How to try Fedora Rawhide + Plasma 6?

I really want to test Plasma 6. KDE Neon is a bit weird due to being based on that Ubuntu LTS base. I would really like to try Fedoras variant of how things are currently going.

I know Nate Graham uses that combo, I am not yet ready to compile complete Plasma myself, but I know the COPR @kdesig/kde-nightly-qt6.

So what I did:

  1. In Virt-manager created a standard Fedora KDE VM
  2. sudo dnf update -y && sudo dnf install dnf-system-upgrade
  3. Did that incredibly complex system upgrade command sudo dnf system-upgrade download --releasever=rawhide --exclude=sdubby && sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot (sdubby and grubby had a conflict?)
  4. Rebooted into Rawhide, deleted a lot of the unnecessary KDE apps preinstalled, did a sudo dnf autoremove
  5. Made the first snapshot of the system, plain KDE Rawhide
  6. Removed the entire plasma Desktop from TTY: sudo dnf remove --setopt protected_packages= plasma-desktop @kde-desktop -y (Hack to avoid protection of plasma-desktop, found on Reddit)
  7. Did nother sudo dnf autoremove
  8. Made another snapshot “Rawhide base”
  9. Added the COPR repo and tried to do sudo dnf install -y @kde-desktop

Problem here is, that the COPR Plasma6 packages are not preferred over the Plasma5 ones. So they conflict and nothing installs. The same happened when just trying to update after adding the COPR to the normal system, thats why I cleaned it up completely.

How could I prefer the Qt6 packages instead, is there a way? I thought the repo with the higher version would be chosen automatically.

Do I need to install the packages with rpm or some other very manual way?

2 Likes

Comps in Rawhide naturally still defines the kde-desktop group using Plasma 5 packages: https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/blob/main/f/comps-f40.xml.in#_3205

AIUI, it’s possible for repos to provide their own comps file, which e.g. RPM Fusion does, but this copr doesn’t appear to do so.

1 Like

I am interested in evaluating KDE Plasma 6 on Fedora Rawhide. I attempted to use this COPR repository but encountered issues in the following two scenarios:

  1. Starting with Fedora Rawhide running Plasma 5, then attempting an upgrade with the COPR repository enabled.
  2. Installing Fedora Rawhide with Budgie and the COPR repository enabled. In this case, I was presented with the SDDM login page that displayed only a password field on a blank screen. Since I utilize passwordless login, pressing enter resulted in the system freezing at the lock screen.
1 Like

So the problem is that the COPR needs a comps file right? So that it can replace every supported plasma5 package, and also remove unneeded ones.

I saw a new repo on KDE-SIG which appears to be the good and needed one for Plasma 6, but it`s new one and empty for now, i think work already started, we need to wait some time

1 Like

Is there a way to install a container image as regular distro? Because there are no install ISOs availalble.

I created a minimal KDE Rawhide qcow2 image I will link.

quay.io/fedora/fedora:rawhide
registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:rawhide
registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora:rawhide

these should all work, but may not suit the porpose. The current upgrade has this dependency issue and it takes a very long time (I am actually spoiled by rpm-ostree)

How about this? :slight_smile:

So, update to this:

On Fedora Rawhide I followed the great KDE guides on how to compile the workspace myself, add it to SDDM and then log in here.

Not sure if it made it, and a bit confused about dependency problems when doing so. Should this be done on a barebones Fedora Rawhide, to remove any dependency issues or duplicated packages?

@goddv mind sharing how you did it? Just the COPR or self compiled packages?

So basically i`ve added Plasma6-nightly Copr, then ran dnf --refresh upgrade && dnf distro-sync. After that it installed half of plasma6 packages, so i needed to manually remove kde-connect package due to dependency errors from plasma5, then ran upgrade && distro-sync again, and it catched all remaining stuff of plasma6. All was made with working Rawhide KDE system on the fly.

1 Like

Also when i get some spare time, i`ll try to compile plasma by myself to get parity with upstream repo and maybe running some autobuild server on Koji

sudo rpm-ostree rebase --reboot \
    ostree-unverified-registry:quay.io/fedora-ostree-desktops/kinoite-nightly:rawhide
1 Like

daaaaamn! Thanks @siosm ! I am so close to just rebasing to that but no I will not do that

Just follow my guide to upgrade your rawhide to latest Plasma alpha and that’s it. I`m not using Kinoite for no reason, lol, but sticking to rawhide instead (i like to mess with my system). Anyways latest Plasma 6 based Kinoite is using rawhide branch for plasma stuff as described above.