Two more KDE Apps have been ported to kf6 and are available in the kde-next repo, print-manager6 & konversation6, plus Calamares kf6 based is now fully functional, all QML modules work again. Print-manager plasmoid fails to run, the QML is not ported yet, image of Konversation & Calamares with the QML user page & virtual keyboard:

Thank you. I successfully installed and tested konversation6. Everything seems to work except for my old way of adding spell-checking by right-clicking on the input line. The pop-up menu did not load. I re-booted, and was able to select auto-spell checking after I started konversation6 again.

When you write that the print-manager plasmoid fails to run, is that separate from print-manager in the System Settings. When I select Printers from System Settings, I get Print service is unavailable / Bad file descriptor. Do I need to install and enable cups?

16 days later

kf5 & kf6 are now fully co-installable. Those that have the kde-next repo enabled, but run Plasma 5 will have to install the kf6 group. All is packaged now in such a way in kde-next that kf6 takes precedent, any comflicts were removed from the kf5 packages.
This also means that those on Plasma 6 should be able to install all/most kf5 based apps. A few conflicts remain, like kuserfeedback & kuserfeedback6, but it will be good to start testing as many kf5 based apps on Plasma 6 as possible.
Latest kf6 based app added is Kompare6, this is probably the last xxxx6 named app added, next week will see the first releases of kf6 & plasma 6, so any more apps ready to port will just have their kf5 based version removed and have it replaced with a kf6 based version on update.

7 days later

The first Alpha for the whole of KDE Qt6/kf6 was released today:
https://kde.org/announcements/kdes-6th-megarelease-alpha/

This means anyone on kde-next/plasma 6 that you will have to do some additional pacman work.
Quite a few moved from Frameworks to Plasma, which means a lower version for pacman (from 5.240.x to 5.27.80), some also moved from Gear to Plasma, also a lower version.
Then all of Plasma 6 moved back to 5.27.80. I never expected the first Alpha to be any 5.27, so the versioning of current 5.27.87 is too high.
All this means that you will have to downgrade any package that will show as newer locally on updating. Once all is build, you can do that in one step with sudo pacman -Suu.

I understand that many re-builds are necessary, but please let us know when it is safe for users of the Plasma6 ISO to update.

Updates are safe, whether Plasma 6 works as should, not yet. But by updating anyone can help with debugging more and adding needed fixes. For now, most will need to install kservice (kf5 based) from the apps repo, an important file is removed from kservice6, no idea yet were it moved to, or why it is not picked by whatever 6 package it should have been moved to.

I did the upgrade, then the downgrade, and re-booted. It looks like plasmashell came back. My Application Launcher seems empty, but I was able to click on the K to run kinfocenter:

Operating System: KaOS (2023) 
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.245.0
Qt Version: 6.6.0
Kernel Version: 6.5.11-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-1185G7 @ 3.00GHz
Memory: 15.0 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® Xe Graphics
Manufacturer: Dell Inc.
Product Name: Latitude 5420

I had to open the konsole (again no icon, just type konsole) to start qutebrowser.
Falkon did not start from krunner, though it appeared along with its icon as I started typing there, but from krunner, command line run falkon did work.
I had kservice6 installed and then I installed kservice and re-booted, and my icons in the application launcher are back and seem to work.
I did not remove kservice6:

pacman -Q | grep kservice
kservice 5.111.0-1
kservice6 5.245.0-1

Paper cut: Plasma 6 System Monitor Sensor widget (plasmoid) does not show Core x Total Usage

But I would agree: The upgrade is safe. Thank you.

kservice is not completely needed, the moved file is now in plasma-workspace6, but renamed to /etc/xdg/menus/plasma-applications.menu (in kservice kf5, it is just applications.menu), if you make a symlink to the old file name then all applications menus are back.
I am checking upstream to see if more are effected by this, otherwise temp solution will be to package plasma-workspace6 with that symlink or make kservice (kf5) a temporary depend, please let me know which solution is preferred.

i am a newbie here, but I would vote for a temporary dependency. That way, after you remove the temporary dependency, when we check for orphans, we will see it. The symlink solution would just hang around, right?

Symlink would be removed once another solution/fix is found, but I also prefer to have kservice just included on all installs, pretty much needed anyway once you install any kf5 based app.

9 days later

Today the last packages that are part of Plasma 5, but not ported to Plasma 6 yet, have done so, Plasma 6 is now as complete as Plasma 5. New added are plasma-browser-integration6, plasma-vault6 & plasma-disks6.
Earlier this week it was also made possible to fully use Flatpaks on Plasma 6.
For that, Flatpak moved to a pre-release build, so it is ready to use the needed appstream 1.0.0. Also added were xdg-desktop-portal-kde6 & discover6.
With the KDE Megarelease Beta at the end of November, all of kf6 will start the move to the stable repo's (co-installable with kf5), that way, a start can be made to move all KDE Apps that only rely on Frameworks (no Plasma parts) to kf6 builds.
For those moves, no xxxx6 naming will be used, it will be the regular naming, so you will slowly see your KDE Apps kf5 based being replaced by kf6 based versions.
Already done this way in kde-next are Kompare, Falkon, Kwalletmanager, Svgpart, Kcm-wacomtablet & Markdownpart.

7 days later

With today's updates, I get this from the Application Launcher:

file:///usr/share/plasma/plasmoids/org.kde.plasma.kickoff/contents/ui/main.qml:20:1: Cannot load library /usr/lib/qt6/qml/org/kde/plasma/private/kicker/libkickerplugin.so: (libicui18n.so.73: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)

Please wait a bit with update/reboot, the icu/boost update started yesterday is still ongoing (didn't upload any for 30 hours to get as much rebuild as needed, but now just uploaded so I can use the buildserver too).
No rebuilds have been done yet in kde-next, waiting for qt6-webengine to build first.
So, yes, your error is known and expected, plasma-workspace6 (among many others) needs a rebuild.

EDIT:
Rebuilds are done, next -Syu will get you the needed packages.

Thank you very much. The Application Launcher and Falkon now work again, but when I try to launch neochat from the konsole, I get:

$ neochat
neochat: error while loading shared libraries: libicuuc.so.73: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The Beta for the KDE Megarelease was released today, and all are up in kde-next.
This time no big surprises, just a few packages that are renamed, but pacman will take of that for you, just answer Yes on the replaces question you will face.

This will also mean that Frameworks 5.246.0 will move to the build repo, and then to all users shortly, this way all users will slowly start to see more and more KDE Apps moving to 24.01.80, kf6 based.

Plasma 6 will stay kde-next only, so no KDE App will move to 24.01 that depends on any Plasma package for stable users.

Thanks for your work.
This is by far the best distro for testing Plasma 6. I installed Neon Testing 3 times and it has always broken. No problems at all in the last week with KaOS and I finally can help reporting Plasma 6 bugs without the fear that everything will break with the next updates.

I'm also considering to switch my everyday-use distro to KaOS as well ❤️

Reporting only.
I've been running the qt6 testing from kde-next and build repos on a spare setup and although I've not used any Akonadi related apps, all is OK.
Trying to run Kmymoney fails to run and reports:
Error while loading shared libraries:libKPim5IdentiyManagement.so.5:cannot open shared object file:No such file or directory.

  • demm replied to this.

    nezzie Correct, there is a start in kde-next to move the whole PIM stack to kf6, so any app depending on kf5 versions of PIM will be broken.
    Once the PIM stack is build, then it will be time to see what broken apps are ready for kf6. Digikam for example will show the same error, but there is a kf6 port available. AFIAK, kmymoney is not at this time,
    And to be clear, the PIM stack will stay in kde-next and will not move with most other KDE Apps 24.01.xx, stable users will not face any breakage.