KDE developer Nate Graham revealed the release date in a blog post giving a top-level overview of Plasma 6 development to date, writing:
“We’ve decided that Plasma 6 will be released in early February of 2024. We don’t have a specific day targeted yet, but it’ll be in that timeframe.”
KDE’s Nate Graham
Graham says he feels ‘confident that the release will be in excellent shape by then’, and adds that another 5 months of development will offer ‘enough of a runway for a solid final release’.
Exciting stuff.
Development on KDE Plasma 6 kicked off (heh) earlier this year. The desktop side is now built using Qt 6 technologies. This unlock support for new features, capabilities (including enhancements to ‘convergence’ implementations), and further future-proofing.
Earlier this KDE developers met up in Berlin, Germany to work on the next-generation of the KDE Plasma desktop. A number of interesting details came out of that sprint, including a decision to adopt a slower release cadence.
Sadly a release date wasn’t part of that info dump, so it’s great to finally have one. Something to jot down in our calendars to be able to look forward to.
I have written a bit about KDE Plasma 6 new features, like using double-click by default (and tap-to-click by default too), redesigning the task switcher; and adding accent color tinting to the header bar area of app windows.
But with a further 5 months of development to come, chances are we’ll get more goodies to gush over as the newly-announced release window gets closer.
Not that you need to wait until February 2024 to try KDE Plasma 6.
Beta builds of the next-gen release are going be made available soon (though exactly when is TBC), and those not averse to riding the bleeding edge can try KDE Plasma 6 in KDE neon Unstable Edition.
