The KDE team has announced Plasma 6.5.3, the third bugfix update to the major Plasma 6.5 series, which follows two weeks after the previous 6.5.2 release. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.3 focuses on refinement and reliability.
Breeze, the default Plasma theme engine, receives corrections, including a palette reset fix and improved QQC2 menu styling. Breeze-GTK, which provides consistent theme integration for GTK applications, fixes missing GTK4 expander icons and corrects corner radii for both CSD and SSD windows.
Discover, Plasma’s software center, includes improvements for Flatpak handling, better GError processing, more reliable size change logic, and KCrash support for DiscoverNotifier.
KWin, the Plasma window manager and compositor, receives the largest set of fixes. The update improves screenshot accuracy, adjusts toplevel drag behavior, fixes several Wayland-specific issues, and corrects rendering paths for more consistent visuals.
Additionally, it includes numerous test-suite adjustments, X11 guards, crash fixes, DRM backend improvements, async present corrections, and more reliable modesetting after suspend.
Moreover, Flatpak Permissions enhances keyboard accessibility and sidebar navigation, while KDE GTK Config resolves formatting issues in GSettings font configurations. KPipeWire adjusts DRM modifier handling to improve stability in setups where usable modifiers are unavailable.
Plasma Desktop, the core desktop shell, includes multiple fixes in Kickoff and Kicker, improving arrow-key navigation, menu sizing, context menu behavior, and hover handling in Folder View. Plasma Browser Integration, which bridges websites with the desktop’s media and download controls, improves artwork selection for media playback.
Apart from those, Plasma System Monitor fixes context menu positioning and header hiding logic. Powerdevil adjusts dark resume handling for s2idle systems. The Plasma browser integration plugin enhances media artwork selection, and libplasma resolves an issue that caused KWin to freeze on startup.
Lastly, the release also includes fixes for xdg-desktop-portal-kde, addressing clipboard signaling, shortcut management, remote desktop clipboard support, and avatar assignment. Plasma Mobile includes a small reliability fix in its shell DBus client, ensuring message replies are validated before use.
For more information, refer to the release announcement or visit KDE Plasma 6.5.3’s full changelog. The next update to the desktop environment, version 6.5.4, is scheduled for release in three weeks, on December 9.
As always, if you’re using a rolling release distribution, keep an eye on your distribution’s repositories—version 6.5.3 is expected to be released there in the coming days or weeks.
