Official KDE Plasma 6 for Debian and Ubuntu is coming later. This is guide howto build KDE Plasma 6 now and run it as your desktop environment. This is actually a bit more than just building exact KDE Plasma 6 Desktop, this is your Swiss Army Knife to build latest KDE packages when you want and survival pack to help you live on bleeding edge, even if official KDE 6 is published. KDE 6 is of course a major release, but also all minor releases KDE 6 are available.

If you are ‘one-click man’, ‘looking always easiest way to do something’ and ‘wonder why I have to do something more than just click somewhere to get something’, then this guide is definitely not for you. Even if all the planets are in just the right position, this will take a while and this is so much complicated than ‘one click’. You maybe will see errors and you might have to learn something new, but if you still want to run latest and greatest KDE Plasma 6 on Debian or Ubuntu, then this guide is for you.

Check video version of guide. Build KDE 6 on Debian 12 Trixie, same commands works for Ubuntu users also:

Support inttf:

Buy Me a Coffee:

1. Prerequisites to build KDE 6 latest using kdesrc-build on Debian / Ubuntu⌗

  • Lots of disk space – something like 60-80 GB is good start
  • >=16GB RAM – also 8GB should work when limit build process RAM usage
  • Good CPU – something like i5, i7 or i9
  • Good nerves – this is long guide and building several packages will take some time
  • A lot of coffee, maybe for me too

I have tested this guide on my test bench PCs and following specs are at least easily enough to build KDE reasonable time. Of course any other combination should work, but might take some time, also network speed is important factor to total build time. I also tested this on virtual machine with limited cores and limited memory and this works without problems.

PC1⌗

i7-8700K
16GB RAM
128 GB disk

PC2⌗

i9-9900K
64GB RAM
1 TB disk

Debian 12 running KDE 6⌗