To be honest, I was waiting for a move from Pat. But I got restless, Pat is otherwise occupied for a few days so I took the plunge.
What I am talking about is of course packaging KDE Gear 26.04.0 for Slackware. The latest release of Applications and KDEPIM is nicknamed the “KDE at 30″ edition because KDE is around for 30 years already (!). Congratulations are in order.

The reason I wanted to wait for Pat is that the new Kleopatra release (part of KDEPIM) requires a version of gpgme which is not present in Slackware-current. I had hoped to see an upgrade to gpgme 2.x in Slackware first, followed by a rebuild of affected packages, which according to avid Slackware user gmgf aka Gérard Monpontet is at least: gmime, gpa, libcups-filters, mccabber, mutt, poppler, samba, volume_key, wget2 and labplot. But that did not happen, and I wanted to have a stable ‘ktown’ which is fully ported to Qt6 before my 65th birthday next week.
Therefore I decided to trick Slackware by upgrading gpgme from 1.24.3 to 2.0.1 but not rebuilding all those other Slackware packages that depend on gpgme 1.24.3. Instead I added another package to ‘ktown’ called gpgme1 which contains all the libraries from the previous gpgme 1.24.3 package. Zero broken Slackware packages and I could finally move on with KDE Gear without having to wait for the upstream.
As you might have guessed after all these years – I hate to be dependent on others and like to have full control. So, move aside Pat 😉
Jokes aside, I hope that Pat picks up this completed work and adds it to Slackware-current soon.

As promised when I revived the ‘ktown’ repository for Plasma6, the addition of a legacy-free KDE Gear 26.04.0 marks the change for this repository from ‘testing’ to ‘latest’, as witnessed by the change in the package download URL: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/. The latest KDE Plasma6 Desktop Environment is absolutely ready for production use. It’s snappy, feature-complete and beautiful. I have been using the Wayland session ever since my first batch of packages and the quirks have by now been removed that annoyed me in the beginning. By now, okteta in ‘applications-extra’ is the only left-over of the old Qt5/KF5 era.

Formally kwayland-integration is also still built against Qt5 and the two old Frameworks kwayland5 and kwindowsystem5, but that’s required for the Plasma6 Wayland session to still support older 3rd-party Qt5 based applications).

The new release of packages is accompanied by an expansive README which will help you remove KDE Plasma5 from your Slackware-current computer and install the ‘ktown‘ version of KDE Plasma6 instead.
The origin host is of course https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (rsync://slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/), but you could choose the alternative
mirror https://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/ (rsync://slackware.uk/people/alien-kde/) which is faster for some people, but you may have to wait until it syncs against slackware.nl. Or if you live in the US, try https://us.slackware.nl/alien-kde/ (rsync://us.slackware.nl/mirrors/alien-kde/), this server has a lot of bandwidth available.

If you want to peek at the source code management, I track everything in a git repository. You will find the new 6_26.04 branch at: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/

Have fun with KDE Plasma6 and please  leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Cheers, Eric