Development for KDE5

Development
1

Hello everyone,

i just wanna know…:

There are very good sources to get into and for coding on KDE6 (https://develop.kde.org/) right now. This is very good and i don’t complain on that one.

But because i’m using an LTS distribution (Kubuntu 24.04), which is shipped with KDE5, i don’t have any chance on get an entry in coding an KDE App directly for my OS? Where i can find an entry page for starting with it? The ony advice i found was to install a newer KDE release in a virtual machine, if i’m interested in this topic.

But even if i do this, i cannot use this app on my daily PC, so it don’t feel right for me.

I know, this will not be a problem on the long term because the next Kubuntu-LTS will surely get KDE6, but it’s kinda frustrating that i didn’t find a KDE5 entry point to begin learning with development right now.

I’m using my PC for a lot of different tasks, which work without any problems right now. Because of that, a migration to a newer distro is no option right now.

Does anyone has some recommendations for me?

Greetings, Ronny

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KDE community can’t maintain both documentation for KDE Frameworks 6 and KDE Frameworks 5. That is too resource-consuming and confusing for new contributors.

Still a lot of KDE Frameworks 6 is still applicable with KDE Frameworks 5, and Qt has documenation.

But I would strongly dis-recommend you developing for KDE Framework 5.

What is it you want to develop ?

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I suggest you find a distro you like that is running Plasma 6.?.? rather than using Kubuntu or any flavor of Ubuntu for that matter.

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You actually can if you use distrobox or turn your app into a flatpak (or snap, Canonical has a tutorial upstream).

So you can develop with Qt6 and still use the resulting app in a system that only has Qt5.

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same. still on plasma 5 because it works and i like it.

but if i were to try and develop some thing that is supposed to be useful to others, then i would seriously consider doing that work in plasma 6.

install virtual machine manager from discover and set up a plasma 6 install to do your development work using the available documentation.

you should be able to use whatever you come up with in plasma 5 as well.

for the plasma 6 install i would recommend either opensuse or fedora, but if you wanted to stick to a .deb based system then there is tuxedo which has an .iso now you can install.

probably delving into virtual machines was not on your radar, but if you want to develop software it kind of a necessary tool unless you have lots of spare PCs laying around.