End of support and updates to the KDE/Plasma Debian builds

It has been many years that I have provided up-to-date builds of KDE/Plasma for Debian stable, testing, unstable. It is now more than a year that I don’t use Debian anymore. Time to send this off.

As already mentioned in some comments to various blog posts here, I will not invest more work into the current repositories. I invite anyone with interest in continuing the work to contact me. I will also write up a short howto guide on what I generally did and how I worked with this amount of packages.

I feel sad about leaving this behind, but also relieved from the amount of work, not to speak of the insults (“You are a Nazi” etc) I often get from the Debian side. I also feel sorry for all of you who have relied on these packages for long time, have given valuable feedback and helpful comments.

It was a nice and long run.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

46 Responses

  1. luc says:

    thanks for all work Norbert!

    • Marcus Britanicus says:

      Thanks Norbert for all your work. Your work is and always has been greatly appreciated by us users!!

      I have been a proud Debian user for more than15 years now, and was very sad to hear about the cheap behaviour from Debian’s side.

      All the best for your future endeavours!!

  2. Anonymous says:

    You never shared what went down exactly. Transparency would be good.

  3. Raul Dipeas says:

    Thank You so much for all of your work.

  4. Without updates, I find Debian KDE quite unusable as a modern DE. I suspected this was coming sooner or later, so I moved to Gnome a couple of months ago 😛

    And thank YOU for all the fish !

  5. Michael says:

    I understand you and wanna thank you for your great work. Good luck on your way.

  6. swampling says:

    Thank you so much for your work! Now I consider converting my last debian machine to manjaro which seems siginificantly more userfriendly in the long run. 😐

  7. Werner Joss says:

    Norbert, this Blog Post has clearly been anticipated, but is now sad anyway.
    I want to say Thank You very much for your work, it has been a pleasure to have an up-to-date KDE on Debian for so long time.
    Now I hope KDE/Plasma LTS based on Qt5 will make it into Debian Bookworm, and be stable and usable for at least 2 Years or so.
    And, who knows, maybe you’ll be back at some point in the future – one should never say: never again 🙂
    Good Luck for your further way !
    Werner

  8. Brad says:

    Thanks Norbert, your efforts are greatly appreciated.

  9. Durant says:

    I am just curious, what distribution / OS are you now relying on? Since you were using OBS repositories to package KDE for Debian, I wonder if you are contributing to openSUSE in any capacity? That would be great. I am a happy openSUSE user for years now and they are in need of some more contributions to continue to properly support KDE in their new MicroOS Desktop which I personally use too. Anyway, thank you for your work all these years.

  10. kdev says:

    Hello everyone, I will be continuing these builds and the build URL will be changing from:
    https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde
    to:
    https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/kdevop:/debian-kde
    I’m still in the process of setting up the build config so please be patient. I will also be setting up a blog for the builds and will provide the URL to it here.

    • Thanks a lot, I will surely help with the transition!

    • Werner Joss says:

      @kdev: that sounds great – I hope you will be able to continue Norbert’s work, would be much appreciated !

    • Steve V says:

      @kdev, that is great news. Is there a blog/web page to be able to follow progress/updates?

      • kdev says:

        Yes it will be the domain kdevop.net and I’ll post the full info here once it’s fully set up.

        • fenglengshun says:

          Not sure if I don’t understand something, but the OBS and blog seems to not be online yet? Regardless, do please post it on Reddit and inform news sites like itsfoss so that interested people can find out about when it is online. Thanks!

        • Andres C says:

          @kdev, I was wondering if there was any update on this?

    • naguam says:

      Hello,
      Glad you are going to continue the project.

      I would love that you and/or Norbert document the process.

      I would love to know the method and how it works to package KDE for debian.
      From creating the repos, to building the packages, making tests probably, etc.

      Also if you have good resource on how to package KDE to potentially dev on it, I’ll take it.

      Thanks a lot to Robert for his previous work and to you for continuing the project.

      I’m sad debian people behaved like this because Debian with a proper KDE is the best combo to me (when wanting a stable workstation, with the latest plasma bugfix).

  11. Luca says:

    I just want to say THANKS for all your effort over these years. Very much appreciated!

  12. Felicia P says:

    Thanks for providing these packages for so many years! Even though ‘unofficial’ they have been a great contribution to Debian KDE users 😉

  13. kamome says:

    Thank you – even though I tend to stay with the standar (stable) packages, your work is still greatly appriciated!
    ってゆうか、魚をありがとう!

  14. V for Vendetta says:

    Thanks for all your hard work and it’s a real shame how you were treated.
    Linuxnews.de has written an article about it over a year ago. That’s how I found your site.

  15. Markus says:

    Thank you very much for your awesome work 🙂

  16. baldyeti says:

    Thank you Norbert for your OBS packages and past role in keeping plasma available under debian. Have fun with your new chosen distro.

  17. Anonymous says:

    well…i guess the trannies will pick up the work. i hope you are good sir

  18. dpanter says:

    We knew it was coming but it’s still sad to see the end. Best wishes to you and yours, and huge thanks for all the good work over the years. ❤

  19. suselover says:

    Sad to see you go but thanks for your hard work! If I may make a suggestion, the KDE version of openSUSE MicroOS is in need of maintainers. The Gnome version is a “RC” but the KDE version is only “Alpha”. Would be great to see more support for this formerly KDE-centric distro. OpenSUSE also strikes me as less leftist/authoritarian although I may be wrong.

  20. Adonis says:

    political correctness has gone too far. You are 100% right in that case with Debian. What a bunch of assholes they are.

  21. Steve V says:

    Norbert, thanks very much for all you efforts over the years. I’ve been quiet, but an user of your repos for a number of years.

  22. soelvraeven says:

    I’ve been on Debian for decades, I too will be leaving for Suse and GNU Guix. It’s all very sad 😥 Thank you for all your good work. Godspeed.

  23. freehck says:

    Norbert, you previously said to itwire that you “decided to write a long blog about the events including complete quotes from debian-private and DAM argumentation”. As more than the year passed, can we ask about our plans now? Maybe we missed some post? We do want to know the whole story. Please.

  24. nomen luni says:

    It is we who should be thanking you for all the fish, Norbert. Your substantial contribution is very much valued.

    I don’t know the background to the insults you’ve been getting, but I have enough experience to know the kind who resort to throwing words such as Nazi around have no legitimate criticism against those they attack.. and amusingly the abuse hurlers are invariably the ones supporting fascist organisations. Self insight is not their strong suite, shall we say?

    It is a shame that these parasites invariably end up killing the host.

    All the best mate, and thanks once again.

  25. monad says:

    I though pre-inning was some sort of pre-initializing, silly me. its your name.
    Thank you for your service, I guess.

    This KDE thing served me well throuout the years, but I’m sick of fixing debian and its DLL hell of packages, like come on, why can’t I have 25 versions of python.
    Windows solved the problem by having a SxS folder.

    I’m now moving to Arch and NixOS

  26. Just leave these left extremist ideologists behind, don’t feed the trolls, let ’em die alone.

    I’ve left Debian project back when it broke it’s primary goal – software freedom – by making systemd pretty much mandatory. Oath-breakers, nothing left to say. We’ve got Devuan.

    –mtx

  1. 2023/03/08

    […] Norbert Preining ☛ End of support and updates to the KDE/Plasma Debian builds […]

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