KDE developers continue preparing Plasma 6.6, and although there are still a few months to go before the final stable release (scheduled for February 17, 2026), the team has published on the KDE Blogs what changes to expect from this version. After covering some of them last week, we now have a new batch to look at.
Plasma 6.6 will introduce new global actions for seeking forward or backward by fixed intervals, 5 or 30 seconds, when controlling MPRIS-compatible media players. These actions ship without default shortcuts, letting users map them to their preferred keys.
Additionally, the Window List widget gains new behavior options, including showing its menu on hover and displaying only the active window name when desired. Users will also be able to reorder icons in the Lock/Logout widget.
On the visuals side, the screen and window chooser dialogs in the XDG portal system have been simplified. Canceling a paste operation on the desktop will no longer trigger unnecessary error notifications. Web Browser and Audio Volume widgets in standalone panel form will gain pin buttons, allowing their pop-ups to remain open while interacting with them.
Kickoff, the default application launcher, also sees several additional quality-of-life improvements. Navigation now behaves more predictably, allowing arrow-key movement from search results back to the search field. Late-arriving results will no longer cause selection jumps.
At the same time, the Kicker menu benefits from smoother submenu behavior, removing brief “No matches found” flashes and improving consistency when hovering across top-level items. Panels placed on the right edge of the screen will now display sub-sub-menus on the left, resolving visual overlap issues; this logic also works correctly in right-to-left environments.
Several bugs affecting day-to-day usage are also being resolved ahead of the release. A long-standing issue that disrupted desktop icon layouts during item dragging has been fixed. Info Center will correctly report GPU models rather than showing “llvmpipe” when hardware was previously misidentified. Plus, Plasma will now reliably detect new, removed, or modified files on the desktop.
Apart from that, KWin gains support for XRandr emulation, improving behavior for XWayland applications that rely on legacy resolution-changing APIs. Desktop selection performance improves thanks to optimized handling of the drag-selection rectangle.
Lastly, Plasma also adopts the standard “reduced motion” setting, automatically enabling it when animations are disabled in System Settings, providing a more accessible experience for users who prefer minimal visual movement.
For more information, refer to Nate Graham’s series “This Week in Plasma” post on the KDE Blog.
Image credits: KDE Project
