14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the KDE Neon GNU/Linux distribution have announced the availability of an LTS (Long Term Support) flavor of the KDE Neon User Edition operating system.
As you might know, KDE Neon is usually distributed as User Edition and Developer Edition 64-bit Live ISO images. While the former is shipping with the latest stable KDE Plasma, Frameworks, and Applications releases, the latter is targeted at developers and bleeding-edge users who want to test drive the pre-release versions of these technologies.
But it looks like there's room for one more, a KDE Neon User Edition designed for those who want to have a rock-solid KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment experience. And this is where KDE Neon User LTS Edition fits in, based on KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS, which will receive maintenance updates for the next two years, until April 2018, and won't be rebased on a non-LTS version of the KDE Plasma desktop.
"KDE Plasma 5.8 is designated an LTS edition with bugfixes and new releases being made for 18 months (rather than the normal four months). This will please a category of user who don’t want new features on their desktop but do want it to keep working and bugs to be removed. Because Neon aims to service Plasma and its users in every way we have now created the KDE neon User LTS Edition," reads the announcement.
Ships with the latest stable KDE Plasma 5.8 releases, Mesa and Linux kernel
Some of you out there will say that there's no need for an LTS edition of KDE Neon, but the development team assures us that KDE Neon User LTS Edition will always ship with the latest stable releases of the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS, KDE Applications, KDE Frameworks, and Qt 5 technologies, as well as Ubuntu's HWE (Hardware Enablement Stack) updates for Mesa 3D Graphics Library and Linux kernel.
Of course, this means that KDE Neon User LTS Edition is and will be based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), for which Canonical provides five years of support, until April 2021. If you're interested in using KDE Neon User LTS Edition on your personal computer, you can download the Live ISO image right now from the distro's website, but upgrading from KDE Neon User Edition is currently unsupported, though it might work.