Synchronized release schedule for Plasma

[Niccolò Ve]

Hi,
sorry to bring this up again, but I would be in favor of a switching to 2
releases every year. I'd like to add some reasons to do that on the
promotional side:
1) In Promo, we are quite stepping up our game in the quality of
announcements, to both the website and the release video. We are already a
bit stretched out with time, and having more of that to prepare each
release would benefit us, especially if we intend - and I think we do - to
improve our work even further.
2) We have measured that doing less announcements every year usually gives
those more engagement; we'd expect a good rise of that if we switch from 3
to 2 yearly.
3) Finally, we also expect higher engagement if we have more big features
to promote. In all the releases I've worked on, I always felt - yes, this
is subjective - that the changes were not quite enough to make the user go
"wow" (we are generally talking about 2/4 big features each release).
Bringing that up by ~50% would help a lot.
4) It is much easier to explain to the users that they are going to get the
new features soon in an announcement, if major distributions such as Ubuntu
and Kubuntu have the new release ready soon, rather than having to wait
months to actually get them.
I would also suggest switching to 6 months from a developer point of view,
but here I'd prefer to only argue the benefit in the promotional side,
adding up to the advantage of synced release frequency with distributions.
It doesn't make much sense to be annoyed that your changes do not reach the
users in time in a 6 months release cycle, when you currently have to wait
about the same amount of time, changing every time, before that version
gets picked up by major distributions with most users, as said before.
Thanks,
Niccolò
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