This past week KDE Plasma 5.18 reached beta for this next long-term support release of the modern KDE desktop. While it's approaching the finish line next month, developers have not let up on more improvements in making this one of their best and most polished releases ever.

Out this morning is the first beta of KDE Plasma 5.18, which is also the project's first long-term support (LTS) release since Plasma 5.12.

KDE developers fixed a number of Wayland and KWin bugs this week along with a number of other annoying bugs as well as making several other noteworthy refinements to the growing KDE ecosystem.

While New Year's festivities lightened the development activity this past week, KDE developers still managed to accomplish a fair amount this first week of January.

With last month's release of KDE's Kate 19.12 text editor there was an initial plug-in for Language Server Protocol (LSP) support to better allow language-agnostic support for code syntax highlighting and other features. There were some issues in that initial implementation but with Kate 19.12.1 and beyond will be better support.

KDE developer Nate Graham who is well known for his weekly development summaries in the KDE space has shared his opinions on the desktop's features he expects to see materialize this year as well as some of the less likely bits.

For those still having fond memories for the KDE 3 desktop days as we roll into 2020, the Trinity Desktop Environment as a fork of K Desktop Environment 3.5 is still pushing along with maintaining these aging open-source software packages.

While open-source software development activity was light this week due to the Christmas holiday, some new features still landed this week for KDE.

Back in November was the first of several KDE Frameworks 6 developer sprints as plans begin to formulate for this evolutionary frameworks upgrade due out not until well after the Qt 6.0 tool-kit release. While Qt6 itself is still in flux, KDE Frameworks 6 efforts continue moving along by focusing on porting code away from deprecated KF5 functionality.

The digiKam photo management software is closing in on its v7.0 release and over the weekend issued their first beta.

Most KDE users are probably happy with the current state of the Plasma desktop and the state of the KDE applications. There's certainly less bugs in recent releases, KWin and the overall desktop is in better standing (though still improvements to be made such as showcased by the likes of KWin low-latency) with reliable Wayland support, and most would probably agree that the work out of this open-source project matured rather well in recent years with their focus on enhancing usability and other areas.

KDE developers haven't let up ahead of the holidays in their relentless work for improving the KDE desktop and contained applications.

Soft-announced earlier this week was the Kubuntu Focus as a high-end Linux laptop pre-loaded with the KDE flavor of Ubuntu. The Kubuntu Focus produced in cooperation with Mindshare Management, Kubuntu itself, and German manufacturer Tuxedo Computers will officially launch in January and begin shipping shortly thereafter while a review sample arrived in our lab today.

A Kubuntu laptop is launching soon that is aiming for a high-end Linux laptop experience atop the KDE flavor of Ubuntu.

KDE developers are working on "something big" but this week in pre-holiday mode still managed to land a lot of improvements to the wide spectrum of KDE software.

KDE Frameworks 5.65 is out this Saturday as the last monthly update to this collection of Qt5 add-on libraries for 2019.

KDE Applications 19.12 is out today as the collection of 120+ KDE applications tailored around the Plasma desktop and largely built using Qt and KDE Frameworks.

KDE Plasma is gearing up for 2020 by introducing a built-in emoji picker... Coming with Plasma 5.18 is easier support for inserting Unicode emojis.

There is an exciting improvement to the GTK client side decoration handling ahead of the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS release due out in February.

It was a busy week in the KDE space.

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.