Kubuntu 26.04.1 and what "Bullet-Proof KDE" actually changes

Flavors & Remixes Kubuntu
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Kubuntu 26.04.1 images landed on 27 August alongside the rest of the 26.04.1 flavours. Standard point release: fewer updates on a fresh install, security fixes rolled in. Worth noting the 24.04 → 26.04 automatic upgrade is held back a couple of weeks while regressions in a recent rust-coreutils are backported. do-release-upgrade -d works now if you’d rather not wait, but read the release notes first.

The more interesting change is upstream. KDE retired the Plasma LTS product last year — almost nobody outside Kubuntu shipped it, it only covered Plasma rather than Frameworks or Gear, and there was no CI to validate the backports. Kubuntu Focus has now funded the Bullet-Proof KDE initiative to build the thing properly: Techpaladin working bugs reported by 26.04 users, and additional CI resources at KDE e.V. running Kubuntu 26.04 so backports to Plasma 6.6, Frameworks 6.24 and Gear 25.12 are actually tested.

Practically, if you’re on 26.04 today you already have some of it — themes holding embedded widgets, the media frame scaling cleanly, desktop files surviving a rename inside an Activity, remote desktop working out of the box.

Worth flagging the support asymmetry for anyone planning deployments: Ubuntu Desktop gets five years, the flavours including Kubuntu get three.

Sources: https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-6.6-lts/ and Nate Graham’s write-up at What a real LTS looks like: Kubuntu 26.04 – Adventures in Linux and KDE

We’ve covered it in a short video too, if that’s easier: https://youtu.be/FxDAT1LRZ4U

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Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 961
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Just curious, have you heard anything more about the topic of Qt updates in Ubuntu Pro? Gordon’s comment on Nate’s blog post would call a bit into question whether Qt does actually get supported as part of the Pro subscription, even if it’s theoretically in scope.

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Qt won’t get full-version updates and will remain on Qt 6.10.2. Ubuntu Pro will likely get security updates for it, which is the scope of ESM.

For what it’s worth, neither myself nor @ricktimmis work for Canonical, and questions about what Ubuntu Pro and ESM get with regards to Qt security updates are best answered by them. A good place to ask would be in Project Discussion > Ubuntu Pro .

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