KDE Plasma 6.5 will include an improved emoji picker

The KDE team has released the first "This Week in Plasma" update of the month, bringing multiple bug fixes and improvements to Plasma 6.4.6, 6.5, and 6.6.

This week saw the release of Plasma 6.5 Beta 2, packed with a ton of fixes ahead of its final release. The update addresses an issue in Discover where it would not prioritize your default package source, sometimes showing a Flatpak when you would rather have the repo version.

Another fix tackles a high-priority bug in KWin (Wayland) where dragging a picture in a Chromium browser could break the user interface and stop the application from registering mouse clicks.

As the team puts the finishing touches on Plasma 6.5, it is also working on the follow-up release, Plasma 6.6, which comes with some nice UI improvements. The time zone chooser map got a complete overhaul. You can now zoom in and out much farther; the zooming action is more predictable, and there is no more blurry text.

In 6.6, when you set the system language to Arabic or Hebrew, Plasma will display reversed versions of the audio icons in different places, assuming your icon theme, like Breeze, provides them.

Speaking of non-English system languages, the team has added a feature in Plasma 6.5 to the Emoji Picker, where if you use the system in a language like German, you can still find emojis by searching for their English names.

Now, unto the bug fixes: Plasma 6.4.6, set to release next month, fixes the issue where Flatpak apps could not create launchers using the Dynamic Launcher portal. Other fixes 6.4.6 will bring include Discover's automatic shutdown feature, now properly allowing apps to prompt you to save unsaved changes, preventing data loss.

A problem that made the Applications table in System Monitor blurry at certain scale factors got sorted out, and the team fixed a bug that prevented the warning message about other logged-in users from appearing when you try to shut down or restart the system.

You can learn more from the full announcement blog post.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 5 October 2025 at 3:49 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix