Kubuntu 24.04 LTS will not use KDE Plasma 6.0 by default.
Kubuntu Council member Rick Timmis shared an overview of a recent meeting at which it was “unanimously agreed” to, among other things, prepare an alpha of KDE Plasma 6 targeting the 24.10 release due October rather than April’s LTS release.
Ubuntu Studio lead Erich Eickmeyer also refers to the agreement on Discourse, confirming that “the Kubuntu Council voted unanimously to stay on Plasma 5 for the time being.”
“I’m the leader of Ubuntu Studio, which also uses Plasma, and would’ve had something to say about any last-minute (at this point) transitions with a lot of panic in my voice”, Eickmeyer adds.
KDE Plasma 6.0 is released on February 28. Kubuntu 24.04 LTS is released on April 25.
“Enough time, surely?”, you ask.
Not quite.
Ubuntu 24.04 feature freeze and Debian import freeze is on February 291 meaning there’s not really time to get an entire desktop environment, underlying frameworks, and requisite apps where they need to be, import, integrate, and iterate on them, then test everything works well together.
And testing is colossally important given that Kubuntu 24.04 is a long-term support release — and KDE Plasma 6 features scores of changes spanning the full breadth of the desktop experience (not to mention it defaults to Wayland, which Kubuntu users may be eager to use).
So holding back on KDE Plasma 5 may sound disappointing but it’s ‘better the well-travelled road’ all that — LTS releases need to be as rock solid as possible. People rely on them!
Besides, KDE Plasma 5.27 is a great release to stick with. It’s fast, well-featured, and reliable. And there’ll be plenty of other reasons to upgrade to Kubuntu 24.04, like thousands of updated packages in the archives, the Linux 6.8 kernel, newer graphics drivers, and more.
Plus, there’s always a chance the Kubuntu backports PPA will make KDE Plasma 6.0 available to LTS users once Kubuntu 24.10 is released in October.
