KDE Plasma 6.7.3 has been released today as the third maintenance update in the Plasma 6.7 desktop environment series, arriving two weeks after Plasma 6.7.2.
A key improvement in KWin, KDE’s window manager and Wayland compositor, is the re-enabling of triple buffering for NVIDIA GPUs, which helps smooth rendering when the system cannot maintain the display’s full refresh rate, reducing visible stuttering.
Plasma 6.7.3 also fixes several display wake-up problems. Screens that temporarily disconnect while Display Power Management Signaling, or DPMS, is active should now wake correctly, while opening a laptop lid can once again trigger sleeping displays to turn back on. KDE also fixed a case where canceling the display power-off animation could leave an unnecessary sleep inhibitor active.
Moreover, the update improves KWin by correcting Vulkan device detection and switching Vulkan initialization to use a graphics queue rather than a transfer queue. EGL context creation now explicitly binds the required API, resolving issues that previously prevented proper OpenGL context creation on some systems.
The compositor now improves direct scanout, which sends fullscreen content directly to the display without extra compositing. Plasma attempts direct scanout earlier in rendering, and color pipeline matching fixes enhance reliability, especially on AMDGPU-based systems.
Additional KWin updates address touchpad middle-click behavior in the Overview effect, tablet input forwarding, DMA-BUF feedback on buffer import failures, and handling of alpha-modifier objects on Wayland. The AMDGPU color pipeline workaround is now applied in both relevant matching paths.
Outside of KWin, KDE resolved a crash in the system statistics service used by Plasma System Monitor. The Intel helper has also been hardened against path traversal to prevent access to unintended paths.
Keyboard navigation in the Kicker application launcher’s search results has been fixed, and the digital clock applet now calculates timezone offsets correctly. Plasma’s Sound Theme settings page can again play preview sounds, resolving a regression that prevented users from listening to a theme before selection.
The calendar component received a fix for a use-after-free issue with shared event plugins. KDE also improved handling of malformed desktop-entry filenames in the application search infrastructure and corrected spacing on several Klipper configuration pages.
Spectacle, KDE’s screenshot and screen-recording utility, now correctly receives mouse-release events after a double-click makes a window transparent to input. The KDE desktop portal disables its background portal implementation under X11 and resolves confusion between URLs and filenames in the application chooser.
Plasma Login Manager picked up several reliability fixes related to virtual terminal handling, session handoff, authentication helper crashes, and invalid soft-reboot counters. It will also reload its configuration when a new seat is created.
KDE’s remote desktop implementation, KRDP, now correctly frees connection context during teardown and delivers input events through the main thread. This release also resolves a build issue affecting Gentoo systems using Clang.
Plasma Mobile users receive a fix for a flashlight toggle that could fail to turn off the light, as well as corrected reordering of Quick Settings entries. Plasma Bigscreen, KDE’s television interface, now manages its home-screen overlay and application selection more consistently and avoids repeatedly reopening libCEC after hotplug events.
Additional corrections include fixes for asymmetrical separators on immutable tabs in the Breeze theme, expanded space for all previews in the Color Picker widget, locale-based formatting of refresh rates in display settings, and improved brightness slider behavior to avoid unnecessary updates unless actively dragged.
For additional details, see the release announcement or check out the full changelog. Users should receive the update through their distribution’s regular software update channels once packages become available.
The next point release, KDE Plasma 6.7.4, is scheduled for August 4.
