KDE developers released the second beta for Plasma 6.5 this week, delivering a significant number of bug fixes and refinements ahead of the final version scheduled for later this month. Concurrently, new features intended for the subsequent Plasma 6.6 update have begun to land, focusing on user interface improvements and enhanced usability across the desktop environment.
UI and Usability Enhancements
Plasma 6.5 brings immediate quality-of-life updates. Kai Uwe Broulik implemented a change allowing users to find emojis in the Emoji Selector by searching for their English names, even when the system is set to a different language.
In a subtle but effective change by Akseli Lahtinen, week numbers in Plasma’s calendars are now italicized to better distinguish them from day numbers.
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Looking ahead to Plasma 6.6, Niccolò Venerandi made multiple improvements to the time zone chooser map, enabling farther and more predictable zooming while eliminating blurry text. For users of right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew, Plasma will now display reversed audio icons where appropriate, a feature contributed by Farid Abdelnour and Nate Graham, which is now supported by the Breeze icon theme.
Broad Bug Fixes and Stability
A wide array of bugs have been addressed across the Plasma stack. For version 6.4.6, a critical fix by Nate Graham and Aleix Pol Gonzalez now allows Discover’s automatic shutdown feature to prompt users to save changes in open applications, preventing potential data loss. Other notable fixes include resolving an issue that prevented Flatpak apps from creating launchers, correcting blurry text in System Monitor, and ensuring ampersands appear correctly in Task Manager context menus.
The Plasma 6.5.0 fixed a case where Discover could crash on exit and resolves multiple issues with the Application Dashboard launcher, including improper resizing and focus loss behavior. For Frameworks 6.19, a patch by Marco Martin prevents Plasma from crashing when encountering malformed themes, and a fix by Pan Zhang restores the “Delete oldest files from the trash” functionality.
Performance and Technical Refinements
In Plasma 6.4.6, Fabian Vogt fixed an issue that caused unnecessary CPU consumption when the Networks widget was visible. Arjen Hiemstra contributed a fix to Frameworks 6.19 that stops System Monitor from wasting resources by rendering graphs even when they are not visible.
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As part of a larger project to make configuration files more manageable, Nicolas Fella moved Discover’s update notification timestamps out of the main settings file in Plasma 6.5. In Plasma 6.6, stale configuration data from old panels will now be properly deleted, cleaning up user config files.
Visit the official KDE blog page for more details. All the images are taken from https://blogs.kde.org/
