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Good news today for fans of the KDE Plasma desktop environment as I just found out that the next major release, Plasma 5.24, will be an LTS (Long-Term Support) series maintained for about 18 months.
KDE Plasma 5.24 (currently in public beta testing) is set to be the next LTS release of the acclaimed and widely used desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, replacing the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS series, which reached end of life in October 2021.
Set to arrive on February 8th, 2022, two years after the release of Plasma 5.18 LTS, the Plasma 5.24 LTS series promises cool new features like support for fingerprint readers to unlock the screen or authenticate in apps that require administration password or with sudo on the command-line.
It also promises a brand-new Overview effect that lets you control your virtual workspaces and find search results from KRunner, all in one place, more Plasma Wayland improvements, a much-improved Breeze theme, a more modern design for the “Plasma Pass” password manager, better support for NVIDIA GPUs, and much more.
According to the KDE Project, Plasma 5.24 LTS will receive maintenance updates made until they kick off the development of the KDE Plasma 6 series, when a new and final Plasma 5.x release will be marked as LTS.
Again, this comes as amazing news for both users and distro maintainers who want to use a long-term supported KDE Plasma desktop environment on their systems. For example, the upcoming Kubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and openSUSE Leap 15.4 distributions will ship with Plasma 5.24 LTS.
As an LTS release, KDE Plasma 5.24 will be supported with maintenance updates that provide bug fixes and important changes until October 2023. As for KDE Plasma 6, I personally can’t wait to see what the KDE developers have in store for us in the coming months.
Last updated 2 years ago
