14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 14, 2016, KDE has released the fifth and last maintenance update of the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment series.
KDE Plasma 5.6.5 is the last bugfix update that users of the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment will get, as the KDE developers will concentrate all of their efforts on the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.7. Therefore, you are urged to update as soon as the packages land in the main repos of your distro.
Looking at the release notes, which are a recommended reading for those who want to know what exactly has been changed, it appears that KDE Plasma 5.6.5 attempts to address several bugs that have been reported by users since last month's KDE Plasma 5.6.4 maintenance update.
The most important components that have received improvements in this last update for KDE Plasma 5.6 are Plasma Workspace, Plasma NetworkManager (plasma-nm), Milou, KWin, Plasma Addons, Plasma Discover, plasma-integration, kde-cli-tools, and, of course, Plasma Desktop.
KDE Plasma 5.7 Beta available for public testing on June 16
Work on KDE Plasma 5.6 is over, but that does not mean that the KDE developers will stop offering users the latest KDE innovations, therefore, in only two days from today, they will release the Beta of KDE Plasma 5.7 for public testing.
Also, on June 20, they are urging everyone in the GNU/Linux community to participate in the "Beta testing day" for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.7 major release, which should hit the streets in approximately three weeks, on July 5, 2016.
In the meantime, please monitor the repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system and update to the KDE Plasma 5.6.5 release, as well as the KDE Applications 16.04.2 as soon as possible. Stay tuned for more KDE news later this week!