The KDE team announced the stable release of KDE Plasma 5.23 with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here, in this quick guide, we give you the steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.23 from 5.22.
This release is the 25th-anniversary edition of KDE. Hence, it is a significant and emotional release for the team. Hence, you can expect several new features and updates. You get a brand new Breeze Ocean Theme, new wallpaper, desktop-wide tweaks, and productivity boost across KWin, Plasma desktop, Wayland improvements.
You can check out the feature highlights of KDE Plasma 5.22 here.
If you are running an earlier version of KDE Plasma, this is how you can upgrade to the latest version.
How to Upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.23
The upgrade size is around 400MB+ which is less than the earlier Plasma 5.22 upgrade. Before you start the upgrade, make sure to close all the running applications, save your data.
The KDE upgrade process is very stable. Hence you may not need to take backup any data. However, if you want to be extra cautious, you may take backups of important items on your desktop. But I believe it is not required.
If you are running, KDE Plasma 5.22 in KDE Neon, Or any rolling release distributions such as Arch Linux, Manjaro, or any other distro, you can open the KDE utility Discover and click check for update.
You can verify the updates whether Plasma 5.23 is available via the Discover upgrade package list. See the below screenshot.
Then you can start the upgrade process by clicking ‘Update All’ at the top-right of the Discover window.
If you are comfortable in the terminal, you can run the below commands from the terminal to start the upgrade process in KDE Neon.
sudo apt update
sudo pkcon update
After the upgrade is complete, reboot the system.
The new KDE Plasma 5.23 should be available for you to experience and enjoy.
KDE Plasma 5.23 in Fedora 35 and Ubuntu 21.10
As of writing this, Fedora 35 and Ubuntu 21.10 are the two major distribution versions. KDE Plasma 5.23 packages are soon to be available in Fedora 35 and Ubuntu 21.10.
You do not need to separately compile and install. Hence wait for the official package updates for respective distributions.
If you want to experiment, add below PPA in Ubuntu 21.10 or Ubuntu 21.04. Make sure you take caution while doing so as it might not work properly. Hence I recommend waiting for official packages to land in Ubuntu and Fedora repo.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
In Fedora 35, you may run the following commands after taking backups.
sudo dnf copr enable marcdeop/plasma
sudo dnf copr enable marcdeop/kf5
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
Post Upgrade Feedback
After I ran the upgrade on my test system, everything went smoothly. I must say, the KDE Plasma team did a very good job for the upgrade process to work flawlessly. It never failed me to date.
The first reboot after the upgrade did not take much time. Hence, all good.
So overall, it is a very good release and flawless upgrade in my test machine. The response of the desktop itself is better than earlier versions thanks to more improvements across modules.
Enjoy KDE!
