Linux

Depending on how desperate you are, and if you are willing to delve into the dark arts, there are ways to get new KDE on stable distros. It's probably way more effort than it's worth, however, and I wouldn't really recommend them to most users, due to the steep learning curve and various limitations. However, if I were to ever build a Linux distro, then I might consider them, as a way to mix and match older and newer packages.

I will also preface that KDE Plasma is one the more unreliable and prone to breakages part of my Linux system (Arch). People like to joke about krashes, but it's kinda true. The bottom bar likes to crash sometimes, and I then I have to run systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell (the fact that I have that memorized scares me). KDE never really stops working overall, but various papercuts appear which I find workarounds for. Gnome is better though, and is much more reliable, IF you aren't using extensions that aren't officially supported, which often break on major Gnome updates. It's probably because of that that Arch Linux sat on the Gnome update for a bit, to wait for the extensions to update and become compatible, whereas Fedora just said YOLO and pulled the trigger lmao. However, Gnome's harder dependency on systemd might make it tough to drag a newer version onto another distro using the methods mentioned below.

The 3 ways I can think of (in order of how much I prefer them):

1. The Nix package manager can install recent packages from Nixos's rolling release or more up to date stable distro on other distros.

Nixos is both a distro and a package manager, and their repos include things like desktop environments, that wouldn't normally be included in solutions like brew. In fact [Hyprland's wiki has a guide on using Nix to install Hyperland on non Nixos distros](https://wiki.hypr.land/Nix/Hyprland-on-other-distros/. This will not work for KDE however. By default, Nix packages on other distros don't have GPU hardware acceleration, which is kinda needed for a DE. You would have to wrap these packages via Nixgl. The best way is to use home manager and use that to wrap the packages.

Wait, it looks like the docs have been updated: https://home-manager.dev/manual/unstable/usage/gpu-non-nixos.html#sec-usage-gpu-non-nixos . If you are using home manager, it looks like GPU wrapping is automatically enabled if you set targets.genericLinux.enable to true, although this requires root.

Then you would have to do some stuff to setup the login manager so that it can detect the Nix/home-manger version of KDE.

2. Bedrock Linux let's you install multiple Linux distros at once, next to eachother, mixing and matching packages and utilities.

With bedrock, you could use a Debian base system, using the Debian bootloader, kernel, and systemd, but you could be getting your DE components from Arch. Unfortunately, it doesn't support many things or distros (see pre installation checks), and some of the things like grub + btrfs would suck to lose.

3. Distroxbox can run an entire desktop environment from within another docker container.

The main limitations with this setup, is that you are now inside the container by default. If you execute bash, or a terminal, or whatever, it's actually the container's version, and not the hosts. You can configure it to automatically find and execute the host's version of the program if it's not found in the container. But, I would prefer just cherrypicking the DE from another distro, in order to use only that component, which is why this one is third and my least favored. But it does technically work.