The Qt Company is stopping Qt LTS releases. We (KDE) are going to be fine :)

Obvious disclaimer, this is my opinion, not KDE's, not my employer's, not my parents', only mine ;)

Big news today is that Qt Long-term-supported (LTS) releases and the offline installer will become available to commercial licensees only.

Ignoring upcoming switch to Qt6 scenario for now, how bad is that for us?

Let's look at some numbers from our friends at repology.

At this point we have 2 Qt LTS going on, Qt 5.9 (5.9.9 since December) and Qt 5.12 (5.12.6 since November).

How many distros ship Qt 5.9.9? 0. (there's macports and slackbuilds but none of those seem to provide Plasma packages, so I'm ignoring them)

How many distros ship Qt 5.12.6? 5, Adélie Linux, Fedora 30, Mageia 7, OpenSuse Leap 15.2, PCLinux OS (ALT Linux and GNU Guix also do but they don't seem to ship Plasma). Those are some bigger names (I'd say specially Fedora and OpenSuse).

On the other hand Fedora 28 and 29 ship some 5.12.x version but have not updated to 5.12.6, Opensuse Leap 15.1 has a similar issue, it's stuck on 5.9.7 and did not update to 5.9.9 and so is Mageia 6 which is stuck on Qt 5.9.4

Ubuntu 19.04, 19.08 and 20.04 all ship some version of Qt 5.12 (LTS) but not the lastest version.

On the other a few of other "big" distros don't ship Qt LTS, Arch and Gentoo ship 5.14, our not-distro-distro Neon is on 5.13 and so is flatpak.

As I see it, the numbers say that while it's true that some distros are shipping the latest LTS release, it's not all of them by far, and it looks more like an opportunistic use, the LTS branch is followed for a while in the last release of the distro, but the previous ones get abandoned at some point, so the LTS doesn't really seem to be used to its fully potential.

What would happen if there was no Qt LTS?

Hard to say, but I think some of the "newer" distros would actually be shipping Qt 5.13 or 5.14, and in my book that's a good thing, moving users forward is always good.

The "already released" distros is different story, since they would obviously not be updating from Qt 5.9 to 5.14, but as we've seen it seems that most of the times they don't really follow the Qt LTS releases to its full extent either.

So all in all, I'm going to say not having Qt LTS releases is not that bad for KDE, we've lived for that for a long time (remember there has only been 4 Qt LTS, 4.8, 5.6, 5.9 and 5.12) so we'll do mostly fine.

But What about Qt 5.15 and Qt 6 you ask!

Yes, this may actually be a problem, if all goes to plan Qt 5.15 will be released in May and Qt 6.0 in November, that means we will likely get up to Qt 5.15.2 or 5.15.3 and then that's it, we're moving to Qt 6.0

Obviously KDE will have to move to Qt 6 at some point, but that's going to take a while (as example Plasma 5 was released when Qt was at 5.3) so for let's say that for a year or two we will still be using Qt 5.15 without any bugfix releases.

That can be OK if Qt 5.15 ends being a good release or a problem if it's a bit buggy. If it's buggy, well then we'll have to figure out what to do, and it'll probably involve some kind of fork somewhere, be it by KDE (qt already had that for a while in ancient history with qt-copy) or by some other trusted source, but let's hope it doesn't get to that, since it would mean that there's two set of people fixing bugs in Qt 5.15, The Qt Company engineers and the rest of the world, and doing the same work twice is not smart.

KDE Workspaces 4.11 End of Life this August

Back in August 2013 we promised to do Long Term Support for kde-workspace for 2 years.

This means this August is the last release for kde-workspace (coming with KDE Applications 15.08.0).

Of course, we can extend the releases if anyone has a strong reason.

If you do, head to the release-team mailing list!

Plasma 5.1 release parties!

Plasma 5.1 is coming up in less than a month, we have already two release parties in the planning, but i'm sure you have some fellow KDE users around you want to meet and have a beer with, so hop onto your local LUG, meetup, or something, organize a party and add it to https://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/Plasma5.1

KDE Community plans for Releases in the Future

Long post about releases ahead, brace yourselves!

Last week we released KDE Applications and KDE Platform 4.14.

KDE Applications, KDE Platform and KDE Workspaces were sometimes collectively referred as the "KDE Software Compilation" or "KDE SC" in short form, which is arguably a bad name, but it is what it is.

The "Software Compilation" started dying a while ago and 4.14 marks its end.

KDE Platform was 'virtually frozen' a long time ago, but we kept increasing the version number for some reasons that are now not important, so KDE Platform 4.14.x will be the last version, of course we will go to very high 'x' if there is bugfixes to be done.

KDE Frameworks 5 is the successor of KDE Platform based on Qt5, it's already on 5.1 and the team plans to release a new 5.x version with both features and bugfixes every month.

KDE Workspaces was frozen at 4.11.x, in fact if you check your distro, you are probably using 4.11.somehighnumber, the plan is to keep doing releases for at least a year if there are bugfixes available.

Plasma 5 is the successor of KDE Workspaces based on KF5, it's currently at 5.0.1. The team plans releasing a stable 5.x.y version every month with bugfixes and a 5.x+1 feature release every three months.

That leaves us with the third component of the old releases, "KDE Applications", comprised of more than 100 applications. We want those to move to Qt5 and KF5 since it's simply a better world, but we're not going to do it all at once as we did in 4.0. We will give the maintainers the choice to move as they feel the quality of their KF5 port is good enough.

KDE Applications has been having feature releases every four months, with bugfix releases in the three months in between.

We don't plan changing that, but to highlight that applications can be used independently of the libraries used to build the desktop you are using, we're just going to use a time approach for version numbers, that is, next release will be "KDE Applications 14.12"

And that marks the end of the SC era since libraries, desktop and applications are now in a separate release schedule.

Also, if you are at akademy we're having a short session Sunday at 10:40, and I guess i'll schedule a BoF later in the week.

Active port of Okular merged

Marco just merged the Active port of Okular to the master in the okular repository. Now people that have the proper dependencies will also get an active-documentviewer binary that is a touch optimized experience based in the Okular core libraries.

You can find a video of an old version of it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvLVqiFC6_4