I want to use the latest 6.x plasma desktop, but my debian stable doesn’t provide it. While trying to build it from source, I met some errors, which appeared to be caused by qt version according to some topics here. I checked my current 5.27 plasma and found that it depends on qt5. So is it possible to remove my current qt5 and plasma, and then install qt6 and build the new plasma 6 desktop?
- You are looking for trouble basically and a lot of work.
- Seems you have a lot of free time available, I’m jealous
- If you are willing to build the entire plasma yourself why don’t you use Gentoo instead
P.S. Talking with the KDE maintainers in the Debian forums makes more sense to me for achieving your goal.
2 Likes
I’m interested - why would you choose the ancient Debian Stable if you want fresh software?
If you’re running a desktop, and you’re not happy about being held back in ‘stable’ territory, then I’d suggest you need to ‘roll’ out onto fresher, greener pastures.
It was this kind of issue which prompted me to roll on - packages getting broken, held back, repositories messing up stuff…
Make your plans, make sure you have a robust backup strategy (I use back-in-time to rsync it to my storage HDD) and also make a plan to regularly update your software list (for me, a script that runs weekly - pacman -Qqet | grep -v "$(pacman -Qqg)" | grep -v "$(pacman -Qqm)" > ~/Dropbox/pkglist.txt ).
Depending on how complicated your system is, it might only take an hour or two to completely install and set up a new system.
At the very least, it’s not too difficult to do a parallel install to play with it until you’re happy. I did this with KDE after I installed Manjaro Cinnamon (coming from Mint) - and I basically made space on the HDD for that.
When the time came, I did a fresh KDE install on the SSD, and copied in the configs as I installed my software - not forgetting the ‘resources’ folders - with all my backup scripts and stuff.
Thanks for your advice. Finally I decided to switch to archlinux.
2 Likes
Using Debian Trixie with KDE Plasma 6.4. I think it is worth devoting a section to debian, rather than chasing developers to a different distro. All the build tools are there ootb and Plasma seems to run quite smoothly on Trixie.
Well it did run super smoothly for me on Manjaro (Testing) for 8 years now… and the software’s always pretty fresh over here 