The KDE team announced the stable release of KDE Plasma 5.22 with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Here, in this quick guide, we give you the steps to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.22 from 5.21.
The KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop brings several new features and improvements. This is a standard and moderate release with respect to the feature volume. Usual improvements across KWin, Plasma desktop, Wayland improvements, bug fixes are seen. On the look and feel aspect, theme changes, new wallpaper, and other small updates also received by this release.
You can checkout 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 5.22
The upgrade process size is around 600MB from earlier Plasma 5.21. Before you, start the upgrade, make sure to close all the running applications, save your data.
The KDE upgrade process is very much stable, as per my opinion. 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 5.21 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 5.22 is available. See below.
Then you can start the upgrade process by clicking ‘Update All’.
For KDE Neon you can also, run the below commands from the terminal to start the upgrade process.
sudo apt update
sudo pkcon update
After the upgrade is complete, reboot the system.
The new KDE Plasma 5.22 should be available for you to experience and enjoy.
KDE Plasma 5.22 in Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04
As of writing this, Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo are the two major distribution versions. KDE Plasma 5.22 packages soon to be available in Fedora 34 and Ubuntu 21.04.
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 21.04 or Ubuntu 21.10. 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 34, 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 – barely a couple of seconds. The last upgrade to Plasma 5.21 took around 1.5 minutes in comparison.
Post upgrade, every customization of my test system remained the same. The Wallpaper is changed to the new 5.22 wallpaper.
So overall, it is a very good release and flawless upgrade in my test. The response of the desktop itself is better than earlier versions thanks to more improvements across modules.
Enjoy KDE!
