14 DAY TRIAL // Being a short-lived branch, the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment has reached end of life at the end of August 2017 with the release of the fifth and last maintenance update, versioned 5.10.5.
KDE Plasma 5.10.5 was published last month and includes a total of 40 changes across multiple core components, such as the Plasma Discover graphical package manager, KWin window and composite manager, as well as Plasma Desktop, Plasma Workspace, Plasma Addons, the Plymouth KControl Module, and the KDE hotkeys.
Highlights of this release include a fix for an important Plasma crash that occurred when the user grouped some taskbar apps in a certain way, the ability for Discover to handle URL links for packages, exclusion of OSD windows from the desktop grid effect for KWin, and use of HTTPS protocol for KNS providers.
"Plasma 5.10 was released in August with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience. This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important," reads the release announcement.
KDE Plasma 5.11 to enter Beta on September 14, launches October 10, 2017
The full changelog with all the improvements implemented in the KDE Plasma 5.10.5 release can be found here or attached below. In the meanwhile, work on the next major release, KDE Plasma 5.11, is ongoing, and it should enter the Feature Freeze and Beta stages of development on September 14, 2017.
KDE Plasma 5.11 will have a strong dependency on the forthcoming KDE Frameworks 5.38.0, due for release at the end of this week. The final release of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment is expected on October 10, 2017. The branch will also have a short-term release cycle that includes a total of five maintenance updates.
We'll have more details about the release cycle of KDE Plasma 5.11 once the Beta is out next week. Until then, we recommend all KDE Plasma 5 users to update their installations to the latest 5.10.5 release as soon as possible. The KDE Plasma 5.10.5 packages should already be available in the repos of various popular Linux distros.