Why are there so many Qt5 packages still installed? Besides Qt6 packages

Tumbleweed, up-to-date. If I search for installed packages on my machine with “KF5” in the name, I get lots of them, all version number 5.116.0.

Another example: search for “baloo”: same result, baloo5-* packages and kf6-baloo* packages

Installed are kwayland, version 5.116 as well as kwayland6, version 6.1.0

Did I miss something? Why are there different versions of the same package?

Because not every application has been ported to Qt6 yet.

If an application has not been ported to Qt6, how do you explain coexisting versions of Qt5 and Qt6? Is it different on your machine?

What do you mean by this?
If a piece of software requires libraries from version 5, there will be libraries from version 5 in the system.
Don’t worry, the day they are no longer needed, they probably will be uninstalled.

Let’s have an example. On my machine are these two packages installed:

  • libKF5Baloo5
  • libKF6Baloo6

And there are many other examples.

I have deleted the Qt5 versions of Baloo, loged out and in again and voila, Baloo still runs, I can search the index.

So obviously the Qt5 versions are no longer needed, but nonetheless were kept installed.

Anybody experiencing the same?

It’s certainly nice to hear that you’ve tested for all possible cases of something that’s still based on Qt5 needing the Qt5/KF5 build of Baloo, and declaring it no longer needed.

You did that, right?

yesofcourse

According to zypper, nothing except baloo5-* requires it (any package baloo5-* or libKF5Baloo5 itself). So it appears to be pretty self-contained.

In my recently installed openSUSE Slowroll, the libKF5Baloo5 is not installed. But there are some libKF5*.
Have you upgraded from KDE Plasma 5?
Do you upgrade with zypper dist-upgrade?

Given that Plasma6 is relatively new, in general, I’m inclined to give a certain amount of trust to our KDE Maintainers, that they’ve got good reason to be leaving baloo5 there as a recommendation.

Yes! You may remember that the mega update to Plasma6 was delayed in TW for weeks.

Was this package labelled as automatically installed?

Not all packages have been ported from Qt5 to Qt6 yet. Therefore, there are still packages from Qt5 and Plasma5.

It is true that this is more than unfortunate, I have also repeatedly mentioned this here in the forum. Plasma 6 was mainly released because Qt5 is no longer being developed further. It has now taken ten years for the new development and yet a complete changeover has not been achieved.

I have partly deleted Plasma5 packages manually, as far as no dependency conflicts were shown to me. For me, the duplicate packages are annoying because my system partition is quite full.

I simply tried to delete (in Yast) libKF5 packages to find out which other packages depended upon them.

The nextcloud client needs Qt5 as well as digikam. Just for example. So it is not in the hands of the Plasma / KDE developers when Plasma5 will be history. There are lots of third party packages which still depend on Qt5.

Ok. The change will take years, but on the other hand I really find the nextcloud client useful, have been using it for years.

Yes, packages from the extra repository are not compiled against Qt6. But there are also enough packages from frameworks and applications that are still not compiled against Qt6. There are even Plasma6 packages that rely on Qt5 and therefore on Plasma5 packages.

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