KDE Plasma will soon properly handle waste toner warnings

We're less than a month from the next major release of KDE Plasma, version 6.6, and the team spent the whole week adding a couple of finishing touches. Let's take a look at some of the most notable ones.

Previously, KDE Plasma would incorrectly warn users about an empty waste toner box. This happened because the system was treating all printer components as standard consumables, like ink or toner, which start full and are replaced when empty.

A waste toner box, however, is a receptacle that starts empty and needs to be replaced when it gets full. The system saw a level of '0' and threw an error. Now, Plasma can properly distinguish between consumables and receptacles, and it will only notify you when your waste toner box is actually full.

The KDE team also brought KRunner settings and pin buttons to the right, just like in other Plasma widgets, and changed the default desktop switching and Present Windows shortcuts to use the Meta key.

When it comes to bug fixes to expect from 6.6, one patch addresses a "surprisingly common" issue where KWin could crash if you frantically wiggled the pointer to stop a monitor from going to sleep.

Other fixes include resolving a KWin crash that occurred when deleting a virtual desktop that still had windows on it and another that fixed a bug where tooltips from widget popups could get stuck on the panel.

Moving on to Plasma 6.7, there is now a dedicated UI for configuring shared printers on Windows networks. In addition to that, the Wi-Fi & Networking page in System Settings now uses clearer security labels, correctly showing WPA2 and WPA3 support.

Plasma 6.7 will also bring a fix for an issue that caused long boot menu entries to be cut off in the Breeze GRUB styling and another that broke KRunner’s Activities plugin from finding any activities.

Plasma 6.5.6, the sixth bugfix release for Plasma 6.5, is scheduled to drop on the 10th of March, and it will bring different fixes including a solution for a KWin crash that could sometimes happen after periods of idleness.

Another fix addresses a crash that happened when you disabled widgets in the System Tray and clicked the "OK" button instead of "Apply". Finally, Spectacle will once again remember the last location where you saved a screenshot.

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Posted Saturday 24 January 2026 at 6:24 pm AEST (my time).

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