I've wanted to follow the development of Plasma 6, and offer to help in any way I can with testing and validation, so the obvious thing to do was to temporarily change my laptop's repository to unstable, right? Too late, I found out that having done that, I could no longer change back to shannon - it's a one-way process. Not wanting to have my daily-driver laptop on unstable permanently, I decided to consider it a lesson well learned, reinstall Solus Plasma on the machine and rebuild it (including my collection of Solus VMs).

With my laptop fully restored, I remembered that I could easily clone a VirtualBox VM in about a minute. So I cloned my Solus 4.5 Plasma VM and renamed the clone to Solus Plasma 4.5 Unstable. So, now I have a fully usable computer for that special purpose. I'm posting this message from it now.

This new VM has everything it needs for its intended purpose, and nothing it doesn't need. It can access my NAS, it can hibernate, and its UI is set up to make accessing Solus' sites easy. The one issue I ran into was that Vivaldi would not start, no matter how I tried to lauch it. Obviously that was a cause for concern. But on a hunch, I installed vivaldi-snapshot, sync'd it, and that works fine.

I thought I'd mention this here, in case there are others in the forum who'd like to follow along with the Plasma 6 adventure but don't want to permanently change their daily-drivers. If you create a VM to use for the purpose - or clone an existing one and modify it accordingly - you can have the best of both worlds without making permanent changes to your computer.

    WetGeek Too late, I found out that having done that, I could no longer change back to shannon - it's a one-way process.

    You can always switch back to stable(shannon) anytime, it is just the packages doesn't automatically rollback to the stable version. Your packages will stay on unstable version until unstable and stable repo are synced. To rollback the packages, you can use sudo eopkg hs -t XXX and then switch back to stable repo. It is not a one way street, but it does have risk of incompatibel configuration leftover that can cause problem.

    WetGeek offer to help in any way I can with testing and validation

    It is fine to help testing with a VM, but a VM is not a 1:1 experience to bare metal of your own hardware. What you experience in VM might not be exactly what you will experience in your machine. Just roughly the same. But if you are not comfortable to live on unstable, by all means just use a VM to test. Real hardware will give (in my opinion) better feedback.

    Happy testing Plasma 6!

    With regards,

    A GNOME Plebs

          alfisya It is not a one way street, but it does have risk of incompatibel configuration leftover that can cause problem.

          Thanks for your reply - I really do appreciate it. I guess I should have added "for all practical purposes," when describing the change to unstable as a one-way process.

          I don't doubt that it's technically possible to return a computer to Shannon, given enough time, knowledge, and potentially debugging and repairing, as needed. But as I said in my message, creating the VM clone that I used required about 60 seconds of so, plus a little bit of configuration. And my laptop remains unaffected. Maybe I'm just lazy.

            WetGeek and offer to help in any way I can with testing and validation, so the obvious thing to do was to temporarily change my laptop's repository to unstable, right? Too late, I found out that having done that, I could no longer change back to shannon - it's a one-way process

            the best adventures start this way. 🙂

            PS--other distros (arch) are having hellish nightmarish problems with what I consider way-too-early releases of P6. Thread after thread of endless grievances.

            alfisya I think I am at XFCE's ceiling and may try to also contribute with a bare metal P6 when its beta.
            food for thought. I filed enough xfce bugs🙂.

            @WetGeek desktop looks anime meets art deco which is interesting.

            WetGeek I thought I'd mention this here, in case there are others in the forum who'd like to follow along with the Plasma 6 adventure but don't want to permanently change their daily-drivers.

            I appreciate this heads up.

                    brent may try to also contribute with a bare metal P6 when its beta.

                    Go ahead, the "beta" phase is now. Install plasma edition, switch to unstable, update. If you are on unstable, you should join the packaging room in matrix to avoid any nasty surprise (unless you prefer it that way 😛). In two weeks time (if testing goes well ), Plasma 6 will hit stable.

                        alfisya In two weeks time (if testing goes well ), Plasma 6 will hit stable.

                        wow I trust the Committees thought this out, but I am not encouraged by the internet chatter. 14 days seems too soon but that's my interpretation of the internet chatter. maybe you got a lot of bodies on this.

                        why is XFCE taking it's time, comparatively, do you think?

                        edit: none/changed mind

                            brent PS--other distros (arch) are having hellish nightmarish problems with what I consider way-too-early releases of P6. Thread after thread of endless grievances.

                            Bit rough on upgrade for me, post-install screen goes black and I had to switch to a TTY to reboot. Outside of that it has been fine for me.

                            Difficulty is sorting the bad user practices, general user ignorance, Wayland specific issues that are not new and nothing to do with Plasma and distro packaging mistakes from actual Plasma 6 regressions.

                            • If you are using some non default themes for sddm / plasma or have installed some plasmoids (extensions) you may run into breakages after upgrading because they have not been updated to support Plasma 6 / Qt6.

                            • Plasma 6 defaults to Wayland (We currently force it to default to X11) so for many this will be their first time using Wayland where sadly nvidia is a bit of a shit show. It varies from card to card, user to user. Nothing to do with Plasma 6 itself, nvidia just suck.

                            • Influx of users wanting to try the new shiny but....

                            • KDE Neon screwed up their Plasma 6 launch, briefly mentioned here: https://pointieststick.com/2024/03/02/this-week-in-kde-a-smooth-release/

                            I am not trying to suggest all problems reported by users are not actual problems just that it can be deceiving. I have been using Plasma 6 since 2nd February for RC1 without issue. We will be on Plasma 6.0.3 by the time it hits stable.

                            As for XFCE I will remind people that our Plasma edition was in beta for literally years. Updating to a new version is not the same as adding support for a new DE for which no one has experience maintaining or configuring.

                                brent why is XFCE taking it's time, comparatively, do you think?

                                Well, XFCE is a completely new DE (for Solus), while Plasma 6 is "just" a major version update for an already existing, mature Solus edition.

                                    @TraceyC , thanks for the suggestion to run vivaldi-stable in a terminal and check the stderr output. That provided the clue that I needed to resolve the issue. I don't expect that to be a problem anymore - if I install something in order to test it, it won't need to deal with a profile from the clone parent. Ready to do what I can to help out now.

                                    Harvey Trying it in a VM and experiencing VM issues such as

                                    I typically don't enable 3D acceleration for my VMs, as I don't use them for anything that would require that level of video performance. But after reading this article, I enabled that feature on my "unstable" VM, and the result was that it wouldn't launch at all. I believe I saw the briefest flash of the UI one time, but it was over in milliseconds, and I didn't notice it during subsequent attempts.

                                    This is, of course, the VM that I've been using all day without the 3D acceleration turned on, so I'm going to turn it back off now. By the way, I did check the BIOS/UEFI virtualization setting, just confirm that Intel virtualization support is turned on at that level, and it is, and has always been.

                                    I just turned the 3D acceleration back off in the VBox manager, and the VM launched normally.

                                      I haven't used VirtualBox in years as I always had problems eventually switching virt-manager. So hopefully someone who uses virtualbox will have a look at what may be wrong here.

                                      The best way for me to migrate to plasma 6 was to delete all the KDE and plasma 5 folders and configuration files from my /home, /.config, /.cache, /.local etc. The reboot was magical, with a brand-new Plasma 6 desktop, and since then everything has worked perfectly, apart from a few minor details. We'll have to get used to the new plasma 6 control panel, where everything has been reorganized.

                                      Congratulations and many thanks to the Solus team and also to kde team!
                                      Solus Plasma 6 has a bright future ahead of it!

                                        sangheeta We'll have to get used to the new plasma 6 control panel, where everything has been reorganized.

                                        That's gonna take a while for me. I've always appreciated the thoughtful way that system settings were arranged in Plasma, compared to lesser DEs. I always knew exactly where to look to find what I wanted to change. Today it took me quite a whiile to figure out how to add another workspace to the switcher.

                                        To be honest, though, it took me years to get so familiar with the old settings. I'm willing to believe that the Plasma designers have done a good job yet again, and it's an improvement that I'll appreciate once I've learned it bettter. (And it was trivial to get rid of that horrible wallpaper.)

                                        Really, the biggest challenge for me will be getting used to having no dock. I use Latte on all the Plasma machines here, and I've learned to really appreciate it. In the KDE forum, I found out that there's a potential replacement for Latte called Crystal Dock. The pictures of it look really good, but for now it's only available for X11. The description stressed the "for now" part, so I expect it to be available for Wayland sometime soon. It's also DE agnostic, so plasmoids won't work with it, but I'm reserving judgement until I see what it uses instead.

                                            sangheeta You can have a second panel as a dock.

                                            Yes, thanks, that was another suggestion in the KDE forum. But I didn't expect that it would have typical dock behavior, so I haven't tried that yet. Maybe today.

                                              Trying to use a panel as a dock works, in the sense that an icon-only task manager fulfulls one function of the dock, and the panel can be resized and relocated to make it look more like a dock.

                                              But I have found no way to impart dock-like behavior to the bottom panel.

                                              When the application's window is maximized, the panel behaves as a panel always has. It limits the available room in the screen's client area instead of moving out of the way. It doesn't hide when it's not needed, and reappear in front of the application when it is needed.

                                              If anyone has found out how to make a panel work like a dock, I'd love to hear from you.

                                                sangheeta right click your panel, choose "edit mode"

                                                Excellent! Thanks. That should add the missing functionality.

                                                Indeed, it does. There's still trivial behavior that a dock has. and it would be nice to see it with rounded corners, but I'm not concerned about trivialities at this point. The "dock" is now quite functional, and it's something I can live with. Maybe some day KDE will add a real dock, so we don't need to build it ourselves. That should be easy for them, given that they're already this close.

                                                  Hey, @TraceyC, I wrote up a bug report from the Plasma 6 unstable VM. I was properly signed in via 2FA. The report included two screenshots, but when I clicked to save the bug report, those images were not displayed. And the bug report was not saved, because I couldn't find it afterward.

                                                  Has anyone else mentioned that this has happened to them? I can repeat the bug report from my laptop, if necessary. As well as the bug about the bug report not being accepted.