KDE Plasma 6 is the next version of KDE
A few days ago it was announced news from the developers of the KDE project, which shared through a blog post, a development plan for KDE 6, according to whichThe launch of the new branch is planned for February 2024.
Nate Graham, one of the KDE developers, mentions that work on KDE Plasma 6 has been progressing “well” and that he is confident that a solid final release can be made in five months, since initially the release of the KDE Plasma 6 user environment and the KDE Frameworks 6 set of libraries was due to be released this fall, but there was more work than expected.
It also mentions that There has been a lot of progress in the last month on some of the latest tasks migration, so the team can now focus more on new features and bug fixes, of recent changes are double-click and “tap to click” features are now enabled by default and bugs in DrKonqi are now inform automatically.
KDE contributors met online this week to plan final release timelines.
We came up with this current plan:
Frameworks/Plasma/Gear Release Schedule Plan
After the last Academy, we checked where we were with our development progress in a meeting and decided on the following plan for the 3 main parts:
In KDE Gear master will be open for the Qt6 code to reach those who are ready to move. Not all applications need to be ported.
The release of KDE Gear will be delayed by 2 months to allow additional time needed to test the initial Qt6 changes.
An Alpha will be held in November (a soft freeze in terms of Plasma)
The Betas/RC will take place throughout December and January (3 releases, 3 weeks apart)
Final release of the 3 main synchronized parts in February
Due to the KDE Gear delay, an additional patch release will be released on 23.08.
This is still under discussion, but if no objections arise, we will see a triple release of a first stable KF6, KF6-based Plasma, and KF6-based Gear next February.
In the new release plan, it is mentioned that By November of this year, an alpha version of KDE 6 with a soft freeze will be released of the changes, a beta version in December and a candidate version in January.
In February 2024, at the same time as KDE Plasma 6 and KDE Frameworks 6, the next major release of the KDE Gear suite, translated to Qt6, is also planned. The December major update for KDE Gear 23.12 will be skipped as additional time is required to test the migration to the new Qt6 branch.
KDE Frameworks 6 introduces a major API revision. As it stands, out of 529 KDE projects, the ability to build with Qt 6 is implemented in 380 projects.
It is mentioned that of the key changes in KDE 6 are the transition to Qt 6, changes to some core configurations, cleaning up deprecated features, and delivering an updated core set of runtime libraries and components, KDE Frameworks 6, which forms the KDE software stack. By default, KDE Plasma 6 will offer a session using the Wayland protocol, a new task switching interface, to open files and directories by default will require a double mouse click, and not just one as before, which will simplify the adaptation to the new environment for users of other systems. If necessary, the old behavior can be returned in the configuration.
Another change that stands out is that By default, the panel will be in floating mode, which has visible padding between the panel and the edges of the screen, giving the user environment a distinctive look (after the introduction of a panel similar to the old KDE panel in Windows 11, some users believe that KDE copies the look of Windows, although a similar panel was offered in KDE much earlier of Windows 11).
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link