Hello!
One might say that KDE Neon isn’t meant to be stable so it shouldn’t be used on a work machine. Well, it’s been going strong for 2+ years!
I can’t say I haven’t lived with a few issues though.
From what I’ve gathered, and correct me if I’m wrong, getting KDE Frameworks to 5.115 and Qt Version to 5.15.13 would be enough to allow for the latest stable Plasma 5 release to work fine.
Well, I’d say the current Neon repositories are very close.
Is it possible? Is it something a “new guy” can grind for a bit on a virtual machine to try and get working? I get to use Plasma 5.27 (and even 6) on other personal machines and the smoothness bug free experience is so desirable. There are a few bugs on the latest focal plasma-desktop release that really get me sad and I wish I could solve them.
Neon 20.04 hasn’t been supported or updated by neon since not long after the move to the 22.04 base. There simply won’t be any 5.27 packages for 20.04. You’d have to build from source, I imagine.
neon is now on Ubuntu 24.04 base now.
You’d be better off using Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, which has 5.27.11 and will be around and supported by Kubuntu until 2027.
I would and I do with my personal machines, however, the work machine needs 20.04. It’s the last stable release with openssl1 and I do software maintenance for some really old piece of code that doesn’t even compile on ubuntu 22.04 or older.
I tried to build 22.04, remove openssl3 and grab the packages for openssl, c++ and a couple of dev libs from 20.04, it kind of works but isn’t stable at all.
The decent option would be attempting to build plasma 5.27.11 from source assuming that KDE Neon repos just don’t have it because it was time to move on to 22.04, not because it was hard to do with the available libs on the 20.04 repos.
Needing to keep your entire working system on an ancient desktop - at least in terms of how much progress FOSS desktops have made in the last 4 years - for the sake of maintaining one program, does sound pretty frustrating. I sympathize with trying to figure out a solution!
Please forgive the ignorance if this isn’t applicable to your situation, but… Is this a case where a container or VM for Ubuntu 20.04, within a host system that’s more up-to-date, could enable you to have an easier desktop experience while also still working on the software you need to support?
Tools like distrobox seem to have images already available for Ubuntu 20.04, if that’s a viable option.
To be honest, I only boot into that system when I have to work on such program. Perhaps I might be overlooking solutions but as far as I know, to use a docker/container, I’d have to always compile it from scratch, not just the modifications. It takes a while to do so and would hurt my unit testing times.
Using a VM is out of question, my laptop isn’t powerful enough to run KDE smoothly through a VM and moving away from it kind of defeats the purpose since by then I could just not use KDE on the host system.
(Un)Fortunately, most of my work is done on Windows, kind of against my wishes but the company I work for really likes their Visual Studio projects. When I started, I kind of used Linux but I was the only one doing so and then co-working was quite troublesome. In the end I succumbed to peer pressure
On my home desktop I run arch with the latest KDE and it’s a gem!
To expand that a bit, I am guessing that you don’t need a full desktop for the software you are using?
If so, a Docker or Distrobox to use a barebones headless setup will not chew up resources.
My first NAS had until this year an i7-3770 cpu from 2012. It ran a lot of docker images for things like Jellyfin, Immich, and nextcloud. I ‘upgraded’ to a somewhat more recent 6th gen i3, using the same setup, no issues or speed problems.
I think Distrobox may be worth looking at, it is probably the quickest, easiest way to test this sort of thing out.
Would I be able to compile the software with simple make instructions and would it keep the object files that weren’t subject to new changes in order to shorten the compile time just like it does on a full desktop?
Perhaps I’m doing things wrong but that was my reason to not use docker. Well, I do when I need to compile releases which are for another architecture. For that I always have to compile everything from scratch and it takes minutes.
