Plasma 6.0 Alpha – What this means
The alpha release primarily focuses on preparing our software for a future release. It involves handling unreleased dependencies, version numbers, co-installation conflicts, and all the relevant bookkeeping work.
This release has been somewhat manic, with issues surfacing up to the last minute. However, that's precisely what this early release is for: resolving these issues now and gathering feedback on packaging to ensure a smoother transition to the beta phase.
Planet KDE:
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November Plasma 6 update
Well, I skipped October, oops. So it’s been two months since my last Plasma 6 update, but you can find all kinds of other good stuff about Plasma 6 on https://planet.kde.org, including this post from Kai.
Probably the big news is that we released the Plasma 6 Alpha today! What does that mean? Well, go read this blog post by David Edmundson to find out! In a nutshell, you should try out the Plasma 6 Alpha out using one of these distros (or by building it yourself using kdesrc-build) if you’re an adventurous person who has a backup and wants to help make the final release better by reporting bugs or even fixing them. It really does help!
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KDE's 6th Megarelease - Alpha
En route to the new Plasma, Frameworks and Gear
Every few years we port the key components of our software to a new version of Qt, taking the opportunity to remove cruft and leverage the updated features the most recent version of Qt has to offer us.
It has been nearly 10 years since the last big release of our flagship Plasma desktop environment, and the time has come again. KDE is making available today the Alpha version of all the software we will include in a megarelease scheduled for the end of February 2024.
To ensure all parts of KDE's software stack are working together, we are releasing all our major bundles at the same time. Today sees the start of that journey with the Alpha releases of Plasma 6, KDE Frameworks 6 and the KDE Gear bundle of apps.
For more on what we mean when we talk about "Alpha Software", see the What is Alpha software section below. But, to summarize, this is a very early preview intended for developers and testers only. We hope it will be picked up by rolling unstable distros, but it is far from being ready for day-to-day use yet.