KDE Plasma finally brings a feature users have been requesting for 22 years

This week, as usual, the KDE team worked on different parts of the KDE ecosystem, including Plasma, Discover, and KRunner. Let's take a look at the most notable changes made.

About 22 years ago, on February 6, 2003, KDE user Dan Allen submitted a feature request that would become something of a legend. He wanted a way to "freeze" items in the Klipper clipboard so they would not get pushed out of the history, and argued that this would let him keep important text snippets handy without setting a massive history size.

After decades of discussion and countless duplicate bug reports, well, here we are. The Plasma clipboard, in the upcoming 6.5 release, will finally let you mark entries as favorites. Starred items are protected from being automatically cleared from the history.

The team also added other features, including support for letting you configure touch rings on drawing tablets, which are now configurable. Discover can also now install hardware drivers directly from your operating system's repositories.

Moving on to Plasma 6.5, KRunner has added fuzzy matching for applications, so that when you search for something, your typos are less of an issue. You can also now find global shortcuts directly from the search bar.

Discover has improved its error messages to be more understandable, and you can now write a review for an application that has none.

On the technical side, the compositor has implemented support for "overlay panes" on single-monitor setups, a change that could significantly reduce GPU power usage for full-screen applications.

This feature is currently disabled for NVIDIA users due to driver issues. In Frameworks 6.18, the team fixed a crash that occurred when dragging files from Dolphin to the desktop on systems with certain mount types. If you were experiencing crashes when configuring the weather widget or when quitting System Settings with certain pages open, that has been fixed in Plasma 6.5.

The next bug fix release for Plasma 6.4, version 6.4.5, is set to land next month with some important fixes, including one for a bug that could cause the text of a sticky note on a panel to be lost forever if the panel was cloned and then deleted. Now, the underlying data files are sent to the trash instead of being immediately deleted.

The team says the annotation feature in the screenshot tool, Spectacle, has been extracted into its own reusable library. This will allow other applications to use its annotation capabilities in the future, though the integration work is still in progress.

You can find out more in this KDE blog post.

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Posted Sunday 31 August 2025 at 6:49 am AEST (my time).

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