 Okay, so the development of Plasma 6 has started quite some time ago actually, but of course we're just at the beginning and there's not much of interest to see. But nonetheless, I had to try out the current state of the Plasma 6 branch anyway since I'm, you know, a KD developer and also I thought that I would share with you how it went. However, it's a journey both for me and for you and you will not get to see Plasma 6 before I do. And believe me, there's a lot of things to do before that. So let's start. Today I try to build Plasma 6. Now, how does this work usually? KD projects hosted on GitLab have a branch called Master, that is, you know, the very latest. However, with the switch to Qt6, some KD projects have split their development in the development branches into the Qt5 branch called KF5 or similar and the Qt6 branch actually called Master or similar. This hasn't happened for all projects since it started with the KD frameworks where the 6 works started and only somewhat recently it got to Plasma projects as well. So what did I do back when this happened? Well, there's a script called ksrcbuild which builds KD projects and I went to its config settings and I added use the branch called KF5 Qt5 which basically forced the script to always use the Qt5 branch whenever there was one. So I've been basically missing out from anything with a 6 until today. I created a new folder called KD6 where to build Plasma 6. I created a new config file in that folder which was basically the same one but with 6 instead of 5 everywhere. And then I told KDE source build, hey, sexy, can you start building? The poor thing actually tried to do something before screaming at me through error logs that I had forgotten to install Qt6. Okay, fair enough. I installed Qt6 Dev packages, I try again and the poor thing starts screaming again that I installed Qt6.2 instead of Qt6.4 which is required. And here's the issue, I'm using Ubuntu Studio 22.04. The latest Qt packages are only on Ubuntu 23.04 called Lunar Lobster which hasn't released yet. So I did something, I did something bad that you should never ever do. I opened the ATCAPT sources.list file and I added one line with the Lunar package repositories. This basically allows me to install Lunar packages on a non-Lunar system, however mixing packages from different major versions of Ubuntu is basically asking for problems but sometimes it works so I gave it a shot. I had to figure out the correct packages to install but it kind of worked. I managed to start building stuff and then I spent the couple of hours trying to fix little missing dependencies and such until one of the project asked me to install the latest version of some kind of Qt framework library that for some reason is not on Qt's githlab. I'm confused here. I mean, as a no big deal I can just install it through the package manager again of Lunar. And apt told me that it was going to download half of a gigabyte of Lunar packages which is way more than I would like to mix with my non-Lunar packages. But whatever, we only live once I guess. So I went with it and everything broke, boom. I spent the following half an hour where any command that required apt would just end with a giant wall of text of errors saying you held broken packages and thanks I know that apt. Worst thing using apt fix missing install which is what you're supposed to do gave me an error because of OBS somehow trying to upgrade that one package for forced OBS to also upgrade and that didn't work. So I removed OBS because I'm such a professional developer. That worked kind of. It also removed the telegram desktop client from my system. I don't know why it just happened. So okay, I go on on building packages until I get another error. I'm missing some files related to Qt6 Swayland. I reinstalled every single Qt6 Swayland package and yet nothing happens. It's almost as if the Qt6 Swayland package was broken itself which obviously can't happen because it was shipped by Ubuntu and they know more than I know. So I went to the KD development chat and I kindly asked everybody, hey, what's up with this? And apparently Ubuntu is refusing to package some files of the Qt6 Swayland package because of reasons. Kindly enough a fellow developer sent me on telegram which I had just reinstalled through a snap the missing files which I just copy pasted. Meaning that now my packages are a mix of 22.04 packages, 23.04 packages and copy pasted from telegram packages. Now I don't want to say that Ubuntu is a bad operating system at all. After all there hasn't been a single time where I hadn't issues with ABT. But had I been using Fedora, probably this would have been so much easier. But it's on me, lol. At this point of the story it has already been 3 hours and I decided to go to sleep. I ate you of my trying to even just build KD Plasma 6 challenge and yes, I managed to. As you might have guessed, yesterday I recorded the first part of the video before actually being able to build Plasma 6 and today I managed. But it wasn't at the press of a button because there has been one last big issue that has stumped me for hours. Today I wake up, I tell KD Sirs to build everything and it fails on KWallet. I go check the error logs and apparently I am missing a library called QCA which is necessary for KWallet. Which is weird because QCA is made by KDE and I had just build QCA and QCA did build successfully so I had no idea what was up with KWallet and I just said you know what, just forget it. I ignored it and told KD Sirs build to just build KD Plasma Desktop and that also failed because Plasma Desktop depends on KWallet. So if I want KD Plasma Desktop, I need KWallet which needs QCA, which I do have weirdly enough. Now here's the thing, it's failing on QCA QT6 whereas I normally build QCA QT5 obviously. However as I explained I did tell KD Sirs build to please use QT6 so I don't know what was up with that. I searched in the documentation of Plasma 6 for the QCA QT6 and yes the documentation does tell me to install QCA QT6 as a package from the package manager. On Arch Linux, I am not on Arch Linux, I am on Ubuntu which does not have any QCA QT6 packages. So I did the best thing I could do which is to send a private message to the KD developer who wrote the documentation talking about Plasma 6 and I told him about my problem. And I gave up, I started working on other stuff. After I don't know like 6 hours I told myself, Nikola you have to solve the QCA QT6 problem or you won't be able to record a YouTube video which would be terrible. So I had an idea, I went to the Arch Linux repository, now this story could now end terribly because as you know my system is a mix of old Ubuntu, new Ubuntu, telegram Ubuntu and the only way to make these voices to somehow use the Arch repositories on Ubuntu but no I had a better idea. Arch Linux has the source files of their packages which do include a file showing how they were built. By looking at them, I do see that they are building QCA with the option KF6 QT6 just like I'm doing but nonetheless I try to do it manually and I see that something is going wrong. The files that are being generated even though I specifically asked KF6 QT6 are still QT5. So I look again at the Arch Linux building script, I look again at what I'm doing, I wait 10 seconds and then I realize that I'm kind of an idiot. In the various building options that I ignored simply because they weren't relevant to me on the Arch Linux page, there's one that's actually quite important which is DQT6 on. Try to guess what it does, seriously just try to guess what on hurt the option called QT6 equals on is going to do. What is it? What does it do? So yeah, I copy-pasted that and it just worked. The mystery is not yet fully solved because in theory KD source build should have done it for me, so I went back to the documentation about building Plasma 6 and I noticed that I'm a double idiot, kinda. So I had set up KD source build by using the template for QT6 on the documentation but there was actually another way to do that which is manually and if you do it manually you have this little instruction that tells you to enable the CMIC flag equals a D build with QT6 equals on. Somehow this flag is instead missing in the template I was given and just by adding that flag to the template, everything worked. So maybe who wrote that template just missed it, happens. So just 15 minutes later I finally built Plasma 6 and now here's the moment of truth. Will it run? And yes, it does. So here it is. This is Plasma 6, built by me. So please take a moment to appreciate the fact that you've been listening to, I don't know, 10 minutes of rambling about building something that looks exactly like Plasma 5 or at least that should look exactly like Plasma 5. There are some bugs which is quite obvious given that this is early, early work in progress. However some of them are pretty funny. As an example my panel now has three kickoff icons, the one on the left is actually kickoff, whereas the two on the right, if clicked, will immediately crash Plasma. Look, I told you, it's still work in progress. So what else? Well, all context menus look like this which is not Breeze. And as soon as I open any window it looks like this, which is also not Breeze. This makes me think that I somehow messed up building Breeze and that the system is failing back to Oxygen, which is pretty funny. I will take some time to fix that, just not today. So what else? Is everything working? The ad widgets sidebar is missing icons, which, okay. And the activity switcher is also missing desktop previews, which I think it should have. Note that this is not my way to report bugs, I'm just talking about these things for fun. I will also make sure to raise my issues if I can confirm that they're not my fault in the appropriate places, don't worry. And don't take this video as how Plasma 6 is going to be, not at all. It's more of a yes, development has started. Nicolò, if Plasma 6 right now looks exactly like Plasma 5 but with more bugs, why did you spend two days building it? There's nothing to try out anyway. Now, as I told you, the code repositories of KDE currently have Qt6 and Qt5 branches, some of them, I mean. The thing is that the Qt5 branches are technically in visual freeze, if I understood it correctly, meaning that you cannot add anything new to them. But I do want to add features. And to do that, I have to make merge requests to the Qt6 branches, which does not require actually running Plasma 6, unless I also want to try out the features which I'm proposing, which is essential. So there's also other people proposing new features that require me to work on the master branch. Before today, I just couldn't test those ones. I was just able to look at the code, but now I can actually build those proposals and try them out. Yes, I'm using a teleprompter. Try them out in Plasma 6. So the simple answer is that yes, Plasma 6 development has started, and thus I have to start using Plasma 6 sometimes, because I am a KDE developer. I want to be at least. You might have another final question. Niccolò, if Plasma 6 right now is so boring, why did you make an entire video about it with a clickbaited title and everything? And here's the thing. I don't actually get paid by KDE. I'm doing all of this in my free time. And the only way for me to have money to eat and everything, whilst still having lots of time for KDE, is to receive donations and at revenue. If you watch an ad to see this video, you are contributing to Plasma 6 development. Does that feel good? If not, you can directly donate to also contribute in a more direct way to my involvement in Plasma 6, because yes, right now it looks like Plasma 5, but hey, that's gonna change. And I'm trying to do my part and I need your help too. So thanks everybody who's helping out and following my journey and see you soon with new and exciting, hopefully devlogs.