14 DAY TRIAL // The KDE Project is announcing today the release and immediate availability for download of the eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment.
In case you forgot, there's an LTS (Long-Term Support) version of the KDE desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.8, which will receive support until April 2018. Today's KDE Plasma 5.8.8 update is a bugfix release that attempts to fix about 24 issues across various core components of the desktop environment.
"Today KDE releases an LTS bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.8.8 LTS. Plasma 5.8 LTS was released in October with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience," reads today's announcement, from where you can also obtain the full changelog of this release.
Among the highlights of this release, we can mention a fix for a crash that occurred when using the Plasma Discover package manager to update apps, support for reading CPU clock from cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq instead of /proc/cpuinfo, as well as improvements to look and feel notifications.
KDE Plasma 5.8.9 LTS coming April 10, 2018
The last point release of the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment will be KDE Plasma 5.8.9 LTS, which is expected to land in six months from the moment of writing this story, on April 10, 2018, marking the end of life of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS. But, until then, you'll be able to upgrade to a newer LTS release, KDE Plasma 5.12.
KDE Plasma 5.12 is coming January 30, 2018, if you want to stay on the LTS branch and upgrade your KDE Plasma 5.8.8 LTS desktop environment to the new series. If not, you can wait until KDE Plasma 5.8.9 LTS is out, but remember that it's the last in the series, so you'll still need to upgrade to a more recent version.
In related news, the KDE project announced the other day the availability of the second point release to KDE Plasma 5.11, the currrent stable version of the desktop environment. So if you're using KDE Plasma 5.11 on your GNU/Linux distribution, you should update to version 5.11.2 as soon as possible.