KDE steps on the gas: it fixes many Plasma 6.6 bugs while emojis become more inclusive

  • KDE has almost everything ready for the release of Plasma 6.6.
  • Many bugs have been fixed and Plasma 6.7 is starting to take shape.
Pablinux

5 minutes

KDE Plasma 6.6 brush

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, Plasma 6.6 should arrive in just over two weeks. For that reason, KDE They're not adding many new features to that version, and what they're doing is focusing on polishing everything so it arrives in the best possible shape by mid-February. On the other hand, they are introducing new features, but these will arrive in Plasma 6.7, which they'll release later, in mid-2026.

A few hours ago, Nate Graham published a new weekly Plasma update, and it lists many bug fixes. They no longer provide figures on the number of bugs still to be fixed, but there is a good number of issues that have been resolved. What follows is the list with news that they have ahead of us today.

New Features Coming to KDE

plasma 6.7.0

  • The emoji picker window now allows you to choose mixed skin tone groupings via a nice, easy-to-use pop-up dialog.

Emojis

  • It is now possible to configure a global keyboard shortcut to clear the notification history.

KDE User Interface Improvements

plasma 6.6.0

  • In the application panel widget, the keyboard focus is no longer stolen by selectable items that are directly under the pointer when the widget is opened.
  • Checkboxes with the Breeze theme now always have an opaque background, which fixes an issue where unchecked versions could be difficult to see when overlaid on images.

plasma 6.7.0

  • The back button in the System Preferences subcategories now behaves more like a traditional back button, eliminating a source of redundant page titles and reducing the total by one.

Back button in system preferences

  • On the System Preferences notifications page, you can now always preview a notification sound even if the sound is turned off for that notification.
  • Plasma's network settings now display additional L2TP VPN options that were not previously available.
  • Plasma's old Air style, the clear variant of the Oxygen style, has returned with corrections and improvements.
  • The Oxygen cursor theme has received a minor visual tweak to improve the appearance of the busy cursor.
  • The cursor theme settings now display more accurate previews, correcting issues like wobbly cursors and making the preview grid feel more stable.
  • The various System Preferences theme selection pages are now consistent regarding whether the active theme can be removed, which it cannot, and also explain why certain themes cannot be removed, because they were installed by the operating system and not by the system for obtaining new items.
  • The weather report widget now displays a progress indicator while its popup window is open but is still loading the forecast from the server.

Framework 6.23

  • Drop-down menus in combo boxes in QtQuick-based applications and on System Preferences pages now use the standard menu style instead of a custom style.

drop down menus

  • Style has been added to the new SearchField component recently incorporated into QtQuick, which now looks the same as the KDE version created years before the Qt version existed.

KDE Performance and Technical

plasma 6.6.0

  • KRDP, KDE's library for remote desktop support, no longer requires systemd.

plasma 6.7.0

  • KWin now supports the Wayland ext-background-effect-v1 protocol, adding support for standardized background effects such as blur and opening the door to greater visual consistency between applications that use these effects.

Coming soon to your KDE desktop distribution

KDE Plasma 6.5.6 is expected to arrive on March 10th, and Frameworks 6.23 on February 13th. Plasma 6.6 is expected to arrive on February 17th, 2026. No official announcement has been made yet, so it is expected that there will continue to be three Plasma releases throughout at least 2026.

Vía: KDE Blog.