Qt 6.5.1 was released today, and all of the kf6/plasma 6 stack will be updated/rebuild on that new Qt.
After that is done, it most probably is quite doable to use Plasma 6 as your daily driver for light work, so it is time to post some instructions.

The first step is the simplest one, and will not be explained here, since adjusting pacman.conf is by far the easiest part of any testing and if you do not know how to do that yet, moving to Plasma 6 is too soon for you.

  • Edit pacman.conf and add the build repo above core, then add kde-next above build
  • Make sure you have the needed applications already opened, if you plan to do this with a GUI
  • Update the system after adding the new repos, sudo pacman -Syu
  • Remove the kf5 group sudo pacman -Rncs kf5, this will remove all of plasma, all Qt 5 based apps, etc
  • Plasma will close after this step, so no more panel and so on
  • Install plasma 6, sudo pacman -S kf6 kdeplasma6, after this step, panel will re-appear again
  • Install commonly used KDE applications in their kf6 version, all named with 6 at the end, like dolphin6, kate6, konsole6, midna-themes6, octopi6
  • Check the online package viewer, kde-next repo, for any additional apps you might need https://kaosx.us/packages/packages.php?sortby=name&sordir=asc&repo=kde-next
    - Do install croeso6 to have a GUI for plasma settings, so far systemsettings6 is not usable

Issue with crashing systemsettings is fixed, installing Croeso no longer a strict necessity.

Now it is time to reboot, GUI won't work for this, so just run run sudo reboot.
If you should run into any issues, it is easy to revert back to Plasma 5, just remove kf6 with -Rncs and install kdeplasma5, this can always be done in tty.

Successfully achieved a smooth change over on an old PC. Only thing I can see is that when opening Dolphin a red box appears saying " Invalid protocol". Dolphin appears to be working OK though.
Also tried on a VBox but no success as it is not booting.

  • demm replied to this.

    After full rebuilds on Qt 6.5.1, a few more things are now working:

    • baloo-widgets is kf6 ready, so Dolphin has full baloo support again
    • spectacle builds again
    • kio-extras is now build from a kf6 branch

    Still not working/crashy:

    • systemsettings crashes on any category change that is fully QML
    • yakuake does not see konsole, upstream mentioned some issue with paths,no fix posted yet
    • VBox only runs in an X session, no Wayland

    nezzie Also tried on a VBox but no success as it is not booting.

    Vbox is not working with a Wayland session (yet), make sure to disable autlogin & set to an X11 session, it will boot fine then.

      25 days later

      Almost the complete kf6/plasma6 stack in kde-next is build again on the latest checkouts.
      Unfortunately, no improvements last months, issues/shortcomings that were seen in May are exactly the same.

      bvbfan Nate uses a Plasma 6 build in a /home directory, so there is no conflict in that setup to have kf5/kf6 & plasma5/plasma6 available (Plasma devs use kdersc builds).
      Here it is pure kf6/plasma6 since there still many file conflicts and they cannot be co-installed.

        7 days later

        Systemsettings is usable again, a patched qt6-declarative fixed the issue.