Plasma 6.5

How do you make a great desktop into a fantastic desktop? Easy — chip away at the rough bits, polish the good stuff, and add awesomeness. After 29 years of development, KDE’s got the foundation nailed down. Plasma 6.5 is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone.

Ready to see what’s new? Let’s dive into Plasma 6.5!

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Usability

Usability improvement has been a major focus in Plasma 6.5. Here are some examples of what you can expect:

System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page has been updated to show detected wireless networks, and you can connect to them directly from there.

Speaking of networking, when sharing the QR code of a Wi-Fi network, its password is now shown as well, so the person you’re sharing it to can easily connect. And to avoid mistakes, clicking “Connect” on a network in the Networks widget closes any other open password fields for other networks, so there’s only one visible at any given time. The widget also now provides visible messages like “looking for wireless networks” and “network has been disabled” to make it clearer what’s going on.

Continuing with the System Tray, the notification telling you that you missed some notifications while you were in Do Not Disturb mode includes a button you can click on to see those missed notifications.

In the audio department, Plasma now warns you that keeping the “Raise maximum volume” setting active for prolonged periods may damage the device’s speakers, and when the system is muted, changing the volume in any way now un-mutes all playback devices.

Likewise, muting microphones with a dedicated "Mute Microphone" key (or using the very cool secret Meta+Mute shortcut) now mutes all microphones, rather than just the active one. This makes the behavior consistent between microphones and speakers.

For the gamers out there, you can now see more relevant info about game controllers on System Settings’ Game Controller page.

And finally, setting up a wallpaper slideshow has been made easier as you can now click on the entire grid item for each image to toggle it on or off. And once it’s set up, you can advance to the or previous next wallpaper with a keyboard shortcut.

Widgets

KRunner, Plasma’s search/launch/unit converter/calculator/“but wait, there’s more” tool, uses fuzzy matching to look up applications. This means that even if you misspell an app’s name, KRunner will probably still find it for you. How search results are ordered has also been improved, and KRunner will start to provide those results after the first character is typed.

Sticky Notes added to panels can be resized to be much smaller; you can change their background color from the context menu; and when you choose the “Transparent” background color, colored sticky notes’ backgrounds disappear entirely.

On Wayland, you can re-order virtual desktops directly from the Pager widget, and re-ordering them in the Overview effect’s grid view now re-orders them in the Pager widget, too.

HDR & Windows

The tone mapping curve used by KWin has been tweaked for when displaying HDR content and now it looks better than ever.

Plasma 6.5 implements support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol that promises to allow apps like Firefox to eventually display proper PiP windows that stay above others automatically.