14 DAY TRIAL // Today, April 19, 2016, KDE has announced the immediate availability of the third maintenance release in the stable KDE Plasma 5.6 series of the popular desktop environment used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems by default.
According to the release notes, KDE Plasma 5.6.3 appears to be yet another small point release in the development cycle of KDE Plasma 5.6. It attempts to fix various bugs and annoyances that have been reported by users since the second KDE Plasma 5.6 update, which was announced only two weeks ago, thus improving the overall stability and reliability.
Among the changes, we can notice a patch for a critical KWin crash that occurred when trying to repaint an invalid sizes decoration, which also appears to be the first-ever KWin bugfix that is combined with an X11 integration test. There's a fix for an issue with the hover effect in the pager on the desktop, as well as support for using the installation information for infering popularity.
"Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.6.3. Plasma 5.6 was released in March with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience," reads today's announcement. "This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors."
KDE Plasma 5.6 will receive two more maintenance releases
Now that the third stable update of KDE Plasma 5.6 is out, only two more point releases will be made available to users in the next couple of months. The next one, KDE Plasma 5.6.4, is currently scheduled to launch next month, on May 10, 2016, and it will be followed several weeks later, on June 14, by the last maintenance version, KDE Plasma 5.6.5.
After that, the KDE developers will concentrate all of their efforts on the next major release of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.7, which will enter Beta testing only two days after the debut of the last KDE Plasma 5.6 update. Then, the final version of KDE Plasma 5.7 will hit the streets on July 5, 2016. Until then, we recommend updating your KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop to today's 5.6.3 release as soon as the new packages arrive in the main repos of your GNU/Linux distribution.