KDE team adds finishing touches to Plasma 6.6 as stable release date nears

We are just days away from the launch of KDE Plasma 6.6, next Tuesday, and the KDE team spent the week pushing a bunch of last-minute fixes ahead of the release.

Plasma 6.6 will ship with a boatload of bug fixes, including several for KWin, the compositing window manager used by KDE Plasma. Developers have hardened KWin against crashes that could happen when a graphics driver unexpectedly resets itself.

A crash that occurred when Plasma was used alongside the i3 tiling window manager has also been fixed. Other fixes include resolving a "division by 0" issue in system monitoring widgets and making sure the swap usage percentage now displays correctly on systems without any swap space.

After the release of Plasma 6.6, expect the first bugfix release, Plasma 6.6.1, on February 24. In this version, if you put a battery-powered device to sleep while it has critically low power, then charge it, the system will no longer incorrectly trigger the "oh no, I am critically low" action immediately upon waking up. In addition to that, the overall application ratings shown in Discover, KDE's software center, will now accurately reflect a simple average of individual ratings.

Plasma 6.5.6, a maintenance release for the older 6.5 series, will arrive this March. Here, monitor names shown in the Brightness & Color widget will update as expected if you connect or disconnect screens while the system is asleep. Plasma 6.56 also corrects multiple issues where custom-tiled windows on disconnected screens moved to incorrect positions on any remaining displays.

Looking further ahead to Plasma 6.7, the "Remote Desktop" page will move into the "Security & Privacy" section within System Settings.

You will also see better handling of loop devices in the Disks & Devices widget, and wallpaper previews that include both light and dark versions will appear with noticeably less visual jagginess. You can also configure the delay before the window switcher shows up after holding Alt+Tab.

Finally, setting up Samba shares for your folders is now far more seamless. Plasma can automatically enable the Samba service on systemd-based distributions when needed.

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Posted Saturday 14 February 2026 at 5:39 pm AEST (my time).

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