Less than three weeks before the final stable release, scheduled for October 21, the KDE community has announced Plasma 6.5 Beta, giving users an early look at what’s coming in the next major desktop update.
On the design side, one of the most noticeable changes is the addition of rounded bottom window corners for Breeze-themed, borderless windows. Additionally, Plasma 6.5 introduces day/night switching for both global themes and wallpapers, as well as an option to prefer either light or dark variants of dynamic wallpapers.
Users can now even choose which global themes are displayed on the System Settings landing page, making customization a bit more straightforward.
The clipboard gets an upgrade, too, with the ability to star and save items for easy reuse. Over in search, KRunner-powered queries now include fuzzy matching for applications and the ability to find global shortcuts.
For digital artists, Plasma 6.5 introduces a long-requested feature, namely, support for configuring tablet dials and touch rings. Meanwhile, widgets see incremental improvements, like better Sticky Notes behavior when placed in a panel.
Regarding accessibility, Zoom now tracks the text insertion point, and Plasma includes several small enhancements to improve readability, minimize flicker, and provide visual cues for sound events. Additionally, a new option in the colorblindness correction filters introduces a grayscale mode, allowing users to desaturate all colors on the screen.
On the system side, Plasma 6.5 introduces printer ink level monitoring, driver installation through Discover, quick toggles in the System Settings sidebar, and a new portal permissions page that extends beyond just Flatpak apps.
From a technical perspective, the beta features several Wayland enhancements, with the most significant being that Plasma now supports the Overlay Planes protocol, which should gradually reduce GPU and power usage for full-screen content.
In addition, support for the Picture-in-Picture and the Pointer Warp protocols is also in place, further rounding out Plasma’s Wayland compatibility.
For a list of all changes, see here or refer to the official announcement. For those eager to explore all the new features immediately, the simplest route is to opt for KDE Neon Testing Edition, which already offers Plasma 6.5 Beta.
Please bring back qindow geouping as tabs into Plasma.
That qould be 100% more useful than many of the features listed here.
Well, what you consider useful evidently others don’t.
Case in point: me 🙂
I used tab grouping when it first came out because it seemed really cool.
But I didn’t find any real usefulness in that feature so I quickly stoped using it.
I know it’s hard when something you like gets discarded but alas, not every feature can be mantained forever.