Hi everyone,
with the holiday season coming up, I'd like to propose a schedule for
Plasma 6.7 before that.
Plasma 6.7 might be a bit special, as it's the last version with X11
support [3], and there was the question raised, if some extra bug-fix
releases should be scheduled for 6.7, i.e. making 6.7 the first LTS
release for Plasmas 6.X series?
This could be a possible schedule with 2 additional bugfix releases:
6.6.80 2026-04-23 (repo and soft feature freeze)
6.6.90 Beta 1 2026-05-07
6.6.91 Beta 2 2026-05-21
6.7.0 TAR 2026-06-04
6.7.0 Release 2026-06-09
6.7.1 2026-06-16
6.7.2 2026-06-23
6.7.3 2026-07-07
6.7.4 2026-07-28
6.7.5 2026-09-01
6.7.6 2026-10-27
6.7.7 2027-01-26
6.7.8 2027-06-22
Things to note:
- The schedule is based on the 3-releases-a-year model, thus I aimed for
6.7.0 to be about 4 months after 6.6.0 (scheduled for 2026-02-17).
It's also based on the release of the "best matching" frameworks
release, which influences the date of Beta 1 (i.e. Beta 1 "will usually
happen on Thursday following the corresponding KDE Frameworks release"
[1] ), which could in turn make 6.7 depend on FW 6.26. Those two kind of
influence each other.
- Required Qt version could remain at Qt 6.10, or could probably use Qt
6.11 which is currently scheduled to be released in March 2026[2].
- I have not taken into consideration any release schedules of distributions
- The Blog post "Goig all-in on a Wayland future" [3] says "The Plasma
X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027", which kind of
implies at least one extra release (6.7.7). I've added another one
(6.7.8) by Fibonacci-sequence (i.e. 21 weeks after 6.7.7) in my
proposal, but this is just for showing the date. I'm not aware of any
formal decision how many extra bug-fix releases will be made, so this is
up for discussion if it should be reduced to less or extended to even
more bug-fix releases. Also, it might be worth discussing if it's good
to put an official "LTS" label on it, or to give an assurance like for
Plasma 5.27 ("In case of urgent bugfixes or security issues, another
release might be made")[4].
Let me know your thoughts on this, I'm happy to adjust the schedule or
(if no objections come) to put it on the wiki and the phabricator calendar.
Best regards
Martin
[1] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6#Beta
[2] https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing
[3] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/
[4] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5#Future_releases
