KDE team puts finishing touches on Plasma 6.5 as stable release date approaches

Another weekend is here, and the KDE team is back with another "This Week in Plasma" update, highlighting the finishing touches put into Plasma 6.5, which is merely just 3 days away. Let's take a look at the most notable changes.

KWin's Dim Inactive effect in Plasma 6.5 has been clamped to strength levels between 10 and 90 percent, because settings outside that range produced nonsensical results. In addition to that, the KDE team ironed out several bugs, including a KWin crash that occurred when you woke a laptop from sleep after disconnecting an external display.

The update also corrects a problem that caused remote desktop connections to fail when using a recent version of ffmpeg. Another fix addresses an issue where screen content would not update frequently enough when a user enabled full-screen colorblindness correction effects.

Finally, for NVIDIA users, a bug that made System Monitor sensors display the wrong values for certain GPUs has been squashed.

Plasma 6.5.1, the bugfix release for Plasma 6.5, will ship with fixes for multiple user interface issues on System Settings' Remote Desktop page. The team also fixed a bug that could cause minor visual glitches when moving the pointer in and out of the windows of certain applications.

Even though Plasma 6.5 is not out yet, KDE is already working on the next major release, Plasma 6.6. This will bring an updated Application Dashboard widget that can be configured to follow the system color scheme, although the default is dark mode.

You can also resize the area between the widget's "Favorites" and "Applications" sections. The top-level menu items have been modified with slightly rounded highlights, and the Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper provider will now show a thumbnail that reflects the image's actual aspect ratio instead of always showing a portrait version of it.

As for the bug fixes scheduled for Plasma 6.6, they include:

• Discover no longer crashes when Flatpak is installed, but is unavailable for some reason.
• A bug that incorrectly stored IPsec passwords for some VPNs, which caused them to ask for the password every time you connected, has been fixed.

You can find out more from the official KDE blog post.

Source

Hope you enjoyed this news post. Feedback welcome.

Posted Sunday 19 October 2025 at 4:49 am AEST (my time).

News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of September): 4,533

RIP Matrix