Exciting news for stable Gentoo users: It’s time for the upgrade to the new “megaversion” of the KDE community desktop environment, KDE Plasma 6! Together with KDE Gear 24.05.2, where now most of the applications have been ported, and KDE Frameworks 6.5.0, the underlying library architecture, KDE Plasma 6.1.4 will be stabilized over the next days. The base libraries of Qt 6 are already available.

More technical information on the upgrade, which should be fairly seamless, as well as architecture-specific notes can be found in a repository news item. Enjoy!

Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linux kernel and glibc, and subsequent discussions on our mailing list, as well as a vote by the Gentoo Council, Gentoo will discontinue all ia64 profiles and keywords. The primary reason for this decision is the inability of the Gentoo IA-64 team to support this architecture without kernel support, glibc support, and a functional development box (or even a well-established emulator). In addition, there have been only very few users interested in this type of hardware.

As also announced in a news item, in one month, i.e. in the first half of September 2024, all ia64 profiles will be removed, all ia64 keywords will be dropped from all packages, and all IA-64 related Gentoo bugs will be closed.