KDE has published its weekly news note and has started by talking about and celebrating the launch of plasma 6.5It's an important release, but they can't rest on their laurels and must continue looking to the future. And also to the past, as they continue fixing bugs for the 6.5 and 6.4 series, the previous one still having to match the 6.6 release they've been releasing since discontinuing the LTS versions.
What follows is the list with this week's news, not including the bugs fixed to keep this type of article from becoming too long. Those who want to see everything should visit the original post, which we'll link to at the end of this article.
Notable new features coming to KDE
plasma 6.6.0
- It is now possible to configure Task Manager to adjust the volume of audio played by a task when you hover over it.
Notable improvements to the KDE interface
plasma 6.5.1
- You can now drag items out of the Kickoff App Launcher Favorites grid without accidentally reordering them. When the dragged item leaves the grid area, everything is restored to where it was before you started dragging, leaving only the item you're moving.
- Task progress notifications will no longer prompt you to view more details when there is only one item, as no further information is available in that case.
- Progress notifications for minimized tasks in the history view are now always displayed there, rather than being limited to just the three most recent.
plasma 6.6.0
- Adjacent highlighted categories in Kickoff app launcher widgets no longer touch each other.
- When playing media in a web browser and controlling it using the Media Player widget thanks to the browser's integration with Plasma, the website's favicon icon is now displayed as album art if the website doesn't provide its own.
- On the Display settings page of System Preferences, all sliders are now the same width.
- The “About this system” page can now be found by searching for “winver,” which may look familiar to those coming from Windows.
Framework 6.20
- The Breeze “Open Link” icon now has a reversed version for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, and is used in several places.
- Changed to a more elegant animation when moving forward or backward between pages.
Featured in KDE performance and technical aspects
plasma 6.5.1
- A lower-bandwidth method for transmitting color information has been adopted, reducing the overhead on displays that are barely meeting the available bandwidth of the cable, port, or GPU to which they are connected, and decreasing the likelihood of them not displaying any image at all.
- Fixed an issue that prevented direct scanning from being used when it should have been.
plasma 6.6.0
- Added support for apps to pass the position property when initiating screen sharing, allowing for greater control in multi-screen setups.
- Clock widgets have been migrated to a new library called “libclock,” which fixes several bugs in specific cases and provides architectural and maintenance benefits.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, they remain at 0 high priority and the 15-minute bugs have dropped from 31 to 30.
KDE Plasma 6.5.1 is expected to arrive next Tuesday, October 28th, and Frameworks 6.20 on November 14th. Plasma 6.6 will take a little longer: the date chosen will be February 17th, 2026. They have not yet released any statement on this matter, so it is expected that there will continue to be three versions of Plasma throughout at least 2026.
Vía: KDE Blog.