14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Neon development team is announcing the availability of the recently released Qt 5.9 open-source and cross-platform application framework in the testing repositories of the KDE Neon Developer Unstable Edition operating system.
Because of the issues between KDE Plasma's KWin window manager and the next-generation Wayland display server that the KDE Neon devs encounter with the Qt 5.8 release of the widely-used application framework, they decided to jump straight to version 5.9, which they say is more promising.
"We held off on Qt 5.8 because of problems with the Wayland support between it and KWin. Qt 5.9 seems a little more promising but we don’t want to change something so fundamental to KDE’s software without checking for issues so it’s still in the hidden testing repo for now," reads the announcement.
A call for testing
You can consider this announcement a call for testing, as the KDE Neon development team needs your help (if you are a Qt software developer) to try out the latest Qt 5.9 packages on the KDE Neon Developer Unstable Edition, and report any bugs, issues, or annoyances you might encounter, or see what else breaks.
To test, you should have the KDE Neon Developer Unstable Edition installed on your personal computer or add the following repository to the apt sources.list of your KDE Neon edition (you're doing it at your OWN RISK), under /etc/apt/sources.list. Use the command below to update the sources and install the Qt 5.9 packages.
deb http://archive.neon.kde.org/testing xenial main
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
The KDE Neon team would also want you to test drive a Wayland session after installing Qt 5.9. To do that, log out of your current session and select Wayland from the bottom left of the screen. Make sure you also review the Plasma Wayland bugs list before submitting any bug report.