Greetings, Kubuntu Community!

Today marked an important Kubuntu Council meeting, where we witnessed significant progress and collaboration among our esteemed council members – Darin Miller, Rik Mills, Valorie Zimmerman, Aaron Honeycutt, Jonathan Riddell (Kubuntu Treasurer), and Simon Quigley(Lubuntu). In this blog post, we’re excited to share the highlights and outcomes of the discussions that took place.

1. Focus on the Upcoming Kubuntu LTS Release 24.04
   
   A primary focus of our meeting was setting the objectives for the imminent Kubuntu LTS release. The council engaged in in-depth discussions to ensure that the upcoming release meets the high expectations of our community and continues the Kubuntu legacy of excellence.
   
2. Ubuntu Flavours Statement of LTS Support
   
   Understanding the importance of clear communication, we considered the necessity of a statement regarding Long-Term Support (LTS) required by Ubuntu recognised flavours. This move aligns with our commitment to provide transparency and detailed information to our users.
   
3. Exciting Collaboration with Scarlett Gately Moore
   
   We’re thrilled to announce that we have agreed to contract Scarlett Gately Moore for a three-month period. With a preliminary budget allocated, Scarlett will play a crucial role in delivering key projects:-
   
   – The 24.04 LTS Release,
   – Updating the Kubuntu Installer to Calamares,
   – Preparing an Alpha of Plasma 6 targeting the 24.10 release.
   
   This decision was unanimously agreed upon and reflects our dedication to continually enhancing Kubuntu.

Actions Moving Forward:

Coordination and Oversight: Simon Quigley will be coordinating with Rik Mills and Scarlett Moore, managing the intricate details and ensuring the smooth delivery of our objectives.

Financial Processes: Simon Quigley will oversee the invoicing process with Scarlett Moore, following the agreed pro-forma. Jonathan Riddell, our Kubuntu Treasurer, will handle the commissioning of payments.

Communication and Documentation: As a part of our commitment to keep the community informed, I, Rick Timmis, will be updating the Kubuntu Council mailing list about the meeting’s outcomes. Additionally, I will draft an LTS Statement for submission to the Ubuntu Technical Board, detailing our approach and commitment to Kubuntu’s Long-Term Support.

This meeting was a testament to the dedication and passion of our council members and the broader Kubuntu community. We’re excited about the direction in which Kubuntu is heading and are eager to see the fruition of these projects.

Stay tuned for more updates, and thank you for your continued support of Kubuntu!

Closing:

Best Regards,

Rick Timmis
Kubuntu Council

As with the previous backport of plasma 5.25, 5.27 is provided in the backports-extra PPA

This PPA is intended to be used in combination with our standard backports PPA, but should also work standalone.

As usual with our PPAs, there is the caveat that the PPA may receive additional updates and new releases of KDE Plasma, Gear (Apps) and Frameworks, plus other apps and required libraries. Users should always review proposed updates to decide whether they wish to receive them.

While we feel these backports will be beneficial to enthusiastic adopters, users wanting to use a more tested Plasma release on the 22.04 base may find it advisable to stay with Plasma 5.24 as included in the original 22.04 (Jammy) release.

To add the PPA and upgrade, do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports-extra && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

We hope keen adopters enjoy using Plasma 5.27

Codenamed “Mantic Minotaur”, Kubuntu 23.10 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.5-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.110, KDE Plasma 5.27 and KDE Gear 23.08.

Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive.

Haruna, Krita, Kdevelop, Yakuake, and many many more applications are updated.

Applications for core day-to-day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, and LibreOffice.

For a list of other application updates, and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.

Download Kubuntu 23.10, or learn how to upgrade from 23.04.

Note: For upgrades from 23.04, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.

As of July 20, 2023, 22.10 reached ‘end of life’.

No more package updates will be accepted to 22.10, and it will be archived in the coming weeks.

You can read the official end of life announcement for Ubuntu as a whole.

Kubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster continues to be supported.

Users of 22.10 can follow the Kubuntu 22.10 to 23.04 Upgrade instructions.

Should for some reason your upgrade be delayed, and you find that the 22.10 repositories have been archived, instructions to perform a EOL Upgrade can be found on the Ubuntu wiki.

Thank you for using Kubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu.

Codenamed “Lunar Lobster”, Kubuntu 23.04 continues our tradition of giving you Friendly Computing by integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 6.2-based kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.104, KDE Plasma 5.27 and KDE Gear 22.12.

Kubuntu has seen many updates for other applications, both in our default install, and installable from the Ubuntu archive.

Krita, Kdevelop, Yakuake, and many many more applications are updated.

Applications for core day-to-day usage are included and updated, such as Firefox, VLC, and LibreOffice.

For a list of other application updates, and known bugs be sure to read our release notes.

Download Kubuntu 23.04, or learn how to upgrade from 22.10.

Note: For upgrades from 22.10, there may a delay of a few hours to days between the official release announcements and the Ubuntu Release Team enabling upgrades.

This milestone features images for Kubuntu and other Ubuntu flavours.

Pre-releases of Kubuntu Lunar Lobster are not recommended for:

• Anyone needing a stable system
• Regular users who are not aware of pre-release issues
• Anyone in a production environment with data or workflows that need to be reliable

They are, however, recommended for:

• Regular users who want to help us test by finding, reporting, and/or fixing bugs
• Kubuntu, KDE, and Qt developers
• Other Ubuntu flavour developers

The Beta includes some software updates that are ready for broader testing. However, it is an early set of images, so you should expect some bugs.

We STRONGLY advise testers to read the Kubuntu 23.04 Beta release notes before installing, and in particular the section on ‘Known issues‘.

Kubuntu took part in ‘Ubuntu Testing Week’ from March 2nd to March 9th. Details for all flavours are available on the Ubuntu Discourse announcement.

You can also find more information about the entire 23.04 release (base, kernel, graphics etc) in the main Ubuntu Beta release notes and announcement.

To enable Flatpaks in KDE’s Discover in Kubuntu 23.04, run this command:

sudo apt install flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak

To enable the largest Flatpak repository, run this command:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo


Log out and log back in (or restart) to re-initialize the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable, otherwise, newly installed Flatpak apps will not run or appear in the startup menu.

As usual with our PPAs, there is the caveat that the PPA may receive additional updates and new releases of KDE Plasma, Gear (Apps), and Frameworks, plus other apps and required libraries. Users should always review proposed updates to decide whether they wish to receive them.

To add the PPA and upgrade, do:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

We hope keen adopters enjoy using Plasma 5.27.2!

Note that Plasma 5.27 is also available for our current development version, Lunar Lobster, to become Kubuntu 23.04.

User and community member, arraybolt3, provides more details regarding challenges of Flatpak support.

No worries; Flatpaks are still available for all Ubuntu flavors. To enable Flatpaks in KDE’s Discover in Kubuntu 23.04, run this command:

sudo apt install flatpak plasma-discover-backend-flatpak

To enable the largest Flatpak repository, run this command:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo

Log out and log back in (or restart) to re-initialize the XDG_DATA_DIRS variable, otherwise, newly installed Flatpak apps will not run or appear in the startup menu.

Kubuntu Manual 22.04.2 should be out next week

You can watch the progress here.

See the Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS Release Announcement, the Ubuntu 22.04.2 Release Notes, and the Kubuntu Release Notes.

Download all available released images.