The KDE development team has been hard at work refining the upcoming Plasma 6.5 desktop environment, scheduled for release on October 21, 2025, and this week’s updates bring some long-awaited visual enhancements.
One of the most noticeable changes is the addition of rounded bottom corners to windows, finally matching the already rounded top corners. It’s now enabled by default in the Breeze window decoration. Of course, if you prefer the old style look, you can always switch it off.
Honestly, I’ve always thought rounded corners add a nice visual touch—they’re used in pretty much every major desktop environment and operating system out there.
So I’ve often wondered why KDE only applied them to the top corners. But now, with Plasma 6.5 right around the corner, it looks like everything’s finally coming together—something that fans of those small, aesthetic details are definitely going to appreciate.
Beyond aesthetics, several usability enhancements are on the way in Plasma 6.5:
- Resizable sidebars in Discover & System Monitor – Now you can adjust the width to your liking, and the setting remains in place.
- Smarter disk mounting in the Disks & Devices widget – Skip the lengthy error-checking process for trusted drives or manually trigger a scan without mounting.
- Better KRunner search results – No more artificially boosted priority for KDE apps or favorites, which should make results feel more logical.
- Instant weather updates – The Weather Report widget now refreshes immediately after waking from sleep.
- A much-needed “Cancel” button – When creating a new user in System Settings, you can now bail out mid-process.
On top of that, the upcoming 6.5 release will also include some crucial fixes:
- Volume Controls no longer break in narrow mode for non-English languages.
- HDR mode now dims the cursor correctly on the lock screen.
- Fewer Kirigami-related crashes when using software rendering.
- No more flickering in System Settings’ FormLayout.
Lastly, on the technical side, KWin is now less reliant on potentially faulty screen color data, and file dialog sizes are stored in a more logical manner.
For users eager to see these changes in action, the beta release should arrive in the coming weeks. For more information, see KDE’s blog post.
Image credits: KDE Project
