14 DAY TRIAL // KDE today announced the release and immediate availability of the Beta of KDE Applications 16.04, the next-generation software suite for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
As you may know, KDE launched the final release of KDE Plasma 5.6 at the beginning of the week, so it's time for them to concentrate their efforts on pushing the KDE Applications 16.04 software suite to the stable channel as soon as possible, especially now that KDE Applications 15.12 reached end of life.
The first Beta of KDE Applications 16.04, which contains numerous KDE app ported to the KDE Frameworks 5 technology, has been tagged on March 23 and it is now ready for testing, as of today, March 24, 2016, which also marks the start of the Dependency and Feature Freeze stages.
"With the various applications being based on KDE Frameworks 5, the KDE Applications 16.04 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience," reads today's announcement. "Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration."
KDE Applications 16.04 will have three maintenance builds
So, if you have the time, and you have access to the KDE Applications 16.04 packages on your GNU/Linux operating system, go ahead and help the KDE developers fix bugs and further polish the software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment. While the final release of KDE Applications 16.04 launches on April 20, 2016, in two weeks we'll be able to test the Release Candidate (RC) build, on April 6.
KDE Applications 16.04 will have, as expected, three maintenance releases, KDE Applications 16.04.1 on May 10, KDE Applications 16.04.2 on June 15, and KDE Applications 16.04.3 on July 12. More details about what landed in today's KDE Applications 16.04 Beta release can be found in the community announcement.