Sponsor gives KDE Plasma 6.6 the LTS treatment

The new "bullet-proof" KDE Software Initiative brings long-term fixes to Kubuntu - and other distros can take advantage of them too. Announced late last week, the effort aims to provide "at least" three years of backported fixes for KDE Plasma 6.6 and the associated KDE Frameworks and KDE Gear apps. It is aimed at Kubuntu 26.04, the latest LTS release of Ubuntu's official KDE Plasma flavor, but other distros are free to pick up the maintained components. This effectively makes Plasma 6.6, which debuted six months ago, a new LTS version of the desktop. As we reported back in May, Kubuntu 26.04 came with Plasma 6.6 - specifically, version 6.6.4. By July, that had been superseded by Plasma 6.6.6, which, as we said at the time, was intended to be the final release in the Plasma 6.6 cycle. As KDE developer Nate Graham explains in a blog post titled What a real LTS looks like: Kubuntu 26.04, the driving force behind the new LTS effort is that an organization called Kubuntu Focus stepped up to pay for it. It's sponsoring Graham's company TechPaladin - which we mentioned last year - to do the maintenance work. The arrangement means that fixes will cover not only the desktop itself, but also its underlying code libraries and accompanying suite of apps. Specifically, that means version 6.24 of the KDE Frameworks, plus version 25.12 of the KDE Gear application suite. The primary beneficiary is Kubuntu, specifically version 26.04, but other operating systems and Linux distros are free to incorporate the updates. The three-year support lifespan is significant here, and we feel that we need to spell out why. Although there are ten official Ubuntu flavors, an important detail that's often overlooked is that only the official GNOME version of Ubuntu gets the full five-year support lifespan. The other flavors do not share that long support lifespan. Beneath their shiny graphical shells, the text-mode stuff - the part most GUI users never see - is the same Ubuntu OS. That gets updates for the full LTS lifecycle. The graphical desktop on top doesn't. Kubuntu is the oldest of the remixes, but even so, it only gets three years of support, not five. It's right there in the release notes: "Kubuntu 26.04 LTS will receive security updates and critical fixes through April 2029." Compare and contrast with the GNOME edition: as its release notes say, "Ubuntu 26.04 LTS will be supported until April 2031." Once the desktop version bundled with an Ubuntu LTS is superseded, users who want updates to the GUI components must upgrade them separately. As an example, back in late 2022, we covered the release of new versions of KDE and LXQt for Ubuntu 22.04. By fortunate coincidence, Kubuntu 24.04 shipped with Plasma 5.27, the final release series of Plasma 5. (Specifically, it had 5.27.11, although a final version 5.27.12 did appear the following January.) Now that a backer is funding the security effort, the KDE team can maintain the entire desktop stack more comprehensively. So long as other distributors pick this up, this should be good news for anyone using KDE on a long-term distro or OS. It's also good for Kubuntu, which faces growing competition. Although it's far from finished yet, there's now an official KDE Linux distro. We described last year how KDE Linux is based on Arch and has robustness and fault-tolerance features similar to those in Valve's Steam OS 3. The new OS complements the older KDE Neon distro, and may in time replace it. KDE Neon is a far more conventional distro: like Kubuntu, it's based on Ubuntu LTS releases, but it's constantly changing as new builds of KDE appear. It's not ideal for long-term deployment. Another contender is Tuxedo Computer's Tuxedo OS. We looked at Tuxedo OS 1 back in 2022, but recently the company has announced major changes. Early last month, the company announced that it would switch from an Ubuntu base to Debian - but, unusually, use the rolling Testing branch rather than Debian Stable. The company cited difficulties with keeping Snap packaging out of its remix, as well as Canonical's new AI focus. As of this weekend, a beta release of the new version is available. (R)