# KDE Gear 26.12 release branches open with December 10 target date

> **Key takeaway:** KDE Gear 26.12 has branched from master, starting a five-week release cycle ending December 10, 2026.

**Published:** 2026-11-07T08:22:51+00:00 
**Source:** Planet KDE (Desktop Engineers) 
**Category:** distro-planet 
**Canonical URL:** https://fosswire.org/news/kde-gear-2612-release-branches-open-with-december-10-target-.html 

## Summary
The KDE Gear 26.12 release branches have been created, marking the transition point where new features must be committed to the stable branch rather than master to be included in the December release. Developers now have until November 12 to land changes before the feature freeze and first beta tarball. The schedule follows KDE's standard release cadence with a beta on November 13, release candidate on November 27, and final packages distributed to distribution packagers on December 4 ahead of the public release.

This is the regular six-month KDE Gear release that bundles updates to KDE's application suite including Dolphin, Kate, Okular, Gwenview, and numerous other desktop utilities. The 26.12 version number indicates this is the second Gear release of 2026, following the 26.08 release in August. Distribution maintainers and users tracking KDE's release schedule can now plan packaging and testing around the published milestone dates.

## KDE Gear 26.12 release schedule and branch mechanics
- **Branch creation:** The 26.12 stable branches have been cut from master, meaning all application repositories now have a dedicated branch for this release cycle.
- **Feature freeze deadline:** November 12, 2026 at 23:59 UTC is the cutoff for new features; after this point only bug fixes should be committed to the 26.12 branch.
- **Beta versioning:** The pre-release tarballs use 26.11.80 for beta and 26.11.90 for release candidate, following KDE's established pre-release version numbering scheme.
- **Packager lead time:** Final tarballs are created December 3 and distributed to packagers December 4, giving distributions six days to build and test before the December 10 public release.
- **Schedule reference:** The full timeline is documented at community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.12_Schedule for contributor and packager coordination.

## Why it matters
For Linux distribution maintainers, the published schedule enables coordinated packaging across rolling and fixed-release distros, with Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and KDE Neon typically integrating betas while Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian stable track the final release. The six-day packager window before public release is standard for KDE Gear and allows downstream testing that catches integration issues before users receive updates. Application developers in the KDE ecosystem should now target the 26.12 branch for any bug fixes they want delivered to users before the next cycle begins in 2027.