KDE Plasma 6.4 is now available to download, featuring a focused set of changes that newcomers and long-time users of this open-source desktop environment stand to benefit from.
This is fourth major update in the Plasma 6 series and it’s a stacked one that adds to the sizeable set of improvements the KDE Plasma 6.3 release served up earlier this year. This release uses Qt 6.8 and KDE Frameworks 6.14.
Developers who’ve spent the past few months beavering away to bring KDE Plasma 6.4 to the masses are billing this update as “smoother, friendlier and more helpful”, noting it contains changes across key areas like colour management, accessibility, and more.
An 18 year old feature request even finally gets answered — and plenty more besides, so read on to get clued up on what’s new…
KDE Plasma 6.4 Features
Colour Management
As our displays get ever-more crisp and vibrant and the media and entertainment we consume supporting vivid colour reproduction through HDR, the need for Linux desktop environments and display managers to keep pace is apparent.
In KDE Plasma 6.4, the Display & Monitor panel in System Settings includes a new HDR calibration wizard to make fine-tuning the colour and brightness of high dynamic range content on supported displays:
Many modern laptop and monitor screens also support other colour-related features, which KDE Plasma 6.4 duly plumbs in support for including:
- Enable Extended Dynamic Range (distinct from HDR)
- Limit colour depth (where supported)
- P010 video colour format (improves power efficiency with HDR video)
Nice updates, especially for graphic designers, video editors and avid gamers (three areas where KDE is, arguably, the go-to desktop environment).
X11 Session Code Split
Upstream GNOME is moving fast to drop X11 support in its next release, so too is KDE — don’t panic, that’s tentatively planned for KDE Plasma 71, not this the 6.x series.
Even so, KDE Plasma 6.4 sees KWin, its underlying window manager, split X11 and Wayland code bases. The benefit in doing this is that work on the Wayland version can happen faster, without the impedance stemming from working around a shared codebase.
Around 82% of KDE Plasma users (who’ve enabled telemetry) use Wayland as of June 2025.
Per Virtual Desktop Custom Tiling
Virtual Desktops (aka workspaces) and Tiles (aka window tiling) now play nicely in KDE Plasma 6.4. Per the release announcement, you can now “choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop”, creating tiling layout combos that suit your needs.
Don’t (as I initially did) confuse the Tiles feature with regular window snapping.
In KDE Plasma, you create a custom tiling layout by clicking an empty part of the desktop and hitting super + t . Then, you can ‘snap’ to the tiling layout by holding shift while moving an app window.
This change means you can now use a different custom tile layout for each of your Virtual Desktops rather than, as before, have the same one affect all workspaces.
Dynamic Wallpapers
Most major desktop environments support dynamic wallpapers where you get a light version during daylight hours and a darker variant during the night (or sometimes if dark mode is activated).
KDE Plasma 6.4 joins the fun.
You’re now able to change (supported) wallpapers between their light and dark versions based on the time of day. To make spotting these dynamic wallpapers easier, they’re indicated in the background picker with an icon and split preview.
Darker Darks
The Plasma desktop’s dark theme, Breeze Dark, is now a touch darker. Developers have bumped the contrast between foreground elements and the background to make text, buttons, toggles, etc easier to see.
Additionally, the desktop is now darkened whenever an authentication dialog is shown to ensure your focus is able to zone in on the window asking for password approval.
Hide System Tray Icons for Apps
Some applications provide a system tray icon—handy!—but don’t provide an option to disable it if the users doesn’t need it—not so handy!
KDE Plasma 6.4 makes it possible to hide tray icons for apps which don’t have a native option to do so, like Discord. To use it, right-click on the System Tray panel item, configure it, and head to ‘Entries’ and hide the app(s) you want to.
This setting should be used carefully. Apps may rely on and/or assume their tray icon is present, and hiding them might cause issues. To underscore that, a warning message is shown each time you make use of it.
Panel Applets & Settings
KDE Plasma 6.4 sees a swathe of of improvements to panel applets/widgets, a few of which I’ll spotlight.
During an active file transfer you can now click the “Details” button to see a progress graph showing the transfer speed over time (which for very sloooow transfers, gives an indication on how long it’ll take).
Editing a clipboard entry only activates the “Save” button if there been a change to actually save, saving the need to bump an eyebrow and question yourself.
The Disks & Devices widget to get an overview of connected USB drives and external hard disks is now able to check the state of disks and offer to repair them if errors are detected.
Plasma’s Bluetooth widget can now (optionally) show a badge relaying the number of connected bluetooth devices, making it easier to, er, know, I guess!
The Media Player widget surfaces a playback speed options — only if the underlying media source/player supports them via its MPRIS implementation — handy for YouTube.
Panel applets can be configured to use the ‘floating’ style even when the panel isn’t using that style, which is a nice degree of customisation flexibility.
Wireframe visualisations on the panel edit configuration screen now reflect the actual panel position on screen. Additionally, and panel visibility modes now incorporate animations when selected to better signpost their behaviour.
Usability Buffs
When an application is open in full screen, Plasma now enters Do Not Disturb mode so that no notifications will be shown over your game, video, Zoom call, etc — not unless it’s a critical notification like “your battery is about to die”.
The ‘Updates Available’ notification now includes a button to initiate software updates from the update notification directly, without needing to open Discover (or a terminal) to do it there.
If you use an iPhone you’ll be familiar with Home Screen dots denoting when a new app has been installed or an app has been updated. Plasma 6.4 adds a similar feature in its main menu. You’ll see a green dot by the category, and a green ‘New’ label next to the app.
The right-click context menu on the desktop sees some refinements, with common file and folder management tasks now in easier reach.
Configuring the stylus buttons on graphics tablets (and related hardware) is made “more intuitive” in this release with a redesigned settings panel and new options including an easy reset options and relative mode to make a stylus work more like a regular mouse.
KRunner is aware of common colour codes (e.g., RGB, Hex) and shows a visual preview of the them; it can convert old-fashioned measurements (like furlongs and rods) into modern units; power and session actions are now ranked first when searched for.
Spectacle, the default screenshot and annotation tool now built-in to Plasma, sees a bunch of improvements — not least it now opens in screenshot mode the moment you press PrtScn, rather than a windowed mode as before.
You can also hold the Shift key when using various annotation tools to draw straight lines, and use pinch-to-zoom in the screenshot viewer window — the latter will prove useful when annotating a screenshot on a touch-enabled device.
System Monitor & Info Center
Info Center improves display of page load errors, respects the system monospace font (in views which use monospaced text, like the new Sensors page), and its energy graph adopts a carded view and makes use of the system accent colour.
If you have lm-sensors installed you can also access a new Sensors page showing raw data from whatever sensors are accessible on your device.
System Monitor puts “more relevant monitors” front-and-center on its Overview page, including GPU usage which is handy. Background services are now grouped in the Applications pod, and two types of CPU graphs are available in the History tab.
Finally, GPU usage can be monitored on a per-process basis (for Intel and AMD GPUs; NVIDIA support planned).
18 years after asking…
18 years after it was first requested, it’s now possible to configure KDE so that dragging-and-dropping files and folders to another location on the same drive automatically moves the files, rather than asking you what to do each time.
By default, dropping a file in a different folder on the same disk will continue to ask you what to do: should it should be moved, copied or linked – if that gets annoying, be sure to take advantage of the new setting!
Other Changes
Changes of note in the Settings app:
- Region & Language: language chooser gains search field
- Date & Time: timezone selection now uses interactive world map
- Recent Files: now uses standard grid styling
- Accessibility: Mouse Keys option to move pointer with numpad
- General Behaviour: double-click speed chooser now has a test area
- Drawing Tablet: new visualisations and reset button
More general changes:
- Task Manager context menu lets you show/hide window titlebar and frame
- Portal-based open/save dialogs are now modal with their parent windows
- Text typed into login screen’s password field clears when switching user
- Plasma Browser Integration now works with Chrome & Firefox variants
- Lock screen widgets on multiple screen setups appear where the pointer is
- KWin’s full-screen zoom can be activated with a three-finger pinch gesture
- Configure modifier key and scroll trigger for KWin’s zoom effect
- Lock screen will respect the login timeout value coming from PAM
- Better performance when changing brightness with Night Light enabled
Plus a fair bit more! See the complete change-log for a detailed rundown.
- And even then, don’t panic-panic as a great many apps/tools designed for X11 work well under Wayland via XWayland. ↩︎