Keen to kick the tyres on the next wave of KDE software? If so, check out a revamped experimental archive KDE neon developers recently announced.
Unstable builds of the Ubuntu-based KDE neon now include KDE Plasma 6 (which is under active development) but apps retooled/built using KDE Frameworks 6 (considered pre-alpha quality at the time of writing) are being more cautiously previewed, siloed in a dedicated archive.
To be clear here: you can sample, test, and use KDE Plasma 6 in KDE neon Unstable builds without this archive (as I understand it). But if you want — and want is the important qualifier here — to test apps leveraging KDE Frameworks 6 you need to “opt-in” by adding this new experimental PPA.
This “nicely segregates the pre-alpha KF6 apps from the more stable Plasma 6 desktop”.
Helpfully, neon devs have made this easy by making a new package (neon-settings-experimental) available to install on existing KDE neon Unstable install.
This “…installs neon-experimental.list to point to the experimental archive and 99-jammy-overrides-experimental which adds a pin to make the experimental archive package always be installed,” they say.
In need of more deets? You’ll find ’em over in the KDE neon blogpost announcing this archive (which has full instructions on how to enable the experimental archive and, crucially, disable it should you get bitten by too many bugs).
There’s no firm or fixed date on when KDE Plasma 6 (and accompanying stacks) will be released but there’s a tentative hope it’ll happen early 2024. Expect betas (and lots of blog posts showcasing the changes the uplift brings) before then.
