Not this week there is no article about what's new in KDE. Right now they are all in Akademy 2023, so they have been able to do little. Looking a little how things are, plasma 6 It is getting closer, and there is a fact that I think is not being given the importance it deserves. With things more mature than Plasma 5 and much better than Plasma 4, it's time to change the release cycle.
It won't be immediately, but it will be at some point in the near future. if we go to schedule page From Plasma 6, we can read that nothing is scheduled, but they do have something clear: the release cycle will be slower, and there will end up being "only" two releases per year. The intention is to do the same as GNOME, which basically releases a new version of its graphical environment a month before the new releases of Ubuntu and Fedora arrive. This allows major distributions to always have up-to-date desktops.
Starting with Plasma 6, there will be two releases per year
Currently, Kubuntu users who want to have the latest KDE software are required to add the backports repository of the project. A backport is bringing features from something in the future into what we're currently working on, and in the case of Kubuntu it's the latest stuff from, say, KDE neon to an operating system that wouldn't otherwise have it available. So if everything fits, and there are times when it doesn't, Kubuntu can install the latest versions of Plasma, Frameworks and Gears.
All this will change a lot at that time when things stabilize. About February-March and August-September there will be a new version of Plasma, and Kubuntu will be out in April and October, so will have the latest version of Plasma with at least two or three maintenance updates, as long as the "Fibonacci" update cycle is maintained
Frameworks and Gear go separately
KDE software is made up of at least the graphical environment, its libraries and its applications. Frameworks is updated once a month, more specifically on the second Saturday. On the other hand, the applications are also updated every month, on the first or second Thursday of each month. Gear updates are a bit different, with new features arriving in April, August, and December, with the rest of the months delivering maintenance updates.
Changing the Plasma 6 update cycle from 3 to 2 per year will still be noticeable in Kubuntu without adding any repositories, but Frameworks and Gear will stay exactly the same. Kubuntu will update them in April and October, and they won't use the latest versions. The most recent case is in Kubuntu 23.04, which uses KDE Gear 22.12.3, from December 2023 + the three corrections. The decision is not to include after the installation of zero something that has been available for days and without any correction.
what is in doubt
Or rather the doubts that remain to me. In the aforementioned most recent example of Kubuntu 23.04, the version of Plasma that there is v5.27.4. 5.27 came out in February, and the fourth maintenance update arrived before the feature freeze, so it was included in the stable version of Lunar Lobster. But now we have the sixth point update of 5.27 available and nothing is showing up in the official Kubuntu 23.04 repositories.
The first question is whether this will change when the changes in the Plasma 6 update cycle begin to arrive, although nothing makes me think that it will be like that. A cycle of two per year will allow us to always use the latest version of Plasma with various fix releases, and that's a lot, but we'll still be a bit behind what we get with the backports repository. The good thing is that if we decide to use that repository, the desktop updates will be less aggressive simply because there will be no version jumping. And it will never happen to us to stay 6 months in an "outdated" version due to incompatibilities with the latest Frameworks, something that happened, if I remember correctly, in Plasma 5.19.
Plasma 6.0 will arrive in late 2023, and the first version of Kubuntu to use it (or 6.1) will be Kubuntu 24.04.