14 DAY TRIAL // It looks like 2017 will be a good year for users of the Chakra GNU/Linux distribution, a desktop-oriented computer operating system originally based on the popular Arch Linux OS, as they can now install the latest KDE software releases.
That's right, the KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS desktop environment and KDE Applications 16.12 software suite have hit the stable repositories of the GNU/Linux distribution, along with various other Qt/KDE technologies like Qt 5.7.1, Qt Creator 4.2.0, and KDE Development Platform (also known as kdelibs) 4.14.27.
While KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS is a maintenance update bringing us December 2016's bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements, KDE Applications 16.12 is a major release of the software suite, adding lots of important changes across many of the bundled apps, such as Ark, Marble, Cantor, Kdenlive, Kopete, Akregator, KMail, and KCharSelect.
It also ports numerous other components to the latest KDE Frameworks 5 technologies, adding various new features to many of them. On the other hand, KDE Applications 16.12 splits the KDE PIM into eight new packages, and if you want to install it on Chakra GNU/Linux, you'll need to run the following command in a terminal emulator.
sudo pacman -S kdepim
Because of these new major changes in KDE Applications 16.12, the Chakra GNU/Linux developers have dropped support for kdepim-common package, urging users to remove it from their systems before updating to the new software versions, but only if you're not using it. Run the next command to remove kdepim-common from your system.
sudo pacman -Rdd kdepim-common
Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library and LLVM 3.9.1 have landed
Apart from the latest KDE technologies, it looks like the Mesa 13.0.2 3D Graphics Library, LLVM 3.9.1 compiler, winetricks 20161228 helper script for Wine, GPGme (GnuPG Made Easy) 1.8.0 library, along with the GnuPG open-source OpenPGP compatible encryption system have landed as well in the stable repositories of Chakra GNU/Linux.
Therefore, all users are now urged to update their systems as soon as possible, but not before reading the entire announcement in case they have any other questions. To update, simply execute the following command in a terminal emulator, and don't forget to reboot your system after all packages have been successfully installed. Good luck!
sudo pacman -Syu