Our upcoming release, Plasma 5.8 will be the first long-term supported (LTS) release of the Plasma 5 series. One great thing of this release is that it aligns support time-frames across the whole stack from the desktop through Qt and underlying operating systems. This makes Plasma 5.8 very attractive for users need to that rely on the stability of their computers.

Qt, Frameworks & Plasma

In the middle layer of the software stack, i.e. Qt, KDE Frameworks and Plasma, the support time-frames and conditions roughly look like this:

Qt 5.6

Qt 5.6 has been released in March as the first LTS release in the Qt 5 series. It comes with a 3-year long-term support guarantee, meaning it will receive patch releases providing bug fixes and security updates.

Frameworks 5.26

In tune with Plasma, during the recent Akademy we have decided to make KDE Frameworks, the libraries that underlie Plasma and many KDE applications 18 months of security support and fixes for major bugs, for example crashes. These updates will be shipped as needed for single frameworks and also appear as tags in the git repositories.

Plasma 5.8

The core of our long-term support promise is that Plasma 5.8 will receive at least 18 months of bugfix and security support from upstream KDE. Patch releases with bugfix, security and translation updates will be shipped in fibonacci rhythm.

To make this LTS extra reliable, we’ve concentrated the (still ongoing) development cycle for Plasma 5.8 on stability, bugfixes, performance improvements and overall polish. We want this to shine.

There’s one caveat, however: Wayland support excluded from long-term-support promises, as it is too experimental. X11 as display server is fully supported, of course.

Neon and Distros

You can enjoy these LTS releases from the source through a Neon flavor that ships an updated LTS stack based on Ubuntu’s 16.04 LTS version. openSuse Leap, which focuses on stability and continuity also ships Plasma 5.8, making it a perfect match.

The Plasma team encourages other distros to do the same.

Post LTS

After the 5.8 release, and during its support cycle, KDE will continue to release feature updates for Plasma which are supported through the next development cycle as usual.

Lars Knoll’s Qt roadmap talk (skip to 29:25 if you’re impatient and want to miss an otherwise exciting talk) proposes another Qt LTS release around 2018, which may serve as a base for future planning in the same direction.

It definitely makes a lot of sense to align support time-frames for releases vertically across the stack. This makes support for distributions considerably easier, creates a clearer base for planning for users (both private and institutional) and effectively leads to less headaches in daily life.