[gentoo-dev] [RFC] News Item: KDE Plasma 6.1.4 and Gear 24.05.2 Upgrade

[Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org>]

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Title: KDE Plasma 6.1.4 and Gear 24.05.2 Upgrade
Author: Andreas Sturmlechner <asturm@gentoo.org>
Posted: 2024-08-31
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: kde-plasma/plasma-workspace:5

Reasons
=======

KDE Plasma 5 has reached end of life and is no longer supported by Gentoo.
Qt5 upstream OSS support ended on 2020-12-08, and LTS releases - even with
considerable effort by KDE community's backports on top - only go so far.
It is therefore required for all users to upgrade to KDE Plasma 6[1].

At the same time, KDE Gear 24.05.2 is provided with most applications ported
over to KDE Frameworks 6. As long as KF5-based applications are being shipped
with the KDE Gear bundle, and other non-KDE Qt5-based applications still
common in ::gentoo repository, it is advised *not* to disable USE="qt5".


Changes
=======

Not many - much like Qt6, this is mostly an evolution of the existing
codebase, no disruptive feat.

Plasma Wayland support has come a long way and therefore KDE developers have
decided to make it the default login session for Plasma 6, even if some
known papercuts[2] remain. For users affected too much by those, switching
to the still existing X11 session is as easy as selecting it in the display
manager of choice. Disabling USE="wayland" is *not* changing this default,
it will yield no dependency savings, and we advise against doing so. It does
not affect users' X11 sessions.

In Gentoo:
- arm 32-bit support is discontinued
- x86 will not see stabilisation of Plasma 6 and KF6-based packages


User Action Required
====================

For users of a plasma profile[3], no specific upgrade steps are necessary,
although some precautionary measures are advised before and during upgrade:

- Switch to a standard (Breeze or Oxygen) theme
- Unmerge kde-misc/latte-dock, it is unfit for Plasma 6 (and masked already)
- Cleanup sets and @world from any SLOT or version pinning of KDE packages
- If possible, perform the upgrade not inside a running Plasma session

Necessary USE flag changes were already made in plasma profile, therefore
only users of other profiles should set USE="kf6compat qt6" globally[4].

Once the packages become available on your arch, it should be as simple as
update @world:

    emerge -aquvUD @world


[1] https://kde.org/plasma-desktop/
[2] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Known_Significant_Issues
[3] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/KDE#Profile
[4] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki//etc/portage/package.use

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