The much anticipated KDE Plasma 6 “megarelease” is now out. Here’s how you can upgrade to KDE Plasma 6.
The first release of KDE Plasma 6 series is now available. This release brings improved overview, HDR support, floating panel, new breeze icons and many more features with Qt6 base. You can check out the detailed feature guide on this page, which I published a while back.
If you are running an earlier version of KDE Plasma 5.27 via the KDE Neon distribution, here’s how you can upgrade to the latest version.
Table of Contents
How to Upgrade to KDE Plasma 6
Housekeeping
- Firstly, the upgrade size is a little higher than Plasma 5.27 considering many new features and graphics additions.
- Secondly, close all the running applications before proceeding.
- The upgrade process of KDE Neon via Discover or
pkconis stable and never failed me. If you want to be extra cautious, you may take a backup of your data. Since this is a major upgrade from Qt5 to Qt6, I would suggest you take backups of important documents on a separate USB drive/cloud storage. - Change the default global theme to breeze. Disable add-ons. This is a prevention step for any unforeseen issues with custom themes. You can enable them after successful upgrade.
- Ensure that your system is up-to-date by running “sudo apt update“. And have a stable internet connection with sufficient time in hand (around 1 hour or more).
- If you are upgrading in a virtual machine, make sure to have display memory minimum 128 MB or more. Otherwise, you will see a black screen.
Steps for the upgrade process
Via GUI – Discover App
- Open Discover from the application menu. Click on “Fetch Updates”.
- Wait for a few minutes until the updated package lists are available.
- You can also verify whether Plasma 6 is available via the upgrade package list.
- Once you have verified, click on the ‘Update All’ button in the Discover window at the top-right.
Via command line
Alternatively, you can run the below commands from the terminal and start the upgrade process in KDE Neon.
sudo apt update
sudo pkcon update
You can also verify whether version 6 is available before you hit Yes for upgrade. As you can see in the below highlighted images.
The pkcon might freeze for a minute or two during the upgrade installation. Don’t close it; instead, wait for it to complete the installation.
Restart the system after the upgrade process is complete.
And after reboot, you should see the brand new KDE Plasma 6 welcomes you.
Upgrading KDE Plasma in Kubuntu and Fedora
Ubuntu & Kubuntu
For Kubuntu 22.04, 23.10, 24.04 LTS users, you will not get Plasma 6 anytime soon. Kubuntu 24.10 will have this version later half of 2024.
Also, I would recommend you keep an eye on the backports PPA. Once available for respective Ubuntu releases, you can easily upgrade to this latest version using the command below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
sudo apt-get full-upgrade
Fedora
Fedora 40 users should receive KDE Plasma 6 during the release or within its first point release later this year.
Arch Linux
Finally, Arch Linux users (running Plasma desktop) can update via the following command from the terminal. Try not to use Discover in Arch Linux for this core plasma update. If you are planning to set up a fresh Arch Linux installation with Plasma 6, refer to this guide.
sudo pacman -Syu
Post Upgrade Feedback
I ran the upgrade process on a Virtual Box VM with a fresh KDE Neon with KDE Plasma 5.27 installed. The upgrade process is smooth, with no surprises or errors. Well, it never failed for me to date.
The upgrade time entirely depends on your internet connection and KDE servers. In general, it should be completed within 40 minutes. For me, it took around 45 minutes. This is a little higher than 5.26 > 5.27 upgrade, which took around 20 minutes in the same test bed.
The first restart after the upgrade went fine and did not take much time.
So, overall, you can safely upgrade if you are in KDE Neon. And wait for the packages for Ubuntu and Fedora stable releases.
Enjoy the brand-new KDE Plasma 6!
