I wanted to highlight my experience with the March KDE Neon upgrade from Plasma 5 to Plasma 6. It is far from noteworthy that so many folks have run into a sea of different bugs and pain points right after the launch, and I am no exception.

Of note though, is I’ve had two instances where my system was rendered pseudo-unusable by failed upgrades. I say pseudo-unusable because in each case I could get a browser and core software working, and in the better case even the full desktop with minimal wrangling.

Ultimately the problem in both cases was a package as part of the upgrade was not upgraded, and the process stopped halfway through. Fixing was always as simple as using apt or aptitude to find the borked package (originally the full plasma desktop package, and recently a libkcolorpicker package), purging the offending legacy/blocking package by using dpkg --remove <package name>, followed by either an apt upgrade or an apt --fix-broken install.

As it stands, while I’m annoyed by these bugs, they’re far from show-stopping. In neither instance have I needed to reinstall the operating system or roll back to a legacy version to get things working, and the bugs I’ve seen have been less severe than similar bugs I’ve encountered during upgrades on Windows and ye-olden-day’s on the Mac.

For folks seeking a generally stable, user focused, and highly-usable desktop, I still recommend KDE Neon as the OS of choice, in spite of the recent Plasma 6 upgrade pains. Ultimately the Neon team clearly heard the wailing of their install base, and is unlikely to do something that they think could incur vitriol and scorn being thrown at them again. The larger problems that plagued the upgrade by in large part weren’t even bugs in the KDE software itself, but were problems caused by inappropriately failing to purge now transitional/deprecated Plasma 5 packages that were superseded by a different package name. As such, new installations aren’t going to run into the same upgrade pains (and upgrade residuals pains) that current users are very rarely still stumbling into.

Last modified on 2024-04-06