Tag: plasma6

A couple of days ago, I promised to use my holiday to come up with packages for KDE Plasma6.
Today I finished compiling packages for 32bit and 64bit Slackware-current and uploaded a fresh package repository to my ‘ktown‘. The name seems to stick with people, even when it has not seen activity for two years, so I will keep calling it ‘ktown‘.

You will find these packages at the origin location: https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/testing/ together with an expansive README which will help you remove KDE Plasma5 from your Slackware-current computer and install the ‘ktown‘ version of KDE Plasma6 instead.

I just went through the process and this is the first time that I am actually running and using KDE Plasma6 on my production laptop:

I did not have to remove any kind of configuration from $HOME and merely had to delete a couple of obsoleted system tray elements.

I also switched to Wayland instead of X11 and to be honest, that is working better than expected and even better than the good old X11 session. For instance, suddenly I can play 4K video in VLC without stuttering. And the laptop’s  Synaptics touchpad was not found at all in the X11 session (must be a bug because I had been using it for 9 years in Slackware KDE)… while it works perfectly in the Wayland session.
The thing that I miss is the Latte Dock which was dropped from KDE Plasma. Having these MacOS-like ballooning application launcher icons floating at the bottom of my screen always impressed my friends, but it was also extremely powerful in the way I could manage my favorite applications. In Plasma6 I created an auto-hiding QuickLaunch panel at the bottom of the screen but it looks dull compared with the Latte Dock. Shame.

My intention is to keep this new Plasma6 package repository in a ‘testing‘ state as reflected in the repository URL. I expect that there’s stuff that does not work as it should and I would like you all to help in testing and stabilizing the packages. When KDE Gear 26.04 releases in April 2026 I expect that the few remaining Qt5 based KDE applications will finally have been ported to Qt6. By that time, I want to promote the repository from ‘testing‘ to ‘latest‘ and that will then reflect in the repository URL.

If you would look at the content behind the ‘latest‘ repository right now (https://slackware.nl/alien-kde/current/latest/) you will see that it is pointing to a single left-over package for KDE Plasma5 (Slackware 15.0): ‘phonon-vlc‘, a backend for Phonon that requires VLC media player. By the way, I renamed that package to ‘phonon-backend-vlc‘ for Plasma6 to be in line with the Slackware naming convention for these backends.
In April 2026 that repository will get a new  ‘stable’ URL to reflect that it is meant for the stable release of Slackware.

If you want to peek at the source code management, I track everything in a git repository. You will find the 6_25.12 branch at: https://git.slackware.nl/ktown/
A word of thanks to LuckyCyborg who maintained a fork of my ‘ktown‘ during 2024/2025. He never contacted me about this but I was made aware of his activities. I checked out his scripts last week and there were some improvements he came up with that I have incorporated into my own sources. See the git commit message for more details.

I suggest that you try these Plasma6 packages out yourselves! Please leave your feedback in the comments section below.

Enjoy the end-of-year festivities and all the best for 2026! Let’s hope that Slackware merges Plasma6 before the end of 2026.
Cheers, Eric