One of the best-looking and handful desktop environments, KDE Plasma, is almost getting a new long-term-support version. According to the schedule, the new KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS will be the last LTS version until the development of Plasma 6 begins.
It will be maintained for 18 months
KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS will be supported until October 2023, then the KDE Plasma 6 will take place
The “current” LTS version of KDE Plasma is 5.18; which was released in February 2020 and has reached its end-of-life status in October 2021. The 5.24 LTS is set to be released in early February 2022; the time between two LTS releases will be exactly 2 years. KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS will be getting support for 18 months.
The new version will be bringing some nice features such as integrated fingerprint reader support that helps unlock screen, authenticating in apps, and even in Terminal for sudo command line. There are also improvements like the redesign for Plasma Pass and better driver support for Nvidia GPUs.
There is no word on the KDE Plasma 6 development schedule yet. Developers currently just porting Plasma and KDE Frameworks based on Qt6. We will be informing you when the team announces a schedule for KDE Plasma 6 development.