KDE Plasma 5.11 normal release coming September 21, 2017

Jun 7, 2017 16:22 GMT  ·  By

KDE developer and KDE Neon maintainer Jonathan Riddell is today announcing that the next LTS (Long Term Support) series of the KDE Plasma desktop environment will be version 5.12, due for release in January 2018.

A meeting was held recently by the KDE Plasma development team to decide what version of the desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions will become LTS to replace the current long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 series, which should reach end of life on April 10, 2018, with the KDE Plasma 5.9.8 LTS release.

"The Plasma team had a mammoth 2.5 hour meeting to discuss some of the aspects of the Plasma releases going forward. Much of the debate was around when to do an LTS release and we’ve gone with Plasma 5.12 due in January," reveals Jonathan Riddell in his latest blog announcement.

The decision was mostly made because of the OpenSuSE Project, which needs to deploy an LTS version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment for their next major release of the openSUSE Leap operating system, which will probably arrive later this year based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15.

KDE Plasma 5.12 to be supported for at least 2 years

Therefore, the plan right now is to continue to develop the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, which is hitting the streets after the summer break, on September 21, 2017, and then prepare for the next LTS release that will replace existing KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS installations.

KDE Plasma 5.12 LTS will most likely require the recently released Qt 5.9 open-source and cross-platform application framework and should be supported for at least 2 years, until 2020. Maintenance updates will be provided following the same Fibonacci schedule as KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS series.

Unfortunately, there is some bad news for Wayland users, as KDE Plasma 5.12 won't ship with new Plasma Workspace features for the next-gen display server. "We also banned new features which might affect the Wayland port unless they’re already functional in Wayland," says Riddell.

Until then, users can enjoy the new KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment on their GNU/Linux operating systems, which already received its first point release the other day. KDE Plasma 5.10 is a short-lived branch, supported until August 22, 2017, but it comes with numerous exciting new features.