Hi Tim, I have recently updated (3 days ago) my Debian testing Plasma 4.14.2 to Plasma 5 successfully, but it was not trivial.
First, I tried to do the Plasma 5 upgrade by migrating from stable to testing and performing the typicall apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade. However, such operations intends to uninstall packages such as "task-kde-desktop", "kwin", "kde-standard" and so on. I accepted and obviously the DE brokes after the reboot. I tried to perform the upgrade by other similar ways (using aptitude instead of apt, etc) and always brokes. So finally I decided to perform a fresh install of Debian 8.2 WITHOUT any desktop environment, then install the KDE Desktop through the command line and it works perfectly! The steps I followed were: 1. Fresh install of Debian 8.2 (stable) WITHOUT Desktop Environment 2. Change "stable" to "testing" and apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade, since you cannot update more your system. Kernel 4.2.0 is installed at this step. 3. Follow the instructions of https://wiki.debian.org/KDE to install KDE desktop 3.1. apt-get install aptitude tasksel (They are already installed but ensure it) 3.2. aptitude install ~t^desktop$ ~t^kde-desktop$ And it works perfectly! Now, Plasma 5 is a little bit "fragile" (I cannot say "unstable" because it is not true, but it is a little bit fragile). Hope it helps! Regards. Javier.