14 DAY TRIAL // Today, November 18, 2016, KDE announced the availability for public testing of the Beta build of the upcoming KDE Applications 16.12 software suite for KDE Plasma 5 desktop environments.
As reported last week, the KDE Applications 16.08 series reached end of life with the third and last maintenance update, versioned 16.08.3, which means that work begun on the next major branch, KDE Applications 16.12, which you can now take for a test drive using today's Beta release.
"The KDE Applications 16.12 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration," reads today's announcement.
KDE Applications 16.12 launches December 15 for KDE Plasma 5 users
The development cycle of the KDE Applications 16.12 software suite will continue with another snapshot, the RC (Release Candidate) version this time, which should be out on the first day of December. After that, the final release of KDE Applications 16.12 is hitting the streets two weeks later, on December 15, 2016.
As expected, KDE is counting on you to help them find bugs so they can squash them before the final release of KDE Applications 16.12 gets out. You have two choices to install the Beta of KDE Applications 16.12 on your GNU/Linux system, either by compiling the sources or install the binaries from your distro's repositories.
Technical details on that can be found on the announcement page (link above). KDE Applications 16.12 promises to offer a collection of modern and much-improved KDE apps for your KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment. It will have three maintenance updates until it reaches end of life on March 9, 2017, with the KDE Applications 16.12.3 release.