What the Alpha means
The alpha release primarily focuses on preparing our software for a future release. It involves handling unreleased dependencies, version numbers, co-installation conflicts, and all the relevant bookkeeping work.
This release has been somewhat manic, with issues surfacing up to the last minute. However, that's precisely what this early release is for: resolving these issues now and gathering feedback on packaging to ensure a smoother transition to the beta phase.
Feature Freezes
The complete feature freeze for Plasma is scheduled for the day of the first beta, which is on November 29th. After that, bug fixing will be the sole focus for a period of three months leading up to the final release.
A soft freeze is set for the week before, on the 22nd, to accommodate any significant changes and ensure a seamless beta release.
This is mostly a case of doing a final round of landing straggling merge requests rather than developers starting anything new.
Should I run it?
Plasma 6 is in a pretty good state; I've been using it as a daily driver without issues for months
The alpha release does have known issues, some already fixed, but unreleased with the pending Qt 6.6.1, some our side fixed since alpha tagging, and some we need to follow up, particularly in the more esoteric areas of Plasma.
If you're the sort of user that wants to help out Plasma and are of a skill level where you're happy to log into another desktop session if things are temporarily down.
I would recommend as a user finding a distribution that covers 'git master' builds rather than any snapshot as it can provide a more dynamic list . A list can be found at https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Plasma_6#How_to_use/test_it
Pre-upgrade steps
Please take a backup of ~/.config/plasma* before upgrading. Just in case you need to file bug reports about config migration from 5.
Can I get involved?
Absolutely! It's an exciting time for Plasma and KDE in general. There are numerous tasks you can dive into. Check out our onboarding wiki here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved