KDE Plasma Gearing Up for its Next Release With Qt6-only Master Branch

KDE is firing up development for the Plasma 6.0 release in a big way.

Seeing that KDE Plasma 5.27 was the last major release in the 5.x series and also the last one to use the Qt 5 framework. The upcoming release has a lot to stand up to.

With a recent notice, a significant development shift was announced that would affect all the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.x releases.

Let me take you through it.

What is happening?: The master branch for the Plasma repos was made Qt 6-only, seeing that Plasma 5.27 has already been shipped.

Though as a result, they are expecting some disruption to happen. Nicolas Fella, from KDE, has mentioned that:

There will be disruption because of this. While we aim for getting a
basic workspace running as soon as possible non-essential functionality
might be broken for a while.

Existing kdesrc-build setups will be switched to building Plasma from
the Plasma/5.27 branch to keep things building with Qt5. Make sure your
.kdesrc-buildrc contains "branch-group kf5-qt5".

He has also said that; people can build the Qt6/master version by referring to the 'kf6-qt6' branch group.

You may go through the official announcement to dive deeper.

If you were wondering what is so special about Qt 6? Allow me to highlight the following:

Qt is a cross-platform application development framework that has seen great success over the years.

With Qt 6, KDE Plasma has much to gain as the framework contains modern libraries/APIs, a new graphics architecture, better HiDPI support, and more.

Suggested Read 📖