The KDE team has announced the release of Plasma 6.5.2, the second bugfix update to the major Plasma 6.5 series. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.2 focuses on refinement and reliability.
With that said, the KWin window manager has seen some of the most significant improvements this cycle. A crash affecting FreeBSD users has been resolved, and several refinements have been made to compositing and screencasting. The update also prevents cursor-plane conflicts across multiple screens and resolves contrast and blur issues that previously caused visual inconsistencies.
Wayland users will notice smoother performance thanks to fixes for screencast scaling, clipboard synchronization, and rendering bugs. KDE developers also adjusted the compositor to better filter decorations and shadows in screenshots, ensuring they match the intended output.
Moreover, the Plasma Addons collection received several useful fixes. The Weather applet no longer throws QML warnings when “feels like” temperature data is missing, and the Notes applet now saves text more frequently to prevent data loss. The Quicklaunch applet also initializes all required properties properly when creating popups, resolving a long-standing usability issue.
On the GTK side, KDE GTK Config now correctly applies light theme preferences in light mode, thereby improving cross-toolkit consistency for users who mix GTK and Qt applications.
Discover, KDE’s software center, received a small but significant fix ensuring proper handling of firmware packages on distributions that ship them separately.
Meanwhile, Plasma NetworkManager no longer exposes loopback interfaces to users and avoids triggering unnecessary wakeup notifications, resulting in a cleaner and more reliable network management experience.
The Plasma Workspace component also sees several subtle improvements. The shutdown process now directly stops graphical-session.target for a faster and more predictable shutdown. Other adjustments fix minor layout and translation issues, such as overlapping icons in wallpapers and misplaced resource files in font configuration modules.
For Plasma Mobile, asynchronous calls have been added across key modules to improve responsiveness. The task switcher now behaves consistently when double-tapping navigation panel tasks, while recording settings correctly assign an encoder. The lock screen has also been updated for better async handling.
The Plasma Welcome module introduces enhanced logging support with new categories, enabling developers to diagnose startup issues more effectively.
Finally, the xdg-desktop-portal-kde component, responsible for desktop integration between apps and the system, now allows the compositor to determine screencast scaling. This ensures better image quality and performance when recording or sharing regions of the screen.
For more information, refer to the release announcement or visit KDE Plasma 6.5.2’s full changelog. The next update to the desktop environment, version 6.5.3, is scheduled for release in two weeks, on November 18.
As always, if you’re using a rolling release distribution, keep an eye on your distribution’s repositories—version 6.5.2 is expected to be released there in the coming days or weeks.
