked up by their downstream which has lots and lots of users which means more people in the community using more up to date KDE doing their bug reports and that's a great thing that effects us all.

[smartalgorithm]

i thought they are still on KDE 4...

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

This is phenomenal. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see an up to date KDE even in testing/unstable. I hope the update train continues and testing/unstable are always on the latest code. Thanks Norbert (and the rest of the KDE team for getting on board)!

[archkde]

i thought they are still on KDE 4...

No supported release of Debian is on KDE 4. Jessie's end of life was in June.

[extremesquared]

I hope they get to the bug that causes KDE slowdown on systems running docker containers. Debian freezes are coming soon, and not being able to use kde apps at the same time as docker images would be a big strike against bullseye being viable for dev workstations.

[Sonadow]

Hopefully Debian can get xdg-desktop-portal, xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, xdg-desktop-portal-kde and xdg-desktop-portal-wlr all in good shape by 11 so that screen or window sharing on Wayland will be possible. Kind of an important feature to have on webconfs with Teams, WebEx and Zoom.

Of course, window sharing using XWayland works as a temporary workaround but it would be better to get Wayland-native solutions, especially if the application already supports Wayland natively.

[reavertm]

Don't laugh people, Debian having anything recent packaged is totally news-worthy.