The KDE team has announced the release of Plasma 6.5.1, the first bugfix update to the major Plasma 6.5 series. While no new features are introduced, Plasma 6.5.1 focuses on refinement and reliability.
Among the highlights:
- KWin, the window manager, received extensive attention, fixing numerous Wayland-related issues. These include better handling of HDR metadata, improved screencast scaling, prevention of pipeline crashes on DRM backends, and more consistent behavior when switching input surfaces.
- Discover, KDE’s software manager, saw several crash fixes and rpm-ostree improvements, ensuring more reliable updates on immutable systems.
- Spectacle, the screenshot utility, now correctly sets export timestamps in rectangle mode, fixing long-standing image handling bugs.
- KPipeWire restores compatibility with older FFmpeg versions (below 6.1), improving build reliability across distributions.
- KScreen and KSysGuard received targeted fixes for display calibration and process monitoring accuracy.
- UI polish continues in areas such as Breeze-GTK, which fixes inconsistent corner rendering, and Plasma Desktop, which improves applet layout behavior and error handling in KCM modules.
Moreover, on the Wayland side, Plasma 6.5.1 resolves multiple input and rendering edge cases, such as corrupted output on hotplug events, cursor buffer issues under legacy modesetting, and more consistent color management across compositors.
Other smaller fixes and updates include:
- Updated translation strings across multiple modules, expanding localization coverage.
- Correct behavior in Plasma Firewall when the firewall service is unavailable.
- Improved the “Remove wallpaper” icon in the Plasma Workspace to improve visual consistency.
For more information, refer to the release announcement or visit KDE Plasma 6.5.1’s full changelog.
As always, if you’re using a rolling release distro, keep an eye on your distribution’s repositories—version 6.5.1 is expected to land there in the coming days or weeks.
