14 DAY TRIAL // Today, September 15, 2016, KDE developer and ex-Kubuntu maintainer Jonathan Riddell has had the great pleasure of announcing the release of the Beta preview of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment.
Now that KDE Plasma 5.7 series reached end of life two days ago with the release of the fifth maintenance update, KDE Plasma 5.7.5, it is time for us to look further to the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.8, which not only will be supported for two years as the first LTS (Long Term Support) Plasma desktop but will also offer a comprehensive list of new features and improvements.
"Today KDE releases a Beta of its first Long Term Support edition of its flagship desktop software, Plasma," says Jonathan Riddell in today's announcement. "This marks the point where the developers and designers are happy to recommend Plasma for the widest possible audience be they enterprise or non-techy home users. If you tried a KDE desktop previously and have moved away, now is the time to re-assess."
Here's what's coming to KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS this fall
As mentioned before, there will be numerous new features in KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS, but the biggest ones worth mentioning here are a universal search functionality to find your stuff, a unified look to run apps written in Qt4, Qt5, GTK2, or GTK3, support for getting notifications from your smartphone, Right-to-Left (RTL) language support, improved applets, simplified global shortcuts, and better Wayland support.
KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS launches officially on October 4, 2016, but if you can't wait until then, now it's time to get an early taste and try the Beta milestone, which is currently available in both KDE Neon and KaOS Live distributions. KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will have a total of nine maintenance releases, until April 2018 when it reaches end of life and the next major version is taking its place, KDE Plasma 5.9?
