About the Plasma release schedule

This will be a boring one, sorry. Basically a “JFYI” for people interested in Plasma’s release administration.

A while back, there was a discussion about moving Plasma to a twice-yearly release model, to better align with discrete release distros that also have two yearly releases — mostly Fedora KDE and Kubuntu.

We discussed this at last year’s Akademy and decided not to do it yet, based on the reason that a faster release schedule would help get important Wayland improvements to users more quickly, given that we’re trying to polish up our Wayland session at high speed. We agreed that once the Wayland Known Significant Issues wiki page is empty, we can re-evaluate.

Until that re-evaluation happens, we decided to instead lengthen our beta release periods from four weeks to six weeks, with new beta releases every two.

Plasma 6.3 will be released very soon, yay! For this release, we remembered to push out the extra new beta releases, but forgot about adding on an extra two weeks to its duration. Oops.

Interestingly, we haven’t gotten many bug reports from users of the Plasma 6.3 beta, which is historically unusual. I’m not totally sure what to make of this. The optimistic assessment is that the release was already great even by the time we shipped the beta! The pessimistic one is that few people showed up to QA it, so lots of bugs got missed (I’m less sure it’s this, but anything’s possible). Either way, it seems like an extra two weeks of beta time wouldn’t have made much difference, so we’re not considering a great loss.

As a result, we’ve decided to try this same approach for 6.4: a four-week beta period, with new releases every two weeks. We’ll see how it goes! If it’s fine, we can keep it, and if it’s not, we can return to the original plan of six-week beta periods. Until then, enjoy Plasma 6.3!