Draft for Plasma 6.6 schedule

[Martin Riethmayer]

Hi everyone,

with the holiday season coming up, I'd like to propose a schedule for 
Plasma 6.7 before that.

Plasma 6.7 might be a bit special, as it's the last version with X11 
support [3], and there was the question raised, if some extra bug-fix 
releases should be scheduled for 6.7, i.e. making 6.7 the first LTS 
release for Plasmas 6.X series?

This could be a possible schedule with 2 additional bugfix releases:

6.6.80		2026-04-23 (repo and soft feature freeze)
6.6.90	Beta 1	2026-05-07
6.6.91	Beta 2	2026-05-21
6.7.0	TAR	2026-06-04
6.7.0	Release	2026-06-09
6.7.1		2026-06-16
6.7.2		2026-06-23
6.7.3		2026-07-07
6.7.4		2026-07-28
6.7.5		2026-09-01
6.7.6		2026-10-27
6.7.7		2027-01-26
6.7.8		2027-06-22


Things to note:

- The schedule is based on the 3-releases-a-year model, thus I aimed for 
6.7.0 to be about 4 months after 6.6.0 (scheduled for 2026-02-17).
It's also based on the release of the "best matching" frameworks 
release, which influences the date of Beta 1 (i.e. Beta 1 "will usually 
happen on Thursday following the corresponding KDE Frameworks release" 
[1] ), which could in turn make 6.7 depend on FW 6.26. Those two kind of 
influence each other.

- Required Qt version could remain at Qt 6.10, or could probably use Qt 
6.11 which is currently scheduled to be released in March 2026[2].

- I have not taken into consideration any release schedules of distributions

- The Blog post "Goig all-in on a Wayland future" [3] says "The Plasma 
X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027", which kind of 
implies at least one extra release (6.7.7). I've added another one 
(6.7.8) by Fibonacci-sequence (i.e. 21 weeks after 6.7.7) in my 
proposal, but this is just for showing the date. I'm not aware of any 
formal decision how many extra bug-fix releases will be made, so this is 
up for discussion if it should be reduced to less or extended to even 
more bug-fix releases. Also, it might be worth discussing if it's good 
to put an official "LTS" label on it, or to give an assurance like for 
Plasma 5.27 ("In case of urgent bugfixes or security issues, another 
release might be made")[4].

Let me know your thoughts on this, I'm happy to adjust the schedule or 
(if no objections come) to put it on the wiki and the phabricator calendar.

Best regards

Martin


[1] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_6#Beta
[2] https://wiki.qt.io/QtReleasing
[3] https://blogs.kde.org/2025/11/26/going-all-in-on-a-wayland-future/
[4] https://community.kde.org/Schedules/Plasma_5#Future_releases