14 DAY TRIAL // After announcing earlier today, October 18, 2016, the release of the second maintenance update to the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, KDE published the release schedule for the upcoming major versions of the project.
That's right, we're talking here about KDE Plasma 5.9, whose development will start first thing next year, in 2017. The upcoming desktop environment will enter Feature Freeze stage on January 12, when we'll also be able to download the Beta pre-release and take it for a test drive on our favorite GNU/Linux operating systems.
The final release of KDE Plasma 5.9 is hitting the streets on January 31, 2017, and will be a normal branch with five maintenance updates. The first one, KDE Plasma 5.9.1 should land on February 7, followed one week later by KDE Plasma 5.9.2, on Valentine's_Day. Two weeks after that, on February 28, we shall be able to update to KDE Plasma 5.9.3.
Here's when KDE Plasma 5.10 and KDE Plasma 5.11 will be released
On March 21, 2017, the KDE Plasma 5.9.4 maintenance update lands with more bug fixes, and the last point release, KDE Plasma 5.9.5, comes one month later, on April 25, ending the release cycle of KDE Plasma 5.9. Then, development will start on the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment, which gets an official release date of May 30, 2017.
Just like KDE Plasma 5.9, the KDE Plasma 5.10 update will receive a total of five maintenance updates, namely KDE Plasma 5.10.1 on June 6, KDE Plasma 5.10.2 on June 13, KDE Plasma 5.10.3 on June 27, KDE Plasma 5.10.4 on July 18, and KDE Plasma 5.10.5 on August 22. After that, KDE Plasma 5.11 enters development, with the Beta landing on September 7.
The KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment will be officially unveiled on September 26, 2017, and the first point release, KDE Plasma 5.11.1, will land on October 3, followed a week later by KDE Plasma 5.11.2, on October 10. The KDE Plasma 5.11.3, KDE Plasma 5.11.4, and KDE Plasma 5.11.5 updates arrive October 24, November 14, and December 12, respectively.
But wait, there's more, as KDE developer Sebastian Kügler also revealed today the official launch dates for the next three KDE Plasma releases, namely KDE Plasma 5.12, which arrives December 2017, KDE Plasma 5.13 in April 2018, and the next LTS (Long Term Support) release, KDE Plasma 5.14, hitting the streets in August 2018.