If you are using a stable V4 release, and do not have a mission critical project in the works, then I suggest you grab a recent nightly of V5RC3. You will probably have a better transition experience if you read up a little bit on the forum about Environment Variables; this is not clearly going to be “fixed” at the release of V5 (as known at this time).
Many forum users have left the V4 stable for quite some time now, and have not had major issues. In fact, I personally have had far fewer issues with the nightlies than I have had with the “stable” V4 releases; disclaimer: there have been a small number of some specific nightlies where there were obvious problems that were fixed right quickly after.
If one has a solid version control system in place it remains my opinion that is best for most KiCad users (without a mission critical V4 project in the works) to migrate to V5 with the one of the current RC3 nightly builds.
I have been running Debian Testing (Buster) for a spell now just to “test drive” RC2 and RC3.
I too have had good luck with them. This evening opted to move back to Stable while I await the official v5 release.
Being an Eagle CAD user (soon to be KiCAD user), I have been keeping an eye on this since January. I can’t wait to convert my 100 or projects to v5.
Strange. Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your time zone) Wayne wrote something about 20th of july.
Would really have been nice to have some warning time to be honest.
I am curious though - being a Debian user of both Stable and Testing, I wonder if v5 will make it to the Stable branch. Might anyone know that? I suppose I should ask the folks that actually packaged it for Sid/Testing to be certain but if someone here knows, would appreciate knowing.
Tagging something is a term from git. It means giving a specific commit a “name”. For kicad this means that this particular commit will be the source for the v5.0.0 release. The official release will come once the packagers and documentation guys finished their work. (Or in one week whatever comes first.)
Tagged is a Git nomenclature that the specific code will be used to the official release. Because the KiCad development never stop and new changes (present in the nightly) can be unstable and can’t in the 5.0 stable release, also in this moment no new features or big changes will be made on 5.0, only in the nightly (that we expect to be present at v6.0).
Today I saw some movimentation on https://bugs.launchpad.net/kicad closing old bug already fixed but that still opened. As @Rene_Poschl said, just missing some documentations, I think.
If you search GitHub, Master seems to have frozen, but there is also a 5.1 branch, which is moving ahead. as you would expect.
What is not clear is what Windows Nightly 16th July is.
A pity as a 5.1 preview is more immediately useful for near term fixes and improvements.
I would even suggest that V6 should drop 32 bit support. It would be interesting to know the ratio of 32 to 64 bit downloads now, but by the time V6 comes out Windows XP and Intel 32 bit Atoms will be a fading memory.
Till friday 12:00 CEST everything should be tagged. Then the packagers start their work. The packager will then need a few days to get everything ready. (Some of their task require quite some computation power/time)
More details see: https://lists.launchpad.net/kicad-developers/msg36623.html
My advice right now is to just wait patiently. Nightly builds are not leading to 5.0.0 anymore, so the often repeated advice of using them is outdated. Packages and installers are ready when they are ready, there are no clear promises or estimates. But it shouldn’t be matter of weeks anymore, hopefully only days.
There are some issues with configuration files and environment variables, and from what I have heard V4 and V5 do not live happily next to each other.
As an alternative I have a dual boot system. Linux Mint 17 with KiCad 4.0.7 and Debian Buster with KiCad V5.
Both distributions share the same /home partition, so finding files is not such an issue for me.
A few days ago I did an sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, and the KiCad version it installed on Buster is:
Application: kicad
Version: 5.0.0-rc3+dfsg1-2, release build
Libraries:
wxWidgets 3.0.4
libcurl/7.60.0 OpenSSL/1.1.0h zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.4 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.4) libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.32.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 4.16.0-2-amd64 x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 2.24
Boost: 1.62.0
OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
Curl: 7.60.0
Compiler: GCC 7.3.0 with C++ ABI 1011