The KDE project has had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the third of five maintenance releases for the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment.
It would appear that the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop, which is the latest stable and most advanced version of the modern KDE graphical interface for Linux desktops, has a very rapid development cycle with new maintenance updates released every two weeks.
As such, in only one month from its official unveiling, KDE Plasma 5.7 received three point releases already. KDE Plasma 5.7.3 is the latest one, announced today, August 2, 2016, and it comes exactly two weeks after the July 19 announcement of the KDE Plasma 5.7.2 update, which arrived as well two weeks after the first KDE Plasma 5.7 release.
If you're wondering what's new in the KDE Plasma 5.7.3 update, we can tell you that it brings, even more, improvements to some of the core components of the widely-used desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, including Plasma Desktop, Plasma Discover, Plasma NetworkManager (plasma-nm), Plasma Workspace, KWin, Oxygen, KScreen, Info Center, User Manager, and kactivitymanagerd.
Release highlights include a workaround to make the first time initialization work as expected, better loading of KCM (KDE Control Module) thanks to the implementation of FileDialog lazy loading, improved support for VPN (Virtual Private Network) connections, fixes for various memory leaks and other annoying bugs reported by users since KDE Plasma 5.7.2. Check out the full changelog below for all the juicy details.
KDE Plasma 5.7.4 coming August 23
The next maintenance update in the KDE Plasma 5.7 series is KDE Plasma 5.7.4, and, according to the official release schedule, it looks like it will land in about three weeks from today, on August 23, 2016. After that, the fifth and last point release, KDE Plasma 5.7.5, should hit the streets on September 27, marking the end of life of the KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment.
In the meantime, the KDE devs will start work on the next major version, KDE Plasma 5.8, which will be a long-term supported (LTS) one. The Beta of KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS comes two days after KDE Plasma 5.7 reaches end of life, on September 29, 2016, and it will have a total of nine maintenance updates, until April 24, 2018.
