[Desktop] KDE Plasma 6.6.6 "the number of the Konqi" available in Kubuntu Backports

[Schwarzer Kater]

Above-mentioned updates for our preferred desktop environment are now availabe for Kubuntu 26.04 LTS in the Kubuntu Backports PPA.

Here is the link to the changelog for KDE Plasma 6.6.6: https://kde.org/announcements/change...6/6.6.5-6.6.6/

As far as I know Plasma 6.6.6 is the final release for Plasma 6.6 - also see Schedules/Plasma 6 (https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6).


Again, thank you very much to the Kubuntu developers for providing this!



The Kubuntu Backports PPA contains "backports of new versions of KDE Platform, Plasma and Applications as well as major KDE apps for Kubuntu."

You can find the instructions how to add the Kubuntu Backports PPA directly on the website (Kubuntu Backports PPA), but here they are again:

Open the Konsole terminal emulator and enter

• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
  (and confirm the addition with [Return])
• sudo apt update

After this any future updates that the Kubuntu Backports PPA provide for your Kubuntu 26.04 LTS will be automatically installed when you update your system.

So now you can install the new Plasma packages e.g. by entering

• sudo apt full-upgrade

and afterwards

• reboot

As always I strongly recommend that you have prepared some way to revert your system to a previous state if something goes wrong, e.g.:

One can use ppa-purge (installed by default in Kubuntu 26.04 LTS) to get rid of the Kubuntu Backports' packages again.
Or use a Timeshift system backup.
Or use LVM/ext4 with snapshots or btrfs with snapshots as your file system.
Or use a Clonezilla volume backup.
Or …

[boospy33]

Thanks for your post. I have to admit that I’m still very cautious about updates like this, based on my past experience. I used KDE Neon for a few years. It was great for the first few years, but after the first LTS release upgrade, I ran into all sorts of problems. Eventually, I did a clean install. Then Plasma 6 came out, and I switched to Kubuntu because it just wasn’t usable.

I switched to Kubuntu LTS to have a stable working environment. Does anyone have long-term experience with the PPA across multiple LTS versions? Would you recommend it?

Personally, I’d only want to install it if there were a really annoying bug that had been fixed in the PPA.

For example, this one here, which I ran into in the past and was super, ultra annoying. It was never fixed for me. But now it doesn’t affect me anymore. And I don’t have an NVIDIA graphics card anymore either.

[acheron]

The PPA description (on its webpage and displayed when you add it) says this:

Backports of new versions of KDE Platform, Plasma and Applications as well as major KDE apps for Kubuntu.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports

This PPA will receive major version updates backported from later Kubuntu releases (and our development release); so if instead you want early access to just point (bugfix) releases of the versions of applications shipped with a Kubuntu release, then our updates PPA provides those: https://pad.lv/ppa/kubuntu-ppa

So if you want to just test, or get early, bugfixes that will eventually come via the main archive updates, then do not use the backports PPA.