Debian KDE Status for Bullseye

A long journey has come to nice finish. 9 month ago I switched to KDE/Plasma, and started to package newer versions of it than available in Debian. Since then I have packaged every single version of Plasma, the KDE frameworks, and KDE Apps and made them available for Debian/unstable and Debian/testing via the OBS build server.

Today, finally, I have uploaded Frameworks 5.77 and Plasma 5.20.4 to unstable, the end of a long story. Despite some initial disagreements with the Debian Qt/KDE Team, we found a modus vivendi, and since some months now I am member of the team and working together with the rest to get an uptodate KDE/Plasma system into Debian/bullseye. Thanks to everyone involved!

The last weeks we have also worked on updating many of the KDE/Apps packages to the latest release 20.12.0, which means that as of now, Debian/unstable contains the most recent versions of KDE Frameworks, KDE Plasma, and of most KDE Apps.

Thanks goes to all the team members, in particular to (in alphabetic order) Aurélien, Patrick, Pino, Sandro, and Scarlett for their work, and to all the testers and bug reporters.

The current status is also more or less what we plan to get into Debian/Bullseye. An update to Frameworks 5.78 and Plasma 5.20.5 is still possible, but not decided by now.

Concerning my OBS packages: they are mostly superseeded by now, and all but the KDE Apps package can be removed from the apt sources. The only remaining archive of interest is

deb https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps2012/Debian_Unstable/ ./

and the same with Testing instead of Unstable for Debian/testing.

For those adventurous, there is also the digikam-beta repository …

That’s it. Have a nice Christmas, if you celebrate it, and a good start into a hopefully better 2021!

Enjoy.

29 Responses

  1. Ralf says:

    Thank you so much, Norbert. 🙂 As a Debian KDE user, I am extremely grateful that finally, I don’t have to use ancient versions of KDE any more — who knows, maybe I can even do some upstream bugreports again.^^

  2. Sunderland93 says:

    Thank you! Can you please enable PipeWire support in Kwin package? It needs for screensharing and screencasting on Wayland

  3. jet says:

    Well done, great job! Much appreciated.

  4. Anonymous says:

    Thank you!

  5. Jonas says:

    I know a thank you is very little compared with your work.

    But here it comes: Thank you to the whole KDE team

  6. manwe says:

    Thank you for your work!

  7. Alex says:

    Thank you

  8. Christian Herenz says:

    This is an awesome effort. I also like reading the updates on your work in your blog!

    It would be great if this could be coordinated with KDE to have a KDE LTS type of release for debian stable at some point.

  9. Thomas Florek says:

    Nine month ago this current progress was not imaginable
    Simply awesome, what the Plasma/QT team in this short time achieved. The dark time of Plasma in Debian is gone.
    I am infinitely grateful to the whole team, especially to Norbert as initiator!
    It is a great christmas gift and it comes just in time for the Debian freeze.

  10. Steven says:

    Thank you for your work.

  11. Shmerl says:

    Thank you for all your efforts!

    I’ll keep OBS repos configured for now, in case you’ll decide to upload newer Plasma versions during the freeze.

    • That might happen, but OTOH I might just upload new versions to experimental. I know that doesn’t help testing users, but anyway, after the freeze and release of bullseye I will revisit OBS and distribution there. I can imagine providing updated packages for Bullseye as long as the Qt version allows it.

  12. Patrick says:

    Thanks to all involved!

  13. Ernst Meier says:

    Just here to say THANK YOU for your work! Enjoy the year-end holidays and all the best for 2021!

  14. mayble says:

    Can you take a look at my post on the MX Forum. This is MAYBL8.
    I can’t get updated to this. Keep getting an error.

  15. Rainer says:

    That is an exceptional achievement. I think not only the Debian KDE users benefit, but it might attract new users to Debian and thus Debian as a whole benefits. Many thanks to the whole team.

  16. Manfred says:

    That’s the X-mass present, I’ve waited for, thanks a lot! I’ve tried to switch to Wayland when Debian 10 was released, but was not able to work around all the problems I had. With Plasma 5.20 in Debian 11 it should be no problem to do the switch.

  17. As a Debian (testing) user and KDE Brazilian Portuguese translator, I would like to thank you and all other members of KDE team for you great job! You’re amazing!

  18. Daniele mte90 Scasciafratte says:

    Thanks for your work!

    Just to know how was resolved the issue?

  19. João Pedro Sousa says:

    Thank you so much, Norbert! Well done and congratulations on your excellent work and communication with us all and therefore your well deserved recognition by everyone and by joining the Debian Qt/KDE Team. It does feel that the dark old and lacking Debian KDE days are finally turning a page for the better. I do wish you and the Debian Qt/KDE Team the best and hopefully the New Year will bring us all the best outcome for the benefit of everyone, including the Debian KDE/Plasma users community.

  20. Ricardo says:

    Testing the KDE Plasma repository (https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma521/Debian_Testing/ /) and it’s perfect. Could I make the usage on my blog available to Debian Testing users?

    • Good to hear that it works for you, but it is a pre-release, 5.20.90, and there will be considerable changes coming in till the final release. So I thought I don’t announce it big that the repository is ready, but feel free to do whatever you want with it, including mentioning it 😉

      • Ricardo says:

        Thanks, I’m using it in production and finding problems I will report here so that it is useful.

      • João Pedro Sousa says:

        Hi Norbert! I have just updated to the latest 5.21 and all seems to be good here! Enjoying it very much. Thank you again! All the best to you and your new job role. Hopefully you’ll still find time to keep up your excellent work with the KDE Plasma Debian updates.

      • George Andone says:

        Hi! How can i upgrade to last Plasma 5.21.x pls? Thank you!

  1. 2020/12/23

    […] Norberts inoffiziellem Plasma-Repository auf einem anderen Rechner lief anstandslos durch. In einem Blogpost fasst er die Entwicklung der letzten neun Monate […]

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