The release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 Beta 2 today added several new minor versions including KDE’s first Long Term Support version for Plasma.

The highly anticipated release of Plasma 5.8 LTS will be the default desktop for openSUSE Leap 42.2 and its beta (5.7.95), which was just released last week, is in openSUSE’s newest beta release.

“The quality of the distribution at this point looks quite good,” said Ludwig Nussel, Leap’s release manager. “Since Plasma 5.8 is still a beta version, it deserves more attention and thorough testing. We can help upstream to release a good 5.8.0 and get a decent quality default desktop in return.”

KDE and openSUSE slightly adjusted release schedules to be able to include Plasma 5.8 in the release of openSUSE Leap 42.2 because Plasma 5.8 is an LTS and complement one another as well as appeal to conservative adapters.

The new Plasma Beta is only in English because of its beta status. Translations for 5.8 and several openSUSE specific components and infrastructure are needed before the final releases.

“If you want to help with your language, feel free to join the mailing list or contact your localization team,” Nussel said.

People who want to help with translations can help translate easily through Weblate, which manages translations in a git repository a respective project. All translated strings are tracked and stored. All people have to do it create an account and start translating in their browser if they would like to contribute to translations for Leap.

Other packages that had version upgrade in openSUSE’s latest beta are KDE Applications to version 16.08.0, Frameworks to version 5.26.0, GStreamer to version 1.8.3, gtk2 to 2.24.31, gtk3 to 3.20.9, json-glib to 1.2.2, Wireshark to 2.2.0 and Xen to version 4.7.0_12.

Testers of the Beta are encourage to submit bugs they find on openSUSE Bugzilla.

The release of the Beta 2 was delayed by one day, but the road map for the release of Leap 42.2 is still scheduled for Nov. 16, which is one week after SUSECon. The next beta, Beta 3, is scheduled for Oct. 6 and the submission deadline for it is Sept. 29. The Release Candidate is scheduled for Oct. 18.

Leap is a community-enterprise distribution that focuses on stability. Leap has hundreds of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) Service Pack (SP) 2 packages and the thousands of community-built packages. The distribution gives developers and organizations an ability to bridge to the faster release cycles of openSUSE Tumbleweed or to a more Long Term Support enterprise solution with SLE.

Media who are interested in more information should contact Douglas DeMaio at ddemaio@suse.de.