Plasma 5.11 Beta now available for testing in unofficial PPA

Sep 22, 2017 20:24 GMT  ·  By

KDE kicked off the development of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment a few months ago, and they've already published the Beta release, allowing users to get a first glimpse of what's coming in the final release next month.

Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team did a great job bringing the latest GNOME 3.26 desktop environment to the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, and it looks like the Kubuntu team also want to rebase the official flavor on the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment.

With the availability of the KDE Plasma 5.11 Beta release upstream, they managed to package the desktop environment in the unofficial PPA (Personal Package Archive) quite fast, probably because they plan to bring it to the Kubuntu 17.10 release with the first set of updates after the distro's launch on October 19, 2017.

Here's how to test KDE Plasma 5.11 Beta in Kubuntu 17.10

If you feel adventurous or you're an application developer creating apps for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, you can test the Beta version of KDE Plasma 5.11 in the development version of Kubuntu 17.10 by running the following commands in a terminal emulator, such as Konsole.

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
KDE Plasma 5.11 is expected to hit the streets on October 10, 2017, but with Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aadrvark) in Final Freeze development stage, it won't be possible for the Kubuntu team to upgrade their environment, which will be based on KDE Plasma 5.10.5, the last maintenance update of the Plasma 5.10 series.

Therefore, if you're running Kubuntu 17.10 right now, and you plan on keeping your installation after the official release on October 19, be prepared to revert the changes made by using the ppa-purge tool to remove the unofficial PPA containing the beta version of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment.