Plasma 5 (KDE5) in Debian Sid

Just writing this up, because no-one else on the Internet seems to have done so.

KDE 5 is a bit of a misnomer now, the more common name seems to be KDE Frameworks or Plasma 5. It looks like Plasma 5 will hit Debian Sid’s official unstable repos very shortly, but for now it’s extremely easy to just get the packages from Siduction.

Firstly add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://packages.siduction.org/kdenext unstable main
deb http://packages.siduction.org/kdenext kde-frameworks main

Then I’d suggest completely removing any existing KDE and Plasma stuff. From a virtual terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1) I did apt-get remove 'kde*' and apt-get remove 'plasma*'

Then do the usual, apt-get update. It’s nice to install apt-get install siduction-archive-keyring to prevent warnings from Siduction repos. Now you can simply install apt-get install plasma-desktop. It’s that easy!

You won’t have a login manager, in fact I’m not sure there is one for Plasma 5 yet. I’ve seen some people using lightdm. But for now I’m just starting it manually with startx.

There’ll be a bunch of other things you’ll want, like; konsole, dolphin, etc. But that’s up to you how much bloat you want to add.