For KDE users often still running GNOME/GTK applications from the Plasma desktop, the experience is about to get a lot better with Plasma 5.18.

Sunday marked the release of KDE Frameworks 5.64 as the latest monthly update to this collection of libraries complementing Qt5.

It's been another busy week in KDE land with developers working through the massive code-bases comprising the KDE desktop environment on a variety of features and fixes.

For those wondering what KDE developers are up to at the start of November, KDE's Nate Graham has published his latest weekly blog post highlighting the new developments in the KDE space.

With Qt 6.0 planned for release in late 2020, KDE developers are thinking about the eventual KDE Frameworks 6.0 for when they plan to transition to the evolutionary Qt 6 tool-kit. The first of likely several developer sprints around KDE Frameworks 6 will be happening already in late November.

It was another busy month in KDE space as we approach the end of October.

KDE developers remain busy this autumn on addressing bugs in the recent KDE Plasma 5.17 release and tackling early feature work for Plasma 5.18. Plus work on KDE Frameworks 5 and KDE Applications is as busy as ever.

Following this week's release of KDE Plasma 5.17, a new release of the independent kwin-lowlatency code has been re-based against version 5.17.

Plasma 5.17.0 is out as the newest desktop feature release from the KDE project.

With KDE Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, it's been seeing a lot of last minute fixes while feature activity is also brewing around Plasma 5.18.

With The Qt Company working hard now on development around Qt 6, the KDE developers are beginning their early discussions over their path forward to adopting this next evolutionary tool-kit update.

The KDE Plasma Mobile team has begun publishing weekly reports on their development efforts for making KDE software more suitable for mobile devices as well as convergence and other efforts in common with KDE on the desktop.

Currently when resuming from systemd suspend or switching back to the KDE desktop from an alternate VT, it's possible with the NVIDIA proprietary driver to see screen corruption or leakage of previous screen contents to areas of the lock screen / desktop. This annoying issue is now being better addressed with Qt 5.14.

KDE developer Roman Gilg attended the X.Org Developer's Conference last week in Montreal. At XDC2019 he provided the X11/Wayland developers with an overview of KWin's architecture as both an X11 window manager and Wayland compositor along with talking of some of the future plans.

KDE developers spent the first week of October working on improvements to their Dolphin file manager, seemingly never-ending work on HiDPI support, and a variety of other enhancements for this leading open-source desktop.

With Plasma 5.17 releasing soon, developers have begun pushing changes targeted for Plasma 5.18. The KDE Plasma 5.18 release isn't set to arrive until next February but if any of the recent releases are an indication, it should be another exciting and solid release.

Following last week's Akademy 2019 developer conference in Milan, KDE developers this week not only released the Plasma 5.17 beta but they've been busy with a ton of other bug fixing and improvements.

The beta release is out today for KDE Plasma 5.17.

KDE's annual Akademy developer conference took place this past week in Milan, Italy. But even with that in-person event the development of the KDE desktop environment didn't let up in landing new improvements.

KDE Frameworks 5.62 is out today as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing the Qt5 tool-kit offerings.

During this week's KDE Akademy 2019 conference there was some planning discussions around improving the Kate text editor.

This summer KDE was looking for ideas on new goals to pursue along the likes of their successful Usability + Productivity initiative. In marking the start of their annual Akademy developer conference in Milan, the KDE developers announced their new set of goals to focus on for the next two years.

Landing Thursday within Mesa 19.3 Git but marked for back-porting to the stable 19.1 and 19.2 series is an Intel driver fix to address an issue with KDE's KWin sometimes crashing.

KDE had a busy final week to August.

As the end of the summer nears and KDE's Akademy conference approaches, development is busy as ever on this open-source desktop environment.

The KDE Usability and Productivity Initiative to solve various problems in the KDE software stack to make it easier to use to more individuals and to do so more efficient will be coming to an end. But other KDE goals are being envisioned and the usability and productivity elements will continue to be worked on outside of this initiative.

The KDE community has delivered the release of KDE Applications 19.08 as their newest feature updates to the core collection of KDE programs.

Out this Sunday is the KDE Frameworks 5.61 update that most notable addresses the recently exposed vulnerability to KDE where specially crafted .desktop and .directory files could automatically execute arbitrary code on users' systems.

It's been an exciting week in the KDE space.

Version 5.4 of KDE's KDevelop integrated development environment is now available.