This Week in Plasma: Post-Release Polishing - KDE Blogs

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blogs.kde.org/2025/02/15/this-week-in-plasma-post-release-polishing
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We’ve got them fixed now, but we need people to be testing the betas with their personal hardware setups! There’s simply no way for a small pool of KDE developers to test all of these hardware setups themselves.

I’d love to but can’t, unless there’s an easy way to install it onto my current setup and easily revert.

Installing neon or running it temporarily is not realistic, in fact I did that and never faced an issue.

In a nutshell, if I can install it on my Fedora system easily, I’ll forever be a beta tester, I have no problems with that.

Thanks.

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Been testing Garuda’s new prereleases and in there Mokka after the install and reboot I did the updates that gave me Plasma 6.3. Did a reboot, added my leftside panel, wen into edit mode, attempted to clone it and the desktop crashed for a quick second and the panel wan’t duplicated. Tried twice more with the same results.

When can we expect and celebrate the return of the true, one and only Grid View? Isn’t it properly tested yet or did it escape everyone’s attention?

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That’s great on your part !

Unfortunately not every-distro allow this easily, and it is partly due to our release cycle that does not match classic bi-annual releaset distros (Ubuntu/Fedora). More on that on Nate’s blog.

That’s something I’d encourage Fedora KDE people to look at. This requires some work setting up the packaging and all that jazz.
Worse opening a bug for them.

Arch does have its KDE-unstable repo, and neon have Testing Edition, unstable and developer edition for this.
I might forget others.

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Plasma 6.3 is out! So far the response has been very good, but of course a few issues were found once it was in the wild.

I find this a bit too sweet-coating, the reality is most of X11 users got a broken system if not all.
They represent supposedly about 20% of Plasma 6 user base (and decreasing).

That’s mostly a failure of a beta period and a testament that Wayland development has been and is the main focus.

Arch did backport the main fix to 6.3.0 so those users should be fine but not fedora, tumbleweed or neon users.

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If you don’t mind spending some CPU time and have disk space to spare, setting up kde-builder to compile from master is relatively easy on Fedora as the requirements are typically up-to-date (lots of people use Fedora so it gets a good amount of testing). You can then just select the Plasma development version as you log in, and easily switch back. The new stuff will be kept in your home (except for registering a few things), so your Fedora stock Plasma session will not be affected.

You should be able to afford around 50-100 GiB of disk space for source code, output, and dependencies though, and be able to spare some CPU time (how much depends on how fast your computer is). And setup usually isn’t difficult, but does require pasting some commands (and maybe asking for help should it get stuck)

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It was a great release!!!

But I have 2 machines where My discover-notifier icon does not show up (from task manager it seems to be running, however) and no automatic update gets ready either…

anyone else with this problem???

About beta testing: I would also be open to it if there was an easy switch to enter beta testing in fedora (and out if I ever wanted)… I would gladly do it!!!

When 6.3 beta came out, I have set the git repo for Tumbleweed up.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:KDE_repositories

But the problem is it does not have a latest release branch, it is a repo compiled directly from git, so it offers nightly builds from master. If there were a way to enable “newest release branch”, then it would be useful.

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I don’t mind testing a beta release or a rc release.

Actually it would be very nice to do so.

I’m using fedora atomic, so reverting should be easy to solve (just pin a snapshot and off we go), but I’m not aware of a easy way to enable unstable testing just for Plasma.

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Also be aware of the risks of testing!

I was running the beta version of Plasma with Arch’s KDE unstable repos on a test machine. When the update to 6.3 landed, Plasma broke both for Wayland and X.

Why? Because a bunch of Qt libraries where still beta versions and didn’t play well with the now stable 6.3 version of Plasma.

The solution was to boot into Arch’s install medium, chroot (using arch-chroot) into the installation’s root directory and do a

pacman -Syuu --overwrite "*"

update to remove the beta libraries and substitute them with the stable versions.

Everything worked swimmingly on reboot.

FWIW, making it easier to test betas is a goal of the upcoming KDE Linux OS that’s being worked on: you’ll be able to download a new OS image with the beta release on it and test it out. If it breaks, you’ll be able to simply reboot into the OS image for the stable release.

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why doing that, you could you just boot into runlevel3 (adding a 3 to the kernel parameters at boot, -no GUI/DE, but network-) and do it from there.

Also, the bug reporting is maybe too cumbersome and time consuming for many people, especially when there is many bugs and they get fixed in few days during betas.
Maybe a simple KDE app, only available for beta testing, could allow testers to simply enter some details (reason, app, etc.), with screenshots and automatically provide all relevant system data (because it could be a lot of very technical details that most users won’t know how to get them), with user registered KDE bugs credentials (to prevent spam), and then just submit.
This wouldn’t create a ticket automatically but could be added to a database for triaging, and being ignored once fixed.
My experience with KDE betas is that it’s often minor UI glitches (often the bugs fixed very fast), or random crashes mostly of inactive apps that could take time to try to reproduce sometimes with no luck at all.
It would bear the burden on KDE contributors but could also much easily to find few rare bugs with much more details provided than with a single ticket.

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On Bazzite, which is based on Fedora Atomic, I can run bazzite-rollback-helper rebase unstable to rebase to the unstable branch with Plasma 6.3.

Fedora Atomic (and other immutable distros) are perfect for this. Fedora Kionite could offer an unstable release of Kionite with the latest KDE Plasma version to which you can rebase. As you said reverting won’t be a problem.

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Because it is how I know how to do things like that.

Needs to be an option, cause I for one like having the desktops shown on the leftside like it is now.

you mean in a single row?

It has that covered too (Use Virtual Desktop Layout)

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OK missed seeing that at the bottom. Thanks

Default openSUSE Tumbleweed is on the latest release. That’s what rolling release distributions do.

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