The KDE development team has been hard at work refining the upcoming Plasma 6.5 desktop environment, scheduled for release on October 21, 2025, and this week’s updates bring some long-awaited visual enhancements.
One of the most noticeable changes is the addition of rounded bottom corners to windows, finally matching the already rounded top corners. It’s now enabled by default in the Breeze window decoration. Of course, if you prefer the old style look, you can always switch it off.
Honestly, I’ve always thought rounded corners add a nice visual touch—they’re used in pretty much every major desktop environment and operating system out there.
So I’ve often wondered why KDE only applied them to the top corners. But now, with Plasma 6.5 right around the corner, it looks like everything’s finally coming together—something that fans of those small, aesthetic details are definitely going to appreciate.
Beyond aesthetics, several usability enhancements are on the way in Plasma 6.5:
- Resizable sidebars in Discover & System Monitor – Now you can adjust the width to your liking, and the setting remains in place.
- Smarter disk mounting in the Disks & Devices widget – Skip the lengthy error-checking process for trusted drives or manually trigger a scan without mounting.
- Better KRunner search results – No more artificially boosted priority for KDE apps or favorites, which should make results feel more logical.
- Instant weather updates – The Weather Report widget now refreshes immediately after waking from sleep.
- A much-needed “Cancel” button – When creating a new user in System Settings, you can now bail out mid-process.
On top of that, the upcoming 6.5 release will also include some crucial fixes:
- Volume Controls no longer break in narrow mode for non-English languages.
- HDR mode now dims the cursor correctly on the lock screen.
- Fewer Kirigami-related crashes when using software rendering.
- No more flickering in System Settings’ FormLayout.
Lastly, on the technical side, KWin is now less reliant on potentially faulty screen color data, and file dialog sizes are stored in a more logical manner.
For users eager to see these changes in action, the beta release should arrive in the coming weeks. For more information, see KDE’s blog post.
Image credits: KDE Project
Uggghhhh. Rounded corners are a blight, eyesore, and waste of space.
The operating system is a tool. When you want a chisel, do you pick the one with a dull edge?
Are the lyrics, “every rose has its completely harmless bumps?” Giant’s Causeway? Pyramids of Giza?
Do we really want to anthropomorphize our OS to be more friendly and approachable? Heck no! Especially not Linux…
A single element on the entire screen with round corners? Yes, it minimizes the mental effort to utilize a new environment (to about the same degree as switching one grade of gasoline affects your car’s performance). Rounded corners everywhere? doesn’t do squat for user efficiency.
If you really want to revolutionize the UI, start making UI elements nestable in any arbitrary transparent SVG boundary, so we can have hexagonal or diamond-shaped snap-together windows, port holes to a console running in the background, presentations that are finally different than those from the 90s, actual living backgrounds, and a straightforward method of going from two dimensions to VR while prioritizing user efficiency. Give us the ability to flick windows away with one gesture, desktops that you synchronize and can instantly start working without some great additional setup effort so you have the same workflow on a new device, a new take on the stale taskbar, icons that aren’t just a 48×48 bitmap on a rectangle grid; more creativity but less silliness.
Rounded corners are the bellbottom jeans of the monitor.
Just stop already!
What’s your take on the new rounded bottom corners now enabled by default in Breeze window decoration—do you prefer this or the classic sharp edges? Regard Sistem Informasi
What a waste of programming time. Would be better spend of making some of the Plasma more stable and then adding meaningful improvements instead of rounded corners. What’s next? A function to dot each i with little hearts?
I have troubles with session restore on sleep. After waking up the OS, all my windows are closed. Is this a KDE bug, or nvidia bug?
What about font size in for example browsers interface. There is no way to make them “normal” you can scale display or set system to control size. No dice…
1080p 96DPi and font in browser are at least 50% larger in KDE compared to mac or windows.
Another thing to turn off.
What we really need is kiosk capability / lock downs/ parental controls
and easy ways to import and export the settings to to turn off the eye diabetes and keep panels and widgets organized for enterprise and distro deployments.
I put my panel on the left with a quick launch and the usable start menu (not the weird scrolling and unfollowable one)
I deploy a lot of systems and I work with seniors. Some things need to always stay on screen (shortcuts to certain apps and websites), and some things need to depict the state of the computer (taskbar, not those stupid pinned confusing things)
KDE is the only usable system out there, but it is difficult to deploy in a usable manner.
/etc/skel is your friend.
I really would love this to be a stable option in this day and age, there really is no reason for it not to be.