KDE Plasma Looking At Global Menu, Wayland & Mobile For 2017

KDE Plasma developers talked this week about their plans for the new development cycle and what they want the desktop to look like moving into 2017 and further ahead into 2018.

Longtime KDE developer Sebastian Kügler has shared his notes from the Plasma planning session. Here are some highlights:

- They are looking at moving from four releases per year to three. The three releases in 2017 would be KDE Plasma 5.9 in January, Plasma 5.10 in May, and Plasma 5.11 in September. Plasma 5.12 might make it out though in December while Plasma 5.13 would be in April and Plasma 5.14 as an LTS release in August of 2018.

- More Breeze icon theme improvements planned, including a Breeze-themed Firefox.

- Support for a global menu similar to macOS is planned and bringing this feature back from its well-supported state in Plasma 4. This might come as soon as Plasma 5.9.

- Locale improvements are planned for a future Plasma release.

- The next few Plasma releases will continue offering improvements for Wayland. Some of the outstanding KDE Plasma Wayland work still is better multi-screen support, support for scaling on a per-output basis, virtual desktops, and better Wayland testing.

- Plasma Mobile is still in development and should further mature over the next two years along with its Kirigami framework.

- Improvements for online services.

More details via this blog post.