KDE plans to release Plasma 6 desktop environment in early February 2024

KDE plans to release the Plasma 6 desktop environment sometime in early February 2024, approximately ten years after the release of the previous Plasma version. An exact release date has not yet been announced.

Nate Graham, one of the developers of KDE’s default desktop environment, let in a status update that Plasma 6 is already in a good state at the moment and that he is confident that a solid final release can take place in five months. He also writes that a lot of progress has been made in the past month on some of the latest porting tasks, so the team can now focus more on new features and bug fixes. Some recent changes are that the double-click and ‘tap to click’ features are now enabled by default and bugs in DrKonqi are now reported automatically.

The previous version of KDE Plasma, version 5, was released in 2014. The new version has been a long time coming and its exact status was unclear for a long time. A relatively stable build was already released for test use in June. That’s the intention, by the way that KDE Frameworks 6 and the Qt6-based KDE Gear applications will also be released in February.