KDE Neon is already shipped with Plasma 6 in its unstable version
a few days ago the news was released by the developers of the KDE Neo projectn, the presentation of the new KDE neon unstable experimental builds edition, which offer a shell-based user environment KDE Plasma 6.
It is mentioned that the reason for the change is for its review of the current form and above all that the user environment in the KDE Neon compilations with Plasma 6 it is almost indistinguishable from builds with Plasma 5.
For those of you unfamiliar with the KDE Neon project, you should know that it was created to provide the ability to install new versions of KDE programs and components through a set of repositories for LTS editions of Ubuntu with the latest version of the KDE desktop and 64 applications. bits
Builds and their associated repositories are updated as soon as KDE versions are released, without having to wait for new versions to appear in the distribution's repositories. The project infrastructure uses the Jenkins continuous integration server, which periodically scans the content of the servers for new versions. When new components are identified, a special Docker-based build container is started, in which package updates are quickly generated.
It currently looks almost identical to the Plasma 5 builds (hopefully a banner will be added shortly).
An obvious bug is visible in the panel above where items that should be right-aligned aren't, that's easy to fix until it's fixed. There are many more bugs, but considering this is an early port using unreleased frameworks, it's mostly usable, especially now that the worst kf5/kf6 overlay packages have been sorted.
The plasma bits, like the system settings, are all Qt 6 and earlier than KF6, as are Konsole and Dolphin, but the rest is Qt 5 and there are still some integration issues to work out.
About the key change in KDE 6, it's basically moving to Qt 6, change some basic default settings and ship an updated base set of libraries and components of runtime, KDE Frameworks 6, which forms the KDE software stack. KDE Frameworks 6 is undergoing a major API overhaul. In its current form, out of 658 KDE projects, the ability to compile with Qt 6 is implemented in 333 projects.
It is worth mentioning that there are still several components that are not yet compatible with Qt 6 including discovery, falkon, kget, ktorrent, okular among others.
Of the changes that can be highlighted of KDE Plasma 6, one of them is that by default, a session with the Wayland protocol will be used and the work with X11 will be transferred to the category of options. Users and distributions will be able to switch back to the X11-based session if they wish, but Wayland will be promoted as the officially recommended protocol.
In addition to this, the KDE developers they have also discussed the issue of extending the development cycle for new releases. Instead of the previously used model with 3 releases per year, the possibility of moving to 2 releases per year is being considered.
It is noted that the scheme with three releases is not convenient for distributions, which do not always have enough time to perfect the packages. The KDE developers intend to try to move to a 6 month development cycle after the Plasma 6 branch has more or less stabilized. The timing of releases is planned to be synchronized with the development schedule of major Linux distributions, similar to how the GNOME project does.
Finally, if you are interested in being able to test the KDE Neon images with Plasma 6, you can get them from their website in their download section by selecting the “Unstable Edition” version. The link is this.
Last but not least, it should be mentioned that The KDE Plasma 6 release is expected to be released in Fall 2023.
You can check the details of the news and more about the KDE Neon project at the following link.