This Week in Plasma: Plasma 6.5 is nigh and KDE is 29 years old; help us celebrate!
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.5, and I think it’s gonna be a pretty darn good release when it comes out in 3 days! So eyes started turning towards features and UI improvements again, and you’ll notice a few of them this week.
Let me also draw your attention to another topic: KDE’s birthday! KDE is 29 this week and celebrating by kicking off our annual fundraiser. It’s a great time to donate if you’ve been on the fence or just want to show your love for Plasma!
The majority of KDE e.V.’s yearly budget comes from fourth quarter fundraising at this point, so it really does make a big difference. Donate today! And then check out this week’s goodies:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
The Application Dashboard widget can now be configured to follow the color scheme, though it remains dark by default. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)


Keep in mind this dashboard hasn’t had any visual sprucing-up in years; if you’re tempted to complain that it’s ugly or unpolished, we probably agree, and would welcome any contributions!
You can now resize the area between Application Dashboard widget’s Favorites and Applications areas, allowing for one or the other to take up more space. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Klipper actions can now be disabled, without having to remove them. (Jonathan Marten, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Right Now
The Plasma Browser Integration add-on’s settings window now has a dark background when its browser is using dark mode. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
KWin’s Dim Inactive effect is now clamped to strength levels between 10 and 90%, because anything outside that range doesn’t really make sense and can produce nonsensical results. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
If you’ve deliberately masked the Systemd service for the firmware updater (fwupd
), Discover no longer considers this an error to bug you about. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
The highlights for top-level menu items are now slightly rounded. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

When using the Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper provider, the thumbnail preview for the day’s wallpaper will now reflect the wallpaper’s actual aspect ratio — landscape or portrait — instead of always showing a portrait version of it. (Gergely Kovács, link)
Passwords for Wi-Fi networks are, by default, now stored globally (in a root-owned location, so not just anyone can go look at them), rather than per-user. This yields multiple benefits, including:
- No more KWallet popups on misconfigured systems
- New user accounts on the same system don’t need to manually log into common Wi-Fi networks all over again
- Login screen features like LDAP account login that need internet access now always work out of the box
(Kristen McWilliam, link)
Frameworks 6.20
KRunner’s search results no longer dynamically change the priority of search results based on how often they’re used. This was a very clever feature, but ultimately made it impossible to offer a good default sort order because the actual sort order would be different for every person. Removing that makes the search result ordering predictable, and hence learnable. (Harald Sitter, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.6
The app chooser window now respects whether the app that opened it wanted it to be modal or not. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed two cases where KWin could crash when you put a laptop to sleep with an external display connected, and then woke it up again with the screen disconnected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash while closing after saving a file. (Noah Davis, link)
Fixed a bug that could make remote desktop connections fail when using a recent version of ffmpeg
. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Fixed a bug that made it possible for screen content to not update frequently enough when using one of the full-screen colorblindness correction effects. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a visual issue that could make full-screen HDR content in certain games not actually look HDR. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Rotating a screen with HDR active no longer makes it become brighter than the surface of the sun for a few milliseconds. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a bug that made System Monitor sensors display the wrong values for certain NVIDIA GPUs. (David Redondo, link)
Notifications marked “transient” once again stay out of the notification history even if they include actions. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Fixed the scroll handle of the Application Dashboard widget; dragging it now works. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Fixed two layout issues with custom System Monitor layouts when using the “Maximum” height option, or more than 11 rows. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Large panels can no longer cover up the Edit Mode dialog when there are several of them in a complex layout. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Worked around a newly-introduced Qt 6.10 issue that made notifications about downloaded files inappropriately remain visible until manually closed. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Plasma 6.5.1
Fixed some UI issues in System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (David Edmundson and Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)
Fixed a bug that could cause minor visual glitches when moving the pointer in and out of certain apps’ windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue that made Plasma tab bars not look quite right with non-default Plasma styles. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Discover no longer crashes when you’ve got Flatpak installed but it’s nonetheless not available for some reason. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed a bug that would store the IPsec passwords of some VPNs incorrectly, making them ask for the password every time you connected. (Mickaël Thomas, link)
Frameworks 6.19.1
Fixed a serious regression accidentally introduced into Frameworks 6.19 that made it impossible to write files into Samba shares. The relevant code will be covered with an autotest soon so it doesn’t regress again. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Frameworks 6.20
Separator lines throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now pixel-perfect, resolving an issue that could make them look much brighter than intended with a dark color scheme. Marco wrote an interesting blog post about this, too. (Marco Martin, link)
System Settings pages opened standalone using kcmshell6
no longer sometimes experience the bottom part of scrollable views being cut off. (Jakob Petsovits, link)
Fixed a bug that made the icon chooser dialog not let you re-select the same icon you selected the last time it was open. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Other bug information of note:
- Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (down from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
- 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 29 last week). Current list of bugs
Notable in Performance & Technical
Plasma 6.5.0
Made some improvements to nested KWin sessions, including better performance and inhibiting global shortcuts outside of the nested environment. (Xaver Hugl and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)
Plasma 6.6.0
kcmshell6 --list
now sorts its output alphabetically. (Taras Oleksyn, link)
How You Can Help
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference.
If money is tight, you can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist, too.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
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