KDE is now working flat out to prepare Plasma 6.5, which will arrive in the coming weeks. At the same time, the K team is working on the next version, Plasma 6.6, which we'll see in early 2026. That's the cycle of life and development for any software: moving forward and improving without much respite. The 6.4 series continues to receive fixes, which we'll see in the sixth maintenance update, but the new features are already in 6.5 and 6.6.
As we have been saying every weekend, this is an article about weekly news, but we haven't included the fixed bugs in the list to keep these posts too long. Those who want more details should visit the original link provided at the end of this article. The following is a list of the most notable new features presented today.
New Features Coming to KDE
plasma 6.5.0
- Color blindness correction filters now include a grayscale mode that can be used to desaturate all colors on the screen, or remove them entirely.
Notable improvements to the KDE user interface
plasma 6.5.0
- On the Bluetooth page of System Preferences, the On/Off switch now stays in place after interacting with it.
- When setting a slideshow wallpaper, you can now click the entire grid element of each image to turn it on or off, instead of having to point to the small checkbox in the corner.
- Anything that lets you quickly see what's on your desktop now consistently uses the term “Glance at Desktop.”
- When the system runs out of inotify observers, and we fix it by clicking the "fix it" button in the notification that alerts us to the problem, the notification now disappears after it's fixed.
- The Activity Manager widget now has a reasonable limit on the maximum icon size, so it's no longer ridiculously large on very thick panels.
- The Add Connection dialog on the Networking page of System Preferences has been slightly modernized.
plasma 6.6.0
- Improved the way cross-app activation occurs on Wayland in several ways.
- The user interface for the color blindness correction feature on the Accessibility page of System Preferences has been improved.
- The App Permissions page in System Preferences now displays the Technical ID of Flatpak apps instead of their version number (because it's not very useful there), and text can also be selected and copied.
Notable aspects of KDE's performance and technical side
plasma 6.5.0
- Dragging widgets over other widgets no longer overloads the system with a delay proportional to the mouse refresh rate used to drag them. It's now always fluid and smooth.
Coming soon to your KDE distribution
As for bugs, the 2 high priority bugs and the 26 15-minute bugs remain.
KDE Plasma 6.5 stable is expected to arrive on October 21st, and Frameworks 6.19 on October 10th. There's no confirmed date for Plasma 6.6.
Vía: KDE blog.