For some time, the KDE Plasma developers have offered Long Term Support releases for the venerable desktop environment.

However, Nate Graham recently posted about the status of Plasma LTS, stating that, "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, since no Plasma developers enjoy living on or testing old branches." Graham adds, "And there’s no corresponding LTS product for Frameworks or Gear apps, leaving a lot of holes in the LTS umbrella."

Graham also goes on to mention that LTS means different things to different people. In the end, it's problematic for the development team to continue with the LTS releases. And given how quickly Plasma development has ramped up, the need for LTS is no longer nearly as important.

At the same time, the developers have considered moving from 3 to 2 feature releases per year, with a much longer bug fix release schedule. In the end, all of this would make every KDE Plasma release (according to Graham) a "mini-LTS."

Graham also points out that the idea of Long Term Support doesn't automatically go away because they're dropping the label and, in the end, the dev team "decided to strengthen our messaging that users of KDE software on LTS distros should be reporting issues to their distro, and not to KDE."

Make sure to read the full post from Graham here.