Ubuntu is a distribution that was born with a few small repositories but that contained the essentials and little by little they have grown to the point of creating official flavors that specialized in a certain installed or pre-installed software.
However, Ubuntu every six months updates make them exist auxiliary repositories that install the latest versions of the main packages. Many of these repositories are called backports, repositories that update a certain application, desktop, or meta-package.
Kubuntu backports allow you to have the latest version of Plasma
KDE is one of the desktops that is usually updated quite regularly and its community, the Kubuntu community, created backports repositories to incorporate those updates to our distribution. This repository not only provides our Kubuntu with the latest security patches but also provides us with the latest Plasma versions.
Even so, it must be remembered that these repositories belong to the Kubuntu Community, not to the official Ubuntu team, so there may be a problem with the software of these backports. We are going that Ubuntu does not certify the security of the system if we enable these repositories. But if we really want to keep Kubuntu up to date, enabling these repositories is a first step.
To enable Kubuntu backports we open Konsole or a terminal and write:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
These repositories can be enabled on both Kubuntu and Ubuntu, so if we want to install the latest Kubuntu software, we can choose this way of installation and update.
In case of having a problem with this repository or with the software provided by this repository, it is indicated to delete the repository, either graphically or through the following command in a terminal:
sudo ppa-purge ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports
Many claim that the inclusion of these backports repositories is a necessary action to have our Kubuntu distribution optimized, But What do you think?
3 comments, leave yours
Thank you very much, I am going to use it to install plasma 5.10
I have installed the repository in Mint 18.1 KDE x64 and it does not update; to date it stays in 5.8.6 and does not go to 5.10 it tells me that there is nothing to update so I put it: sudo apt dist-upgrade
It has been a long time since the question, but in case anyone else is curious, Linux Mint version 18.x is based on Ubuntu 16.04 and only have kde 5.8 updates via backports at the moment to upload you would have to install the kde repository neon which is based on ubuntu https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=249871#p1345918