KDE Plasma 6.4 Beta 2 arrives with multiple bug fixes

The second beta of KDE Plasma 6.4 just landed, and it is packed with fixes as KDE gears up for the final release scheduled for June 17th, 2025. While new features were largely locked down earlier, this beta focuses on squashing bugs and polishing what is already there, ensuring a smoother experience for everyone.

A significant amount of attention has gone into refining the Audio Volume widget. Users will notice small textual headers now clearly separating audio input and output device sections, making it easier to tell your microphone from your speakers. The mute button has been neatly indented to align better with labels, and keyboard navigation, along with accessibility, have received welcome improvements.

One of these is the icon for item-specific menus in list items, like those in the Audio Volume widget, switching to the view-more-symbolic icon, a change hinted at in KDE's weekly development summary last week. Furthermore, when you are playing media, the widget's Applications page will now show the name, which is particularly handy with web browsers juggling multiple sounds.

KWin, Plasma's powerful window manager and compositor, saw fixes for XWayland leaking normal key presses when using keyboard layouts other than English and addressed an issue where custom tiles could collapse a bit too enthusiastically. Spectacle, the screenshot utility, had a crash fixed when using "Save As" in rectangle mode, and an issue preventing the --edit-existing command-line option from actually showing a window has been resolved.

The Plasma Desktop itself received updates, including several for Kicker, the application launcher, tackling problems with its size, how it handles long application names, and keyboard navigation. Discover, the software center, benefits from fixes related to rpm-ostree for those on immutable systems and improved accessibility on its updates page.

The Powerdevil service, which handles power management, received fixes for the battery monitor applet, preventing it from repeatedly asking to install Power Profiles Daemon (PPD) if it is already there and ensuring only one battery icon shows up in the desktop tray. Even Dr Konqi, the crash reporter, had a tweak to its minimum systemd requirement. Bluedevil, managing Bluetooth connections, now sorts devices with actual names first in its wizard, making device selection a little more straightforward.

For more information about this release, you can check out the full changelog. In addition to that, you can grab the live image to test it out yourself.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post.

Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years.

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of April): 1,811

RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend