Over the last years, MIPS and Alpha support in Gentoo has been slowing down, mostly due to a lack of volunteers keeping these architectures alive. Not anymore however! We’re happy to announce that thanks to renewed volunteer interest both arches have returned to the forefront of Gentoo Linux development, with a consistent dependency tree checked and enforced by our continuous integration system. Up-to-date stage builds and the accompanying binary packages are available for both, in the case of MIPS for all three ABI variants o32, n32, and n64 and for both big and little endian, and in the case of Alpha also with a bootable installation CD.

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!