The KDE e.V. organization, in collaboration with Kubuntu Focus and Techpaladin Software, has introduced an initiative to provide LTS support for the KDE Plasma 6.6 branch, which includes the formation of fixes for at least three years.
Last year, the KDE project discontinued support for LTS branches and delegated their maintenance to distribution developers who wished to provide older versions of KDE Plasma. This decision was made due to the significant workload involved in addressing issues arising from the use of specific software stacks in distributions or the desynchronization of package states with the current KDE codebase. In fact, only the Kubuntu distribution used the LTS branch, while Debian and openSUSE ignored it. Moreover, LTS support was not comprehensive and only entailed backporting individual fixes to KDE Plasma without testing in a continuous integration system, and did not cover KDE Frameworks libraries and KDE Gear applications.
To support the old KDE stack, Kubuntu Focus, a company that produces laptops shipped with Kubuntu, has allocated $100,000 for continuing to fix bugs in the KDE Plasma 6.6, KDE Frameworks 6.24, and KDE Gear 25.12 branches, which will be provided in the Kubuntu 26.04 distribution. The maintenance work will be carried out by Techpaladin Software, whose director is Nate Graham, a developer responsible for quality control in the KDE project.
Additionally, separate funding has been allocated to add three additional nodes to the KDE infrastructure with a continuous integration system, which will be used for testing KDE's functionality in Kubuntu 26.04.
Source: opennet.ru
