KUbuntu 26.04, the official Ubuntu 26.04 flavor features KDE Plasma desktop, as expected will be a LTS with 3-year support circle.
As you may know, Ubuntu Technical Board announced the LTS qualifications for Resolute Raccoon in last December, excluded Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Unity as they missed the deadline of the LTS qualification.
The Ubuntu Mate team lead Martin Wimpress now has other interests and obligations, and the Ubuntu Unity lead Rudra Saraswat has a busy university life. So they missed the LTS qualification.
There will be Ubuntu MATE 26.04 and Ubuntu Unity 26.04 releases if everything goes well without critical issues, as all flavors’ iso images are controlled by the Ubuntu Release team.
As non-LTS, the two flavors (MATE & Unity) will get only 9-month support from broader Ubuntu community, though non-flavor specific things will be supported as long as Ubuntu 26.04 support life.
KUbuntu seems to be special to other flavors! It also missed the deadline of 26.04 LTS qualification, though not mentioned in the announcement.
Perhaps because the KUbuntu team lead Rik Mills is as well the core Ubuntu developer. The team finally applied the LTS Requalification for Kubuntu 26.04 a few weeks ago:
After discussing this with the core team, we would like to formally request 3-year LTS requalification for Kubuntu. Below is an outline of our support plan: …
And, the Technical Board approved the LTS qualification request last night, confirmed that KUbuntu 26.04 will be an LTS with 3-year of support.
KUbuntu 26.04 is coming with Plasma Desktop 6.6 that features:
- New on-screen keyboard.
- New initial setup wizard.
- Text Recognition (OCR) support for built-in screenshot tool.
- Save user colors & themes settings as custom global theme.
- Hide app window from screenshot.
- Optional new login manager.
- Support using game controllers as regular input devices.
- Automatic brightness adjustment (for computer with ambient light sensor).
- Pinch gesture and axis modifier in magnifier.
- Global Shortcuts for seeking forward and backward.
- “Slow Keys” support on Wayland.
- Smoother animations on high-refresh-rate screens.
- Scan QR code to connect to a new Wi-Fi network.
- Scroll on app icon to change its volume.
The developer team will provide the desktop fixes and updates (even major version updates via PPA) for 3 years, while, the main repository packages and drivers are supported by Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) as long as Ubuntu 26.04 with 5-year standard support.
For more about KUbuntu, join the community.
