KDE has announced a major ✱change, saying it is discontinuing its LTS releases of its Plasma desktop envir🌸onment for Linux and UNIX.

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

In on his website, Plasma developer Nate Graham emphas🐓ized the chall♛enges involved.

It’s no secret that ou🅷r 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 anyon🍸e’s expectations, so we decided to not continue it. Instead, we’ll lengthen the effective support period of normal Plasma releases a bit by adding on an extra bug-fix release, takin🌜g us from five to six.

That conclusion coincides with the developers moving from three feature releases per year to just twoꦑ, each aligned with the releas💛e 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 much longer bug-fix release schedule. It would effectively make every Plasm♎a 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 t💟o 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 software 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 soft🔯ware stack, 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 environmentsꦇ, quickly adding features and abilities that other environments lack.

As Grah🐈am 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 int✱o an LTS product.