Plasma/Plasma 6: Difference between revisions

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* kwayland-integration, for several Wayland things to work
* kwayland-integration, for several Wayland things to work
* kio-extras, for various kio-related things
* kio-extras, for various kio-related things
Breeze, plasma-integration, and kwayland-integration support building for Qt5 and Qt6 in the same build

Revision as of 14:08, 11 August 2023

Plasma 6 is built on top of Qt 6 and is tentatively planned to be released in late 2023 or early 2024. This page outlines important information and major changes coming in Plasma 6.

Release date and schedule

Release date is currently undefined, but hopefully between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. See Schedules/Plasma_6 for more information.

Known issues

On the KDE side:

  • Plasma 6 issues
  • Frameworks 6 issues + Plasma 6 issues
  • All Qt6-related issues across all KDE software
  • In a built-from-source dev session on top of a distro-provided session, KWin effect IDs have changed, so they appear duplicated in the Effects KCM and you need to disable one of each, or else both play at the same thing and there are weird visual glitches.
  • In a built-from-source dev session on top of a distro-provided session, Qt5-using QML apps don't launch because they'll try to use the KF6 Kirigami. Workaround: For those apps, create custom .desktop files with QML2_IMPORT_PATH set to the built-from-source KF5 location in the "Environment Variables" field, and an absolute path to to the built-from-source executable in the "Program" field. See also https://phabricator.kde.org/T16483.

Upstream:

How to use/test it

Developers and adventurous users are encouraged to test or even live on Plasma 6, to help get it into a releasable state faster. Before doing so, remember the rules of Plasma 6:

  • Read through the list of major bugs and only use Plasma 6 in production of none of them is a deal-breaker for you. Maintain regular backups! This is mandatory.
  • When you encounter an issue in Plasma 6 that was not present in Plasma 5, check the list of issues to see if it's already been reported. If you don't find anything, submit a bug report and add the "qt6" keyword to it.
  • If you are technically able, try to fix issues you encounter yourself.

Options for testing Plasma 6 include the following:

If you're a distro packager reading this and your distro offers a Plasma 6 ISO/repo/etc, please add it to this list in alphabetical order!

Developer-facing changes

  • PlasmaComponents 2 has been removed. All usages should be changed to their PlasmaComponents 3 equivalents.
  • Widget API has changed, and all widgets need to be ported. See the Plasma 6 widget porting guide to learn how.
  • On Wayland, Plasma panels, sidebars, KRunner, and Yakuake are now positioned using the layer-shell protocol.

User-facing changes

New features

User interface changes

Changes to default settings

Removals

Work that's been decided on but not implemented yet


Packaging notes

This section is aimed at packagers/distributors for information about correctly packaging a KF6/Plasma 6 session

Sources

Most of the required sources are not released. For Frameworks and Plasma the development work happens in master branch. Some applications use master for their KF6 development work and support building against Qt5 or Qt6, others have a dedicated kf6 branch. See here for machine-readable information for the right branch.

The following frameworks will not be part of KF6:

  • kdelibs4support
  • kdesignerplugin
  • kdewebkit
  • kemoticons
  • khtml
  • kinit
  • kjs
  • kjsembed
  • kmediaplayer
  • kross
  • kxmlrpcclient

The following non-frameworks modules are obsolete:

  • kross-interpreters
  • kwebkitpart
  • khotkeys

The following new frameworks will be part of KF6:

  • kcolorscheme
  • ktexttemplate
  • ksvg

The following new non-frameworks modules are relevant:

  • kglobalacceld
  • plasma5support
  • kmoretools

Coinstallability

For frameworks and other relevant libraries we aim for being able to install both a 5 and a 6 version without conflicts. However there are cases where this cannot be provided out of the box, e.g. because a framework contains runtime parts that must only exist once. Some projects have build flags to disable such problematic parts that should be applied to the KF5 build:

  • kguiaddons: -DBUILD_GEO_SCHEME_HANDLER=OFF
  • baloo: -DBUILD_INDEXER_SERVICE=OFF

Qt5 compatibility

For compatibility with Qt5-based apps (first- and third-party) we need Qt5-based variants of several modules in addition to Qt6-based ones. These modules include:

  • Breeze/Oxygen, for correct application style. This also applies to third-party QStyles
  • plasma-integration, for correct Qt integration
  • kwayland-integration, for several Wayland things to work
  • kio-extras, for various kio-related things

Breeze, plasma-integration, and kwayland-integration support building for Qt5 and Qt6 in the same build