KDE Plasma 6.5.1 rolls out, finally fixing an 8-year-old Plasma Desktop bug

The KDE team has released Plasma 6.5.1, the first bugfix update for Plasma 6.5, bringing several changes across components like KWin, the Plasma Desktop, Discover, and more.

Following the Plasma 6.5.0, some users reported that their cursor was replaced by a set of horizontal lines. The bug affected people with older AMD GPUs using the legacy Radeon driver, and a developer figured out that a workaround for legacy modesetting had been accidentally removed. Plasma 6.5.1 brings a fix that restores the use of "dumb buffers" for the cursor on these systems, correcting the visual glitch.

This release also stops KWin from getting stuck in an infinite loop when calculating window placement offsets. It improves how HDR metadata is handled and prevents the active display from getting corrupted when you plug in or unplug a monitor.

In the Plasma Desktop, a really old bug that has existed since 2017 finally got squashed. Previously, when you dragged an application from the Kickoff launcher's favorites list to your desktop to create a shortcut, the launcher would also reorder your favorites.

The new code resets the internal grid layout if the drag operation leaves the launcher's window, so your favorites only get reordered if you actually drop the icon inside the favorites list. Another fix makes sure that the content inside panel applets properly respects the panel's separator line.

Moving over to Discover, the software manager received some stability updates. A crash that could occur was fixed. For users on immutable operating systems like Fedora Kinoite, Discover's handling of rpm-ostree backends was improved. The software center will no longer use skopeo to fetch tags, and it provides better progress notifications once a transaction is complete.

Other small fixes include Spectacle now setting the correct export timestamps on screenshots taken in rectangle mode, a problem that could screw up file sorting. KPipeWire now builds correctly with older versions of the FFmpeg multimedia framework.

The Plasma Firewall settings page correctly grays out the enable button if the firewall service is not running. In the Plasma Workspace, the icon for removing a wallpaper was updated to something more intuitive. Lastly, libksysguard, the backend for the system monitor, now correctly reports swap usage.

You can check out the full changelog here.

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Posted Wednesday 29 October 2025 at 12:40 pm AEST (my time).

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