KDE developer Nate Graham wrote in his bog:“It’s no secret that our Plasma LTS (‘Long-Term Support’) product isn’t great. It really only means we backport bug-fixes for longer than usual — usually without even testing them."

The LTS version was meant to give Plasma users a stable and supported option, but no one on the team wanted to maintain it. Graham added that there was no LTS equivalent for KDE’s Frameworks or Gear apps, so even the so-called support umbrella had holes big enough to drive a distro through.

Graham said: “Many have an expansive definition of the term that gives them expectations of stability that are impossible to meet,” and the result was a mess of mismatched support, half-hearted bug fixes, and rising frustration on all sides.

Rather than limp along pretending LTS means anything, the KDE project will now ship an extra bug-fix release for each version, taking support from five to six patches. It also plans to potentially drop from three feature releases a year to two, spacing things out in a way that should keep things more stable overall.

This new model should align KDE better with big players like Kubuntu and Fedora, giving distro maintainers a clearer target and users a more predictable experience.

“We decided to strengthen our messaging that users of KDE software on LTS distros should be reporting issues to their distro, and not to KDE,” Graham said. That’s because KDE isn’t doing the LTS engineering anymore — the distros are, and they’ve got the infrastructure to match.

By handing off responsibility where it belongs, the KDE team hopes to stop wasting time debugging problems tied to old, inconsistent stacks and focus on shipping fixes that actually matter to current users.