Good news for KDE users: Plasma 6.5 will launch with a new OOBE wizard

Another weekend, another KDE development update. This week focuses on a loads of bug fixes for Plasma 6.4.5, as well as UI and performance improvements for the upcoming Plasma 6.5.

About two months ago, we told you about KDE Initial System Setup (KISS), a KDE project that creates a first-run setup wizard for the user. This out-of-the-box experience (OOBE) is similar to how Windows and macOS guide you through creating an account and picking settings.

The project actually began in 2020, but it went dormant sometime around mid-2022. Thankfully, it was revived this March, and then developer Kristen McWilliam took over the project and pushed it forward. The KDE team says KISS is now production-ready and will land in Plasma 6.5.

Here is KISS in action:

Plasma 6.5 is also bringing several UI improvements like newly scrollable Plasma panels. When they get too crowded with app icons, they will now scroll instead of just compressing icons forever. The update adds more relevant info about your game controllers in System Settings, like joystick type and actual button names.

In System Settings, the Drawing Tablet page will now hide itself if you do not have a tablet connected, but you can still force it to appear for troubleshooting. Other changes include a better tone mapping curve for displaying HDR content and improved accessibility on the Shortcuts page.

We're less than three weeks away from the release of Plasma 6.4.5, and the developers have added a bunch of bug fixes that will land with the release. For example, if you clone a panel that has a System Tray widget, its settings will now be cloned correctly. The team also fixed a layout issue with the Audio Volume widget that caused an application's recording stream to be indented incorrectly.

Those with AMD GPUs will be pleased to hear that a workaround has been implemented for a driver issue on some cards like the RX 7900 XTX. This problem caused the screen to flicker on HDR-capable displays when changing GAMMA_LUT values, which happens frequently when you adjust brightness.

As for 6.5, the bug fixes it brings include preventing desktop icons from shifting around, particularly after switching folder layouts. The team also tackled a performance issue by switching to a more lightweight timer for KWin's render loop.

Profiling showed that the old QTimer was a resource hog, so the developers ported the code to a lighter QBasicTimer.

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Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 24 August 2025 at 5:54 am AEST (my time).

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