With more projects ported to Qt 6, and development of KDE Frameworks 6 well underway, the KDE developers plan to make KDE Plasma 5.27 the last feature release in the Plasma 5 series.

Kai Uwe, the developer of KDE, recently stated in his personal blog that they decided to freeze the functions of KDE Frameworks 5 at the end of December this year, and KDE Plasma 5.27 will be the final functional version of the Plasma 5 series.

According to KDE Plasma’s current release cycle, KDE Plasma 5.26 will be released next week, and KDE Plasma 5.27 will be released in February next year. After that, the next functional version will be KDE Plasma 6.0. Under normal circumstances, the 6.0 version will be released in June next year, but as the next major version update, 6.0 is not known whether it will require more development time and cause a delay.

Released in July 2014, KDE Plasma 5 has been in development for more than 8 years. KDE Plasma 5 is also the fifth-generation desktop environment created by KDE for Linux systems. KDE Plasma 5 is built with Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

When KDE Plasma 5 was released, it included a new Breeze default theme, the graphical interface was completely migrated to QML, and OpenGL was used for hardware acceleration. came better performance and lower power consumption.

Currently 282 of the 588 projects have been built for Qt6. Plasma’s next step is to quickly port these remaining projects to Qt 6, clearing the final hurdle. Next we should see more and more news of various feature updates and changes to KDE Plasma 6.