KDE He launched plasma 6.5 More than a month ago, that series was already relatively stable and will now focus on the release of the next version, Plasma 6.6, which will arrive in 2026. Among these future improvements, most will be aesthetic tweaks, such as the blur effect, which will look better on dark color schemes. As expected, the project is also actively hunting down, capturing, and eliminating bugs, although the number of the most critical ones remains high.
What follows is the list with the most outstanding news, not counting those bugs that have been fixed. Anyone who wants to see the complete list of changes will have to visit the original link that we will provide at the end of this article.
New Features Coming to KDE
plasma 6.6.0
- Windows can now be selectively excluded from screen recording by invoking it from the title bar context menu, the Task Manager context menu, and window rules.
KDE interface improvements
plasma 6.6.0
- With a dark color scheme, the blur effect now produces a darker and more vibrant blur when there are bright colors in the background. Additionally, the blur's saturation value is user-configurable to adjust to a preferred level.
- When clicking on grouped icons in Task Manager to cycle through your windows, full-screen windows no longer always rise first; they now rise according to their last use.
- The portal remote control dialog box interface has been polished to look better and be more natural to read.
- When you open the Kickoff Application Launcher, if the pointer lands directly over an item in the Favorites view, it will not be automatically selected.
- The Kickoff App Launcher widget now attempts to keep the first item in the search results selected until the list receives focus and manual browsing begins.
- Discover now uses more understandable language when used to find applications capable of opening a specific type of file.
- It's much less likely to accidentally raise an unwanted app when a notification appears right below something that's being dragged and dropped.
- KMenuEdit allows you to select multiple items at once to delete them faster.
- The QR code dialog that could be accessed from the clipboard has been removed; now the QR code is displayed directly in the widget, making it large enough to use and simplifying the code.
KDE Performance and Technical
plasma 6.5.3
- Applications that use the Keyboard Shortcuts Portal to set shortcuts can now remove them in the same way.
- Spectacle's Active Window mode can be used to capture WINE windows.
plasma 6.6.0
- The smoothness of animations in Plasma and KWin has been significantly improved for screens with a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz.
- The amount of unnecessary work that KWin does during its composition process has been reduced.
- When you remove all shortcuts from a category on the Shortcuts page in System Preferences, all shortcuts become dimmed and no longer interactive; a warning also appears indicating that they will be removed shortly and offering the opportunity to undo the action.
Framework 6.21
- KConfig now analyzes configuration files in a stream instead of opening them all at once, allowing it to detect damaged or badly formatted files sooner and preventing crashes in multiple places.
- By using the Systemd integration (enabled by default if Systemd is present), programs will no longer fail to start when there are environment variables that begin with a digit, something that Systemd does not support.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
Regarding bugs, the 4 high-priority bugs have been maintained, and the 15-minute bugs have been increased from 31 to 34.
KDE Plasma 6.5.4 is expected to arrive on December 9th, and Frameworks 6.21 three days later, on the 12th of the same month. Plasma 6.6 will take a little longer: the chosen date is February 17th, 2026. No official announcement has been made yet, so it is expected that there will continue to be three Plasma versions throughout at least 2026.
VÃa: KDE Blog.