2026/07/30 19:23 Ben Cooksley <[email protected]>:
Seems that some distributions are actually going ahead with full removal or have already done so which matches up with the view that it is well and truly dead?
I do not get the feeling that it's "well and truly dead" at all from the thread; at least not yet. It seems very much still in the "people are working hard to put it to rest" stage.
- Arch, Slackware, and FreeBSD all mention waiting on KDE to at least make releases for KDE apps that have already been ported but just haven't made a release after porting (kaffeine, kbibtex, krename, kronometer, kdesvn) or for more KDE apps to be ported (Okteta).
- Arch still ships VLC with Qt5 (but this is. probably not a problem? VLC already supports Qt6 now, right? If anything it shouldn't be hard to get VLC to fix its Qt6 support)
- "Adelie Linux" notes "the most important Qt 5 software is Quassel IRC" and why it's used. The last commit is in June, the second last commit is from July 2025, so it's not quite active but not dead either. Though a porting effort does exist.
- Gentoo has done full removal. For Okteta, they use the work/kossebau/kf6 branch.
https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/distributions/2026-June/001705.html
https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-editors/okteta
https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/app-editors/okteta/okteta-0.26.60_pre20260628.ebuild
- Ubuntu is moving towards removal but hasn't done so yet even in the 26.10 branch.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/stonking/okteta
This feels like quite a bit of effort being justified for a few small pieces of software that will only be used by a small number of applications (as most have ported) that are themselves legacy and likely to have maintenance issues (because otherwise they'd be ported already).In my view, the expense of maintaining Qt 5 support for that very small handful of Plasma projects is not particularly well justified.
While I understand why we want to move on from Qt5, if we do it now it should be done with the understanding that it's not zero impact. It's probably still worth it, but then the last unported-but-still-wanted or ported-but-unreleased KDE apps should still be resolved first.
Specifically: kaffeine, kbibtex, krename, kronometer, kdesvn, and maybe systemdgenie[1] are ported but unreleased and need a release; Okteta is not ported yet but probably still wanted (ie. can't just deprecate Okteta). If the desire to decommission now is high, that should be turned into a desire to release what's been ported and port + release Okteta first.
[1]: I got this list from looking at which packages depend on kcoreaddons5 in Arch
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/kcoreaddons5/
Best regards,
Kisaragi Hiu
