We reported earlier today, January 6, 2016, the availability of the third maintenance release for the KDE Plasma 5.5 desktop environment, and we've promised to share some details about the release schedule of the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.6.

While browsing the official KDE website, we've noticed that the KDE developers published the release schedule of the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment, so we've decided that it will be a very good idea to share it with our dedicated readers.

Work on KDE Plasma 5.6 will start soon, and the repository freeze will be on February 18, 2016. Then, the first Beta build will be available to testers worldwide on March 3, along with the feature freeze, two days after the release of the last KDE Plasma 5.5 maintenance.

The final build of KDE Plasma 5.6 will see the light of day on March 22, 2016, and it will be followed closely by the first bugfix release, KDE Plasma 5.6.1, on March 29. As expected, the KDE Plasma 5.6 series will have a total of five maintenance releases.

According to the official release schedule, the KDE Plasma 5.6.2 and KDE Plasma 5.6.3 builds should land on April 5 and April 19 respectively. KDE Plasma 5.6.4 will arrive on May 10 and KDE Plasma 5.6.5 on June 14, 2016. Until then, the KDE developers will gather together at the conf.kde.in 2016 event at the beginning of March.