Schedules/Plasma 6

Preamble

Plasma is the desktop developed by the KDE community. Version 6 of Plasma is being developed, built and shipped on top of Qt 6.

Further details for Plasma 6 can be found on the Wiki, a current list of open bugs at Bugzilla.

Purpose of this page

This page contains the release schedule for previous and future versions of KDEs Plasma 6.

The schedule may be subject to change for several reasons:

• if the quality of a major component is not deemed good enough
• if the release of the required KDE Frameworks version is delayed
• if the required Qt version is delayed
• important bugfixes or security issues

All deadlines are due midday UTC, but if you are a developer and need a few more hours (e.g. for an important bugfix), please notify someone from the release team.

Release mangler: Jonathan Riddell

Status

Plasma 6 is currently in active development for new and improved features as well as for bugfixes.

Release frequency and bugfix policy

Releases of new versions are planned every 4 months (3 times a year) initially. Once distros agree stability has been found we can move to 2 releases a year

Normal releases will stop receiving bugfixes as soon as the following release is available. The exception to this rule are LTS releases:

LTS releases

No scheduled LTS releases yet. If distributions find LTS releases useful, we will schedule those in close cooperation with the corresponding distributions.

Release Cycle

1. Alpha: Repository freeze and soft feature freeze
   The Thursday two weeks before the beta release date, there is a repository and soft feature freeze. This means, that the list of git repositories is fixed and major features are merged.
   No new major features may be added without requesting an exception.
   Additional release manager tasks:
   
   • Start writing the Beta release announcement using this list of noteworthy changes.


2. Beta: hard feature freeze, soft UI and string freeze
   This will usually happen on Thursday following the corresponding KDE Frameworks release (which is usually released on the second Saturday of a month).
   No new features. No UI or string changes are allowed without requesting an exception - this includes the wallpaper that should be used by default for this release.
   Additional release manager tasks:
   • Bump the milestone to the current version (i.e. the version that the beta leads up to) for bugfixes that failed to merge in time for the previous version
   • Bump the milestone to the next Plasma release version for features that failed to merge in time for the current version (a link is in the future releases table).
   • Go over all other milestoned merge requests for this version and determine if they qualify as bugfixes that can be merged. If so, add the "Cherry-Pick" label. If not, bump the milestone to the next version (a link is in the future releases table).


3. One week after the beta release, we'll try to host a beta test day where we encourage everyone to install and test the beta.


4. The initial to-be-released-version (6.X.0) will be tagged on Thursday three weeks after the Beta, i.e. tar-archives will be created from a git snapshot then. Those archives are accessible to packagers before the official release. The official release will be on the following Tuesday.


5. Bugfix tags/releases are made on Tuesdays in a Fibonacci sequence of weeks (1, 1, 2, 3, 5)

Dependencies

Releases should depend on the latest KDE Frameworks available at beta time and an agreed Qt version. Check CI is updated to the new Qt before changing version. Ask sysadmin to get Qt updated.

Plasma Version	Qt Version	KDE Frameworks Version
6.0	6.6	6.0 - additionally Plasma 6.0 depends on Gear 24.02 for libkexiv2
6.1	6.6 (6.7 strongly recommended)	6.2
6.2	6.7	6.5

Future releases

The schedule is also available at:

• Calendar on Phabricator
• Google Calendar

Version	Post release Version	Type	Tar Date	Release Date	Comments
6.1.5		Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-09-10
6.2 repo and feature freeze		soft freeze	Thu 2024-08-29
6.1.90	6.1.95 and 6.2.80	6.2 Beta	Thu 2024-09-12		Plasma/6.2 branch made
6.2.0		Release	Thu 2024-10-03	Tue 2024-10-08
6.2.1		Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-10-15
6.2.2		Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-10-22
6.2.3		Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-11-05
6.2.4		Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-11-26
6.2.5		Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-12-31

History of releases

6.1 series
Version	Type	Release Date	Comments
6.0.80 (Plasma 6.1 Alpha)	Alpha	Tue 2024-05-09
6.0.90 (Plasma 6.1 Beta)	Beta	Tue 2024-05-24	Plasma/6.1 branched. List of features that failed to merge List of open merge requests
6.1.0	Release	Tue 2024-06-18	Public Release of Plasma 6.1
6.1.1	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-06-25
6.1.2	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-07-02
6.1.3	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-07-16
6.1.4	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-08-06

6.0 series
Version	Type	Release Date	Comments
5.80.0 (Plasma 6.0 Alpha)	Alpha	Wed 2023-11-08	Plasma Release Notes, Megarelease Announcement
5.90.0 (Plasma 6.0 Beta 1)	Beta	Wed 2023-11-29	Megarelease Announcement
5.91.0 (Plasma 6.0 Beta 2)	Beta	Wed 2023-12-20	Megarelease Announcement
5.92.0 (Plasma 6.0 Release Candidate 1)	Release Candidate	Wed 2024-01-10	Megarelease Announcement
5.93.0 (Plasma 6.0 Release Candidate 2)	Release Candidate	Wed 2024-01-31
6.0	Feature Release	Wed 2024-02-28	Public release of Plasma 6.0
6.0.1	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-03-05
6.0.2	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-03-12
6.0.3	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-03-26
6.0.4	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-04-16
6.0.5	Bugfix Release	Tue 2024-05-21