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Kubuntu News

KDE cancelled Plasma LTS. Kubuntu bought it back.

kubuntu.org

Key points

Kubuntu 26.04.1 is out, and the post argues that the more important news is funding: Kubuntu Focus has committed over $100,000 across three years to maintain the KDE software that Kubuntu 26.04 ships, under the name Bullet-Proof KDE.

Background

  • KDE retired its Plasma LTS product last year. Almost no distribution besides Kubuntu shipped it, it covered only Plasma and not Frameworks or the Gear applications, and backports were not validated by CI.
  • KDE's compromise was an extra bugfix release, stretching support for each Plasma version from four months to six.

What the money pays for

  • Techpaladin Software is paid to work on bugs reported by Kubuntu 26.04 users.
  • Fixes land across the whole stack Kubuntu 26.04 ships: Plasma 6.6, KDE Frameworks 6.24 and KDE Gear 25.12.
  • KDE e.V. gets additional CI capacity running Kubuntu 26.04, so backports are tested. The post says KDE's general build times improved as well.
  • Fixes already delivered: desktop themes can hold embedded widgets, the media frame widget scales images cleanly, desktop files no longer disappear when renamed inside an Activity, and remote desktop works.

The 26.04.1 point release

  • Images arrived on 27 August with the other 26.04.1 flavours. They roll accumulated security and bugfix updates into the installation media; an up-to-date 26.04 system is effectively already on 26.04.1.
  • The automatic upgrade offer from 24.04 to 26.04 is held back for a couple of weeks while regressions in rust-coreutils are backported. To upgrade now, after reading the release notes:
do-release-upgrade -d

Support length

  • Ubuntu Desktop gets five years of maintenance; the flavours, Kubuntu included, get three.
  • Bugs can be filed on bugs.kde.org or Launchpad.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.

Kubuntu 26.04.1 is out — but the release that matters is the one somebody paid to support properly. The Bullet-Proof KDE announcement The bit nobody funded Nate Graham on what a real LTS looks like Last year KDE retired the Plasma LTS product, and the reasoning was honest. Almost nobody shipped it — Kubuntu, essentially, and not Debian or openSUSE Leap. It only ever covered Plasma itself, not the KDE Frameworks underneath or the Gear applications on top.

This is the summary Kubuntu News published with the story. The full text is on the original page.

Read the original at kubuntu.org