Things just kicked up a gear in KDE Plasma land.

As of today, the main development branch for the KDE Plasma desktop environment is Qt 6-only.

With KDE Plasma 5.27 out of the door — this was the final release in the Qt 5-based 5.x series — development effort is going to focus entirely on the next generation.

Those of you who keep a paw on the pulse of Plasma development will be well aware of this change. A heads-up went out to the kde-devel mailing list at the start of the week to let everyone know this was coming.

And know they need to as, to quote:

There will be disruption because of this. While we aim for getting a basic workspace running as soon as possible non-essential functionality might be broken for a while.

Nicolas Fella, KDE

Change is a-coming!

There’s currently no firm release date for when the first KDE Plasma release based on Qt 6 will emerge. But blog posts by KDE devs shared over the past few months suggest a tentative hope it will appear roughly when KDE Plasma 5.29 would’ve, next year.

But if you’re gonna jot that down in your diary to plan a release party around please do it pencil – it’s very much TBC!

KDE Plasma 6.0 — y’know, it’s kind of trippy to write that — will be notable due to its shift to Qt 6, and this will unlock new capabilities, technologies, and functionality, a focus of the first iteration is stability, subtle enhancements, and bug fixes — i.e. don’t expect a massive UI revamp.

But I can’t lie: I’m excited nonetheless!