KDE Plasma 6.6 will finally fix those pesky fingerprint authentication issues

KDE Plasma 6.6 is around the corner, and the KDE team is still hard at work adding finishing touches and bug fixes ahead of the stable release. Let's take a look at some of the highlights of the latest KDE "This Week in Plasma" issue.

The Touchscreen Gestures page in Plasma 6.6 will now hide itself if you do not have a touchscreen connected. As for the bug fixes, the KDE team squashed some long-standing problems with fingerprint authentication. One of these bugs caused the fingerprint unlock prompt to deactivate after the screen auto-locked. This meant the "or place finger in reader prompt" would just disappear, leaving users unable to scan their finger. Another related bug could leave the lock screen completely unresponsive, showing an "Unlock" button that did absolutely nothing.

Other bug fixes include:

• A Plasma crash caused by applying a global theme that included a malformed layout script is now fixed.
• Panel tooltips no longer incorrectly respect certain window placement policies on the Wayland session.
• User-created global shortcuts are now correctly categorized as "Applications", preventing them from being stuck as uneditable system services.
• The Kickoff application launcher now shows correct file type icons for recent items and no longer displays a weird duplicate "files" section.
• Spectacle, the screenshot utility, now shows the correct resolution in its tooltip for rectangular region screenshots when using fractional scaling.
• The "Open With" dialog now properly filters its view when you open it from a Flatpak application.
• Keyboard focus no longer gets trapped inside the Search widget after search results appear.

In Plasma 6.7, the Window List widget will get sorting and section headers, making it easier to navigate windows by virtual desktop or activity. The window manager will remember tiling padding on a per-screen basis, the wallpaper selection dialog will open to your last-used location, and cursor theme previews will scale better with large cursor sizes.

Plasma 6.5.6, the sixth bug fix release for Plasma 6.5, will ship next month with a fix for an issue in sRGB ICC profile parsing that reduced color accuracy. Other changes to expect include a tweak to the "Keep display configuration?" dialog that prevents you from accidentally closing it with a panic click.

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Posted Sunday 8 February 2026 at 5:12 am AEST (my time).

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