KDE Plasma 6.0, the next major release of the phenomenally popular open-source desktop environment, is under rapid development.
But one question has persisted: when will it be released?
Last month KDE devs shared a tentative target of February 2024, a window within which the first formal release of KDE Plasma 6.0 would emerge.
Now they’ve gone one better.
An official release schedule has been unveiled and it pins down the precise release date for KDE Plasma 6.0 – plus many of the related technology stacks paired with it.
In fact, there are so many package releases happening at the same time that devs are dubbing this the MEGA RELEASE (so please apply a suitably epic vocal sound effect when reading that name aloud in your head).
Key dates in the KDE Plasma 6 release schedule:
- 8 November, 2023 — Alpha
- 29 November, 2023 — Beta 1
- 20 December, 2023 — Beta 2
- 10 January, 2024 — Release Candidate 1
- 31 January, 2024 — Release Candidate 2
Btw, all of these dates include KDE Gear and KDE Framework snapshots alongside KDE Plasma.
Things get officially official during the private tarball release taking place on 21 February 2024, which is followed a week later by the main event, the real-deal, the epic emergence, the first stable release:
- 28 February, 2024 – KDE Plasma 6.0 Release
Of course, I should stress that last-minute bugs, unexpected issues, or imploding infrastructure, etc could intervene at any juncture and push these dates out — so don’t take them as sacrosanct deadlines.
But all being well… 🤗
KDE Plasma 6.0 Features
KDE Plasma 6.0 will default to Wayland, apply accent colour tints to app header bars, adopt a floating desktop panel design, make double-click default behaviour (along with tap-to-click), ship a redesigned task switcher, support custom result ordering in KRunner — and plenty more!
Will Kubuntu 24.04 use KDE Plasma 6.0?
No; Kubuntu 24.04 is likely to ship with KDE Plasma 5.27 and use X11.
The reasons for this are stability and timing.
The late February release date for KDE Plasma 6.0 doesn’t allow much time for testing by Kubuntu devs, while the relevant packages/technologies also need to filter into Debian first.
