Kubuntu 24.04 LTS will not ship with 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 and (it sounds) not the upcoming April LTS release.

Ubuntu Studio lead Erich Eickmeyer also refers to this 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.

So what’s the reason?

KDE Plasma 6.0 is released on February 28 while Kubuntu 24.04 LTS is released on April 25.

“Enough time, surely?”, you might think.

Ubuntu 24.04 feature freeze and Debian import freeze is on February 291 so I imagine there’s not a lot of time to get an entire desktop environment, underlying frameworks, and relevant apps where they need to be, import, integrate, iterate, and then test enough.

And testing is colossally important. Kubuntu 24.04 is a long-term support release that will be supported for 3 years. KDE Plasma 6 is a big upgrade with scores of changes across the full breadth of the desktop experience, and it defaults to Wayland.

KDE Plasma 6.0 is shaping up fantastically well (as I’ve shared on social media recently based on my own hands-on testing in KDE neon). It’s stable, consistent, and performant in use which bodes well for its actual stable debut in late February.

So while holding back on KDE Plasma 5 could sound disappointing, if including it by default was an easy/no fuss/minimal risk it’d be happening, I guess. LTS releases need to be as rock solid, reliable, and predictable as possible, and KDE Plasma 5.27 is that.

And DE version aside, there’ll be plenty of other reasons to upgrade to Kubuntu 24.04, including thousands of updated packages in the archives, the Linux 6.8 kernel, newer graphics drivers, and lots of quality of life buffs.

Besides, there’s a good chance the Kubuntu backports PPA will make KDE Plasma 6.0 available to 24.04 LTS users once Kubuntu 24.10 is released in October — meaning no-one need miss out if they don’t want to.

  1. I just realised 2024 is a leap year, heh! ↩︎