KDE Plasma 5.27 is now available for users of Kubuntu 22.04 LTS to upgrade to — if they want to.
Kubuntu 22.04 LTS ships with KDE Plasma 5.24. That is a solid release that works well for most folks, but it does lack a few of the fancier flourishes and refinements found in more recent versions of the desktop.
Now, no-one need miss out.
Developers working on the popular Ubuntu flavour have packaged KDE Plasma 5.27 into a backports-extra PPA. This makes it easy to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.27 on Kubuntu 22.04 LTS.
“We have had many requests to make Plasma 5.27 available in our backports PPA for Jammy Jellyfish 22.04. However, for technical reasons this would have broken upgrades to Kinetic 22.10 while that upgrade path existed,” they explain in a blog post.
But because support for Ubuntu 22.10 has ended — please don’t say that’s news to you — the roadblock’s been removed and this Plasma upgrade made possible (it was previously possible to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.25 from the same PPA, FYI).
The backports-extra PPA is best used in conjunction with the regular Kubuntu backports PPA but, devs say, it will work standalone too. You should be aware that these PPAs may include updates to KDE apps and frameworks too, so do review proposed updates before you install them.
Given that Kubuntu 22.04 LTS is a long-term support release focused on stability it’s also worth my mentioning that packages installed from outside of the main Ubuntu repo may lack the same level of quality assurance and testing as things within it.
How to Upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.27
Caveats aside, you can add the Kubuntu back ports-extra PPA and upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.27 on Kubuntu 22.04 LTS (only) by running the following commands in Konsole:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports-extra
sudo apt full-upgrade
Check over the proposed changes then hit y to proceed.
The upgrade itself takes a few minutes (longer on a slow connection) and you should reboot your system once the upgrade completes to ensure that everything clinks into place correctly.
Once the system is back up you can log in to enjoy all of the neat new features in KDE Plasma 5.27 as well as many of the changes introduced in the 5.25 and 5.26 releases prior to that, including:
- Auto Accent Colours
- Floating panel option
- 1:1 touch gestures
- Set animated images as wallpaper
- New Timer widget
- Resizable panel pop-ups
- Compact mode in KickOff app menu
- Flatpak permissions accessible from System Settings
- Major multi-monitor improvements
- Quick tiling feature
- Improved battery monitor
- KRunner can suggest web searches
Plus plenty more besides!