Hi all!
I have a laptop running Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and I want to switch to KDE Plasma 6.
How should I change over and why?
Option 1: Install KDE Plasma 6 alongside GNOME
Option 2: Backup and fresh install KDE Neon.
Installing 2 DEs alongside will double the amount of apps and can break theming. The choice is yours
Ya that was a concern of mine. Even switching from x11 to Wayland causes scaling and some other features to reset for me.
Have you tried Plasma 6?
Not yet. I’m a GNOME user and I also use Plasma 5 for customization (idk if 6 is compatible with old themes and stuff). Though I want to try it and see if there are any performance improvements
I’ve tried running KDE Neon in a VM and it seems that all Plasma 5 widgets and themes aren’t compatible so they don’t show up in search. Kind of a bummer.
Thats just how it is. There are tons of extensions that also dont work in Plasma5 but its not sorted. There are porting guides for extension developers in the KDE lemmy
I’m under the impression that you currently can’t install plasma 6 on Ubuntu, as the repos aren’t available yet. That would make option 2 the only possible option.
You’re right. Upon further research I found that Plasma 6 is only available on specific distros but apparently it’s still quite buggy.
It seems to be buggy on Neon, which is based on Ubuntu. I would give Fedora Kinoite a try, on a second disk install Fedora Kinoite prerelease and wait until Fedora 40 comes out.
Install KDE. If shit breaks, install fresh.
You can certainly have multiple DEs installed and run happily in parallel.
KDE Neon is going to be better supported than installing plasma on Ubuntu. Option 2 will be less of a headache long term I think.
Honestly, if I couldn’t wait, I’d go with Neon. There aren’t many other options anyway. Other considerations could be Arch or KaOS. I don’t know the timeframe for openSUSE Tumbleweed, however, they are usually super fast. It could be a matter of weeks when Plasma 6 will be offered if it’s isn’t already. If I could wait, Kubuntu 24.10 seems to be a reasonable choice (or any other distros you would consider that will ship Plasma 6 this year).
I wouldn’t go with option 1. As far as I know, thy don’t offer Plasma 6 yet and I don’t know whether backporting Neon repos will work.
Fedora 40 KDE is pretty solid as it is already. I actually moved away because Gnome completely fucked it up by banning any 3rd party screen shot app based on the Apple mentality of “its for your protection”, which is total bullshit.
I’d install it alongside and buff the edges. If there’s no sources to install it from, or there are problems, I’d kill it and wait till it’s better.
I’ve managed to switch from GNOME to KDE, removing GNOME afterwards, and it was quite painless.
KDE 6 isn’t available yet, though. The first one to get the new KDE is the distro it’s made for, so Arch, I think. Everyone else gotta wait, and it could be a while.
Arch is not the latest. Opensuse tumbleweed has it, NixOS has it, Fedora will get it in a few months and has it in the prerelease builds.
What’s your hardware? Is Ubuntu your only option? Are you wanting to just drive KDE to see what it’s about? Are virtual machines an option?
Framework laptop with an AMD chip. I’ve tried Arch, Fedora, and some Debian based distros. Was trying out Neon in a VM but I noticed a lot of things (like theming) wasn’t compatible with the latest KDE version.
dual boot/vm i have a old drive to test new software.
