Testing Plasma 6 (Beta) on Endeavour OS - is this approach any good?

Desktop Environments Plasma
161

Welcome @FabianM, thanks for chiming in and do some testing. :+1:t2:

I did not need compiling to get testing.

The steps I ended up doing to get Plasma6/Qt6 installed:

  • Download Cassini Nova R3 ISO
  • install it on a spare partition
  • run yay to update, reboot, login
  • edit /etc/pacman.conf to add:
    kde-unstable,
    core-testing,
    extra-testing.
    These need to be, in this order, before the [endeavouros] entry, as @Schlaefer pointed out[3].
  • run yay to update to get Plasma6 on board
  • reboot, login

There was a problem along the way with qt6-shadertools (which was missing when I did the Plasma 6 install); but that was since resolved.
Also there was an GPGME error along the way, coinciding with anappstream-qt dependency conflict, which were resolved as per [1] and [2].

Widgets are still not working under Plasma 6, I believe.

This is what I remember doing to get rolling with Plasma 6.

Have fun :-).

[1] Testing Plasma 6 (Beta) on Endeavour OS - is this approach any good? - #90 by SemLraug
[2] Testing Plasma 6 (Beta) on Endeavour OS - is this approach any good? - #97 by SemLraug
[3] but please have a look at this comment, though: Testing Plasma 6 (Beta) on Endeavour OS - is this approach any good? - #162 by manuel

Edit: added [3]

4 Likes
162

In theory, those repos should be after the [endeavouros] repo but before all other repos.

However, it shouldn’t matter much currently because yad is the only app that might “conflict”.

163

Oh, man, things are so much more complicated than I had hoped. Thanks for the clarification.

1 Like
164

i’ll wait for the official release to use wayland, autotype on keepassxc doesnt work and the browser plugin for obs studio also doesnt seem to work

165

I’m on Breeze Dark, using default wallpaper, default cursor (Breeze).

locale -a gives:

C
C.utf8
en_US.utf8
nl_NL.utf8
POSIX

I can’t remember to have customized anything, except for changing the position and height of the panel.

166

As to browsers: I have experienced lots of crashes trying to copy (both ctrl-c/v and drag/drop) images from Gwenview to a Firefox -tab.
In that use case Gwenview crashed almost 100% of the time, so did Dolphin.
Using Chromium is a workaround.

Want to check if that happens on Plasma 5 as well, before looking into that a bit more.

167

As to reporting bugs at bugs.kde.org, it’s not always trivial for me to find duplicates of a bug I want to report.

Case in point:

I had searched for similar bug reports, and found none I recognized as such, before I reported:
“Testing Plasma6/Qt6: Pressing META-key a second time does not close the start menu”[1].

It was however marked as a duplicate of:
“Widgets’ activation shortcuts don’t close their popups anymore”[2].

None of the keywords I would have thought of searching for would have brought up this particular report - and if it would have been, I don’t think I would have thought it pertaining to what I wanted to report.

Still, people at KDE didn’t complain, they just marked my report as a duplicate, I got notified, and as “end user” I know that they are working on resolving the issue.

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477683
[2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=476482

168

You’re right…I hadn’t noticed that the meta key didn’t close the menu.
I wonder when we’ll get the beta build in testing?

169

in testing never, only the stable release will get promoted to testing - in KDE-unstable latest the day after it is released (at least that is my guess by looking at the update frequency in KDE-unstable)

170

Yes, unstable (I forgot what I was following), so likelihood is tomorrow then.

171

Frankly, I don’t really know anything about repositories. So, I looked it up[1].

The gist is:

core-testing

core-testing contains packages that are candidates for the core repository.

core-testing is the only repository that can have name collisions with any of the other official repositories. If enabled, it has to be the first repository listed in your /etc/pacman.conf file.

extra-testing

This repository is similar to the core-testing repository, but for packages that are candidates for the extra repository.

kde-unstable

This repository contains the latest beta or Release Candidate of KDE Plasma and Applications.

So, Beta should indeed land in kde-unstable.

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/official_repositories

172

I’ve been eagerly yay’ing all day…

173

The (plasma) beta isn’t out yet, then some time for the Arch packagers …

With a little bit of luck in a few hours, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. My money would be on tomorrow at the same time.

1 Like
174

Err me too? :slight_smile: I’m anxious to see if things we’ve noted are fixed.

175

Frameworks seems to just have dropped on kde-unstable.

:exclamation: The plasma DE alpha doesn’t start anymore here, so it’s probably a good idea to wait for beta plasma desktop packages too. :exclamation:

Or it’s a packaging issue:

$ plasmashell --replace &
plasmashell: error while loading shared libraries: libKUserFeedbackCoreQt6.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
1 Like
176

Thanks for the warning.

177

For those worrying about Dolphin not showing previews (as I claimed earlier): you can relax.
It was a clear case of chronic PEBKAC.

178

I got a question from Nate Graham at KDE about the Plasma-shell crash bug report, which I am not certain how to answer correctly:

“Does EndeavourOS track the latest git master for Plasma 6? Or is it still shipping the alpha release?”

I don’t know what a “git master” is, but I think the right answer is, that EOS is “shipping the alpha release”, right?

179

I just got a bunch of kde programs updated (not desktop though)…yes, it tracks releases and not git dev snapshots.

1 Like
180

Thanks for your quick reply.
I reported your answer here:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=477477