KDE has announced a major change, saying it is discontinuing its💫 LTS releases of its Plasma desktop environment for Linux and UNIX.

KDE Plasma is one of the most popular—and certainly the most powerful—desktop environments available on any platform. For years, Plasma has included an LTS (long-term support) release. Unfortunately, given the break▨neck pace at which Plasma progresses, and new features are added, maintaining the LTS has become increasingly challenging.

In on his website, Plasma developer Na🎉te Graham emphasized the challenges involved.

It’s no secret that our Plasma LTS (“Long-Term Support”) product isn’t great. It really only means we backport bug-fixes for longer than usual — usually without even testing them, since no Plasma developers enjoy living on or testing old branches. And there’s no corresponding LTS product 🀅for Frameworks or Gear apps, leaving a lot of holes in the LTS umbrella. Then there’s the fact that “LTS” means different things to different people; many have an expansive definition of the term that gives them expectations of stability that are impossible to meet.

Our conclusion was that the fairly limited nature of the product isn’t meeting anyone’s expectations, so we decided to not continue it. Instead, we’ll lengthen the effective support period꧂ of normal Plasma rel𓆏eases a bit by adding on an extra bug-fix release, taking us from five to six.

That conclusion coincides with the developers moving from three feature releases per year to just💛 two, each align♕ed with the release of two of the most popular KDE Plasma-based distros.

We also revisited the topic of reducing from three to two Plasma feature releases per year, with a mඣuch longer bug-fix release schedule. It would effectively make every Plasma version a sort of mini-LTS, and we’d also try to align them with the twice-yearly release schedules of Kubuntu and Fedora.

As Graham points out, dropping the LTS version Plasma doesn’t magically make it go away, especially for a distro like Kubuntu, which offers up to several years of support. As a result, the KDE devs plan to help shift the LTS support from them to the individual distros that take it upon themselves to offer an LTS experience.

However, the concept of “Long-Term Support” doesn’t go away just because we’re not giving that label to any of our software releases anymore. Really, it was always a label 🧸applied by distros anyway — the distros doing the hard work of building an LTS final product out of myriad softwareꦛ components that were never themselves declared LTS by their own developers. It’s a lot of work.

So we decided to strengthen our messaging that users of KDE software on LTS distros should be reporting issues to their distro, and not to KDE. An LTS software stack is complex and requires a lot of engineering effort to stabilize; the most appropriate people to triage issues on LTS distros are the engineers putting them together. This will free up time among KDE’s bug triagers and developers to focus on current issues they can reproduce and fix, rather than wasting time on issues that can’t be reproduced due to a hugely different software stac▨k, or that were fixed months or years ago yet reported to us anyway due to many users’ unfamiliarity with software release schedules and bug reporting.

The change of direction is an important one, and one that makes perfect sense for the KDE project. Plasma has always been one of the fastest-moving development environments, quickly adding 🧔features and abilities that otܫher environments lack.

As Graham points out, ditching the LTS version allows the developers to focus on improving Plasma,💫 rather than trying to match disparate pieces of software and frameworks and weld them into an LTS 🌃product.