I wouldn't want to write a pessimistic article or anything like that, but I also don't like to keep information to myself and stop telling the whole truth. The fact is that, although at the time of writing this article the launch had not been made official, today it has arrived Kubuntu 23.10, and it has done so with "the same" graphical environment as the version released six months ago. The bad thing for those who want news is not that, but what is coming.
plasma 5.27, the graphical environment used by Kubuntu 23.10, was released in February 2023. That's all well and good, but the average Ubuntu user could, and I think will, go without new features for about a year and a half. The next non-point version will arrive in February 2024, with more than enough time for Kubuntu 24.04, but will you use it? In an LTS version and with the very new Plasma 6 and Frameworks 6? It seems unlikely to me.
But this article is not about when what will arrive or about more or less long waits, but about what they have launched today.
Kubuntu 23.10 Highlights
- Supported for 9 months, until July 2024.
- Linux 6.5.
- plasma 5.27.8. As we mentioned, it is the one launched in February of this year with 8 maintenance updates, but there is nothing newer. KDE is taking its time preparing Plasma 6, and not even the Rollng Release distributions are using anything more up-to-date.
- KDE Framworks 110.
- KDEGear 23.08.1.
- Qt 5.15.10.
- Wayland plasma session available, but not supported.
- Table 23.2.
- LibreOffice 7.6.2.1
- Thunderbird 115.2.3
- Firefox 118.0.1
- GCC 13.2.0
- binutils 2.41
- glibc 2.38
- GNU Debugger 14.0.50.
- Python 3.11.6
To add more information, we reproduce the message that informs you that flatpak package support can be activated in Discover by opening a terminal and writing these two commands, the first installs what is necessary and the second adds the Flathub repository:
sudo apt install flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
The Kubuntu 23.10 image can be downloaded from the button below.