So my KDE Neon Testing on my old computer is not compatible with the latest kde wayland because of my old gpu. So I am using X11 window manager now.
What settings do I have to configure so it won’t be updated to Plasma 6.8 ?
So I never want to update to a version that breaks my computer, so als not 6.7.80, 6.7.90, etc.
On Schedules/Plasma 6 - KDE Community Wiki I see that after 6.7.4 there comes 6.7.80, and after that 6.7.5. And the last 6.7 will be 6.7.7 (2027-01-19): “This extra release marks the termination of support for the X11 window manager.”: I hope this means that 6.7.7 is the last version that can work with X11.
Updating my kde neon always jumped to the beta’s, I never had bug fixes for an older release.
So I want to jump from 6.7.4 to 6.7.5 and not to 6.7.80. And to 6.7.6 and to 6.7.7.
How do you do that?
Probably in the near future when my new computer (probaby running KDE Linux) is ready, that means I have configured it to my liking completely, I will have no more reason to use my old computer. But I am afraid that the flatpak applications available for KDE Linux will be out-dated (not the latest versions) and limited in choice compared with the amount of apps that ubuntu and fedora provide in their repo’s. And that I will still have to use my old computer running 6.7.x to run programs that are not available on KDE LInux.
I am thinking of learning to create my own flatpak’s so to have the latest versions of what I want but it doesn’t seem easy.
For now I can live with bugs and crashes of using X11 in KDE Neon Testing, but not being able to get out of lockscreen is quite annoying.
KDE Linux has Distrobox and kapsule preinstalled, so you should be able to use Fedora or Ubuntu inside a container and export the applications to the host using an application like Distroshelf.
I don’t use KDE Neon, but I suppose that you can change the package sources to use the user edition. However, this will only work as long as 6.8.0 isn’t released, so you won’t get 6.7.7. I think it won’t even be packaged for KDE Neon as Neon does only ship the latest version. Maybe, Kubuntu 26.10 will ship 6.7.7, but I don’t know if it’s possible to move from Neon to Kubuntu without reinstalling. You could try something like Alma, but I think Distrobox is the easiest solution.
To be honest, you’d want to migrate to a non-rolling distro that does not update Plasma at all between releases. You would have to remove or disable neon’s repos, but this is not a safe thing, as neon does include some non-KDE packages upgraded or different from the Ubuntu base it uses. An update or upgrade from Ubuntu could replace one of these that breaks your desktop. This is not a minor, off-chance thing, either.
Flatpaks are entirely distro-independent. They offer the same applications and versions everywhere, so this will not be an issue.
Can you tell us which GPU you have, and a driver version if it is Nvidia?
Also, why choose Testing as your daily OS here? I wonder how much better running official stable Plasma releases would be for you?
A stable-release version of KDE Linux still looks to be a ways away, fwiw.
I have been running Neon Testing since the beginning.
Last week kde updates broke my wayland: my very old gpu NVIDIA GK208 [GeForce GT 630 Rev. 2] driver: nouveau, is no longer compatible with the latest kwin wayland.
For example flathub doesn’t have the latest wine development 11.10 (Since a few months I use the Windows app dc++ with wine as the linux derivative EiskaltDC++ is outdated).
Technically yes, however this will likely require quite a large number of packages to be marked as hold.
I am with @ostfriese4 that simply using Neon User edition instead of Testing would already eliminate the issue with getting beta releases.
Given the Neon is currently base on Ubuntu 24.04 it might well be that it will be rebased onto 26.04 before the transition to Plasma 6.8
In which case simply not doing that distro-upgrade would keep the system from getting 6.8
However, since the very purpose of Neon is to deliver the most recently released KDE softwares, forcing it to not do that sounds a bit like a Sysiphus task.
As @claydoh said a non-rolling distro might be a better choice for staying on old releases as long as possible.