I’ve been looking into the release cycles of both Plasma and Gnome 40.0. Gnome follows a 6 month release schedule, however, plasma has a 4 month release cadence for their non-LTS releases. This means we will have a three month period between stable releases where our stable release will have an unsupported version of plasma. Personally, I don’t think this is much of an issue; unless there’s a compelling security reason, the plasma desktop should still be very usable. I would much rather have people saying, “why isn’t plasma at the latest”, than “why can’t I log out”.
Doesn’t plasma release an LTS version? why don’t we use that?
They do, but even with the 20.09 release, we had issues with systemd compatibility where these regressions did not occur on the later plasma releases as they were developed against more recent versions of systemd (logout, and certain functionality was missing or broken). Subtle incompatibility issues between these desktop managers and fundamental libraries will likely always occur, however, the greater the divergence, the more likely we will have to develop in-house solutions. Thus delaying releases more.
As I’m not a user of gnome or plasma, I would like some feedback from those users and maintainers about their thoughts. My main interest is being able to release in a timely manner, and the Desktop experience is usually people’s “first impression” of NixOS. With the YY.05 and YY.11, I think it’s very doable to have a “mostly polished” experience going into the release branch-off. Which should save everyone a lot of headache, pain, sweat, and tears.
TL;DR
Going with YY.05 and YY.11 release dates with non-LTS versions of plasma and gnome will have an awkward window for plasma where there will be a 3 month window where it will be unsupported. However, I don’t think this will be much of an issue as long as we can provide a very usable desktop experience.