It’s that time of the month again. KDE tarballs have all been refreshed, and so this presents the opportunity to release a new package set for the Plasma 5 Desktop Environment… but then I found out that the new Plasma 5.13 depends on a minimum Qt5 version number of 5.10. Currently I have Qt 5.9.5 in my repository, and this is a LTS release (Long Term Support). The next LTS release will be 5.12 and this will not be available before end of 2018. Also, the current Plasma 5.12 has Long Term Support and the new Plasma 5.13 has not.
I expect that Slackware will likely adopt LTS versions of Qt5 and the KDE software once it is time to replace KDE4, so that puts me in an awkward position. I have been maintaining Plasma 5 packages in this repository for almost 4 years now, with the hope of getting this included into Slackware. Should my repository remain compatible with Patrick’s estimated goals or should I ‘deviate’ and stick with the bleeding edge like I have always done?

The decision I made eventually is that I am not going to upgrade Qt and Plasma to the newest releases yet. At least, not in the ‘latest‘ repository. On the other hand, the ‘testing‘ repository is alive again, and that contains the new Qt 5.11.0 and Plasma 5.13.0. So you have a choice now. If you go with the ‘testing‘ repository, the new Qt 5.11.0 may cause breakage in packages that have a direct dependency on Qt5. That was  why I had to recompile Frameworks and Plasma against Qt 5.11 but could leave the Applications unmodified even though those had been compiled with Qt 5.9 on the system. You are warned.

The KDE-5_18.06 release of ‘ktown‘ for Slackware-current offers the KDE Frameworks (5.47.0), Plasma (still 5.12.5 like last month) and Applications (18.04.2) on top of Qt5 5.9.6 (which was released recently).
You can and should check out the README file for more details and for installation/upgrade instructions.
And KDE-5_18.06_testing has the KDE Frameworks (5.47.0), Plasma (5.13.0), Applications (18.04.2) with Qt5 5.11.0. It has a similar README.

News about this month’s package content:

  • In the deps section I updated the qt5  package to 5.9.6. In the ‘testing‘ repository I also had to update the PyQt5 package because of the new qt5 5.11 in ‘testing‘.
  • Frameworks and Applications updates are focusing on improved stability. No news here.
  • The Plasma in my ‘latest‘ repository has not been updated as explained in the article header. But in ‘testing‘ you get Plasma 5.13.0. See https://www.kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.13.0.php for all the news and videos regarding this release.
  • The kdeconnect-framework package in plasma-extra was updated.
  • In applications-extra I have updated the okteta, krita and kstars packages.

If you are using slackpkg with the slackpkg+ extension, you need to update slackpkg+ before any other package. The recent modifications to slackpkg broke the extension and you need the most recent version of slackpkg+.
And don’t forget to run “slackpkg install ktown” to get any new packages installed, because “slackpkg install-new” will not catch new packages in 3rd-party repositories like ‘ktown’.

I will try and get a new Slackware Live PLASMA5 ISO image built and released with the new Plasma 5.13 on it, so you can check out the new features. I will have to check the other stuff in the ISO first and recompile anything that got broken because of Qt 5.11.
But don’t hold your breath… I am pretty much occupied with attempting to move 20 years of scripts and data from my ageing server to the ‘new’ box (well new… it’s 9 months old already). Having two servers running 24/7 is hurting my wallet because of the electricity bill. And this migration’s complexity (lots of custom stuff) made me delay the move time and time again. Now, I am focused and determined to finish the job.

Enjoy!