KDE/Plasma for Debian – Update 2022/11

Monthly update on KDE/Plasma on Debian: Updates to Frameworks and KDE Gears

Short summary of recent changes and updates:

  • Frameworks updated to 5.99.0
  • Plasma 5.24 LTS (repo plasma524) has been updated to the latest patch level 5.24.7
  • Plasma 5.25 updated to the latest patch level 5.25.5
  • KDE Gears 22.08 updated to latest patch level 22.08.3
  • Krita updated to 5.1.3
  • (hopefully) everything recompiled against new Qt from Debian

If you see some strange behavior, please report.

Concerning Plasma 5.26

Debian unstable and testing already have (albeit outdated) packages for Plasma 5.26, and I have tried to package and build it for all the releases including Debian/stable. Unfortunately, Plasma 5.26 has a hard dependency onto a version of libDRM that is not available in Debian/stable, and thus compilation on Debian/stable does not succeed.

This makes my work regarding Plasma 5.26 far less useful, and thus I am currently not working on 5.26.

Usual reminder

I repeat (and update) instructions for all here, updated to use deb822 format (thanks to various comments on the blog here):

  • Get the key via
    curl -fsSL https://www.preining.info/obs-npreining.asc | sudo tee /usr/local/share/keyrings/obs-npreining.asc
    
  • Add the sources definition in /etc/apt/sources.lists.d/obs-npreining-kde.sources, replacing the DISTRIBUTION part with one of Debian_11 (for Bullseye), Debian_Testing, or Debian_Unstable:
    # deb822 source:
    # https://www.preining.info/blog/tag/kde/
    Types: deb
    URIs: 
     https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other-deps/DISTRIBUTION
     https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/frameworks/DISTRIBUTION
     https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/plasma525/DISTRIBUTION
     https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/apps2208/DISTRIBUTION
     https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/other/DISTRIBUTION
    Suites: /
    Signed-By: /usr/local/share/keyrings/obs-npreining.asc
    Enabled: yes
    

You can use also plasma524 instead of plasma525 if you prefer the LTS version of Plasma.

Enjoy!

24 Responses

  1. Shmerl says:

    > This makes my work regarding Plasma 5.26 far less useful

    Not sure what percentage of stable vs testing vs unstable users you have. I always assumed that most who want up to date desktop don’t use stable, so that would mean that it might be less useful as in missing stable, but still not *far* less useful for majority of the users.

    But you know better what’s the percentages are I assume (if you can see downloads stats).

    • No idea about the users, not at all. I think I cannot see the download stats for the OBS projects, and even if I could, I never checked 😉

    • Felicia P says:

      That’s definitely not me. I *want* stability however for the desktop this option of ephemeralness is great. But that same level of ephemeralness for other daemons and components would be too much overhead to manage.

      • Shmerl says:

        Understandable, but too many things are critical for desktop experience to be recent (especially kernel and Mesa) that stable really becomes a hindrance on any relatively recent hardware, let alone very recent. So for some testing / unstable are way more practical, especially when building or upgrading your PC.

        I know there are backports and such to address some of that, but still. So I’m kind of interested in is the distribution of desktop users between these subdistros.

  2. Felicia P says:

    👍 much thanks!

    I think the way that this repo enhances stock Debian is great. It’s kind of the best of both worlds: stability of Debian yet some ephemeralness for the desktop. I only wish you were recognized by Debian for this great contribution!

  3. Luc says:

    Thanks for making this available Norbert! I updated just now and things are working. Few packages were not installed due to dependencies (I guess) like: qt5-qmake qt5-qmake-bin qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools. I believe they will be installed “over time”.

  4. Heinz says:

    Thank you very much 🙂 ( I use stable : )

  5. Soelv Raeven says:

    Again, thank you very much for this 🙂

  6. Cosmo says:

    albeit outdated… LOL what a moron

  7. Birk says:

    I updated to Plasma 5.24.7 and Gears 22.08.3 after recent the Frameworks 5.99 update on Debian 11 stable (Bullseye) – everything works just fine, tanks!
    But the only Krita version I can see with apt policy krita is 5.0.8+dfsg-1~np1. Perhaps I am too stupid? 🙂

    • Birk says:

      The update from Framework 5.99 to 5.100 worked without hiccups on Debian 11 Bullseye (stable). Thank you!

  8. peter says:

    FYI:
    OS: Debian bookworm
    DE: KDE 5.98.0 / Plasma 5.26.3
    not too buggy, I am still learning about how to use KDE/Plasma

  9. PtitGNU says:

    Hi Norbert and thanks a lot for this update ! 🙂
    Did you see that krita was no longer built for stable since the update ?
    ( unresolvable: nothing provides libwebp-dev >= 1.2.0~, (got version 0.6.1-2.1), nothing provides libxsimd-dev >= 8.1.0~ )
    Do you think it’s possible to fix this dependence ?

  10. Shmerl says:

    FYI: libkf5archive was split in Debian to libkf5archive-data and libkf5archive-data which makes your package a bit incompatible.

  11. arustictop says:

    I did a recent fresh from Debian 11 upgrade to KDE 5.24 LTS and I had a few hiccups with your instructions. Not sure any action is needed, but I though I would document them:
    1. The curl command to get the key will fail if the keyrings subfolder doesn’t exist
    2. Running apt update followed by apt full-upgrade ran into some errors (had to run apt –fix-broken)

  12. laosom says:

    Hi Norbert,
    Thanks for your efforts providing Plasma 5.24 LTS and 5.25 in Debian 11.
    I use it happily on 1 PC and 2 notebooks right now, it’s much more reliable than Manjaro rolling or Kubuntu 22.04 LTS.
    My findings:
    1) Installation instructions:
    One should first
    #mkdir /usr/local/share/keyrings
    and
    #apt install curl
    before setting up the repo.
    Typo: correct path is “/etc/apt/sources.list.d” and not “/etc/apt/sources.lists.d”
    Could add a hint about ‘sed -i’ to replace the string Distribution.
    Sometimes these repos have network connection issues , cannot downloading all packages (blame Opensuse ?)
    Testing (since December)
    I noticed the same errors like arustictop with apt full-upgrade (dependency issues with plasma-workspace-data ) , but found that if I install kwin-addons before the upgrade, no issue happens. I tried with the standard Debian 11 installer and the live / Calamares as well.
    I noticed the first one is better, the live image contains a lot of language package and bloat you want to remove after instalation. (firefox, libreoffice)
    I discovered a plasma bug , which is not present in Kubuntu 22.04 LTS (backports ppa also added) neither is Opensuse Leap 15.3 , but both in 5.24 and 5.25 on Debian 11.
    You start with the default panel layouts.
    You add a new default panel. Now you have 2 panels, 1 in the bottom, 1 in the top.
    Now you delete one of them e.g, the top panel and you get plasma panel / kwin crashed and restarted. With application menubar and empty panel the crash does not happen
    I can send a bug output if you need one.
    Another bug I was annoyed with is Discover. OS / widget etc updates installed, you close Discover which crashes. On KDE bugtacker they recommeded to wait longer before closing it hahaha. Not sure in which Plasma it is fixed, surely not in 5.24 LTS.

  13. Felicia P says:

    Just want to say I’ve been using Debian 12 Bookworm for a while now which has Plasma 5.26.90 and Frameworks 5.102.0 and it’s working great. As of yesterday Bookworm hit ‘soft freeze’ status and everything seems pretty rock solid with it. I look forward to the future when we will have the latest KDE packages again provided here 😀

    • Sorry to say, but I don’t intend to put more work into the packages, I’m done with Debian and their wizard hunting. I leave the current state up in the hope that maybe someone takes over.

      • Kaveh says:

        Norbert,
        Thank you for all your effort and the good work. Although it is sad to hear you have decided not to continue the work, it is understandable. I would like to ask you to do one last thing for the small community you have created. Can you please write a guide or instructions to help someone who has the basic knowledge to be able to pick up and continue your work.

  1. 2022/11/07

    […] Norbert Preining ☛ Norbert Preining: KDE/Plasma for Debian – Update 2022/11 […]

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