KDE Plasm LTS 5.18 will be released in February 2020

The KDE project team has announced that the next LTS series for the KDE Plasma desktop environment will be KDE Plasma 5.18 and is scheduled for release early next year (tentative date is February 11, 2020). There will be a 5.17 version before the release of KDE Plasma 5.18, which will be released on October 15.

KDE Plasma LTS is currently KDE Plasma 5.12, which recently released the last maintenance update in the update cycle,  KDE Plasma 5.12.9, which means it has reached the EOL phase and will no longer be available unless it needs to be resolved Serious security issues or errors. As a result, the KDE project team talked to developers of major Linux distributions to discuss which KTS Plasma desktop environment LTS series is best for them.

KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS is based on Qt 5.12 LTS and KDE Frameworks 5.66 and is also compatible with Qt 5.13 to support use on more distributions. Finally, the project team also revealed that the next LTS series of KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS will be KDE Plasma 6.0, but the release date has not been announced.