It's coming soon to a GNU/Linux distribution near you

Dec 27, 2016 16:45 GMT  ·  By

As expected, KDE announced today the general and immediate availability of the fifth maintenance update to the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

KDE Plasma 5.8.5 is the fifth planned bugfix release of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS, and also the last for 2016. According to the changelog, which we've attached at the end of the article, this point release fixes a total of 57 issues reported by users since last month's KDE Plasma 5.8.4 maintenance update.

Among the components that received the most attention in KDE Plasma 5.8.5 LTS, we can mention Plasma Workspace, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Discover, and KScreen. Additionally, the Plasma add-ons, Breeze icon theme, KWin window manager, libkscreen, plasma-integration, and Plasma NetworkManager (plasma-nm) got small fixes.

"Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.8.5. Plasma 5.8 was released in October 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," said the devs.

KDE Plasma 5.9 development starts today

While KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS will receive four more such bugfix releases, the next one, namely KDE Plasma 5.8.6 LTS, being scheduled for a February 21 launch, the KDE developers will concentrate their efforts on the next major update, KDE Plasma 5.9, which is already open for development with a repo freeze set for December 29.

On January 12, 2017, we'll be able to test drive the Beta build of KDE Plasma 5.9, and it looks like the final release is coming on January 31. If you don't want to upgrade to KDE Plasma 5.9 in February, you should stay on the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS branch as it will receive support until April 2018.

KDE Plasma 5.8.5 Changelog