Next Plasma LTS and openSUSE

[Luca Beltrame]

Hi everyone,

this is basically the same discussion as already took place for 5.8.

According to distrowatch, it looks very much like we're currently the _only_ 
remaining Top 10 distro with KDE (Plasma+Apps) installed and used by default.
Not only has Ubuntu switched to GNOME, for openSUSE there's currently also a 
major fork in the road happening next:

- openSUSE Tumbleweed will likely switch to having no default at all
  (user has to choose one)
- openSUSE Leap _may_ switch to GNOME as it is the desktop in SUSE Linux
  Enterprise. The argument here is that SUSE has a desktop team that is paid 
  to fix bugs, while this is not the case for the community-maintained KDE
  packages.

It's obvious that this switch must not happen for various political reasons:
- GNOME becomes the de-facto standard desktop (Fedora, Ubuntu, openSUSE)
- This headline: "openSUSE switches default desktop after 10+ years, KDE not 
viable?"
- openSUSE KDE users might think that the focus shifted away

The only chance I can see avoiding the switch is by delivering a flawless 
experience for the next major release, which will be released roughly this 
time next year. So it would be perfect to have a 5.12 (?) LTS by then. The way 
the schedule aligned for Leap 42.2 with Plasma 5.8.2 was perfect, thanks for 
that again!

Additionally, it would be great to have an Applications LTS as well, which 
would make a faster feature-release cycle alongside a slower LTS cycle 
possible.

I'm aware that this is an awful situation to be in, but I hope that we can 
figure something out...


The openSUSE KDE team

-- 
Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team
KDE Science supporter
GPG key ID: A29D259B
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