KDE Plasma 5.27 Planning To Be The Last Plasma 5 Feature Release

With Qt 6 porting and KDE Frameworks 6 development continuing at full-speed, KDE developers are looking at Plasma 5.27 being the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series.

Prominent KDE developer Kai Uwe just published his recap from being at the KDE Akademy conference in Barcelona, Spain. During this year's annual KDE gathering, Qt 6 porting and KDE Frameworks 6 development was a popular topic.

KDE developers decided for a feature freeze on KDE Frameworks 5 at the end of December of this year and that KDE Plasma 5.27 will be "the final feature release in the Plasma 5 series."

KDE Plasma 5.26 is releasing next week while per the usual KDE Plasma release cadence, KDE Plasma 5.27 in turn should be out next February. So after that point the next feature release would be KDE Plasma 6.0, which we'll see if they manage to make it for their usual June summer release or if Plasma 6.0 will require extra time.

Plasma 5 has been around for eight years already while Plasma 5.27 is expected now to be the final feature release in the series.

A big step-up in next-gen Plasma work is that the remaining blockers for getting KWin to build against Qt 6 are expected to be resolved soon. The website iskdeusingqt6.org can be used for tracking what and how many KDE components can currently build against the Qt 6 toolkit.

More details on the Akademy 2022 happenings and the Qt6/KF5 attention via Kai's blog.