KDE Plasma 6.5 Released with Rounded Corners, Clipboard Pinning + More

KDE Plasma 6.5 has been released with automatic light and dark theme switching, pinned clipboard items and a variety of other improvements.

This is the sixth major update in the KDE Plasma 6 series, and continues to add to the many (many) new features and foundational improvements that have been introduced since 2024.

For regular users, the “immediate wins” are largely through smaller, subtle changes that reduce friction, smooth out inconsistencies and extend functionality.

The most eye-catching change is that Breeze-themed windows now use rounded bottom corners (the same radii as used for the tips of windows). The rounding is fairly subtle (compared to GNOME) but if prefer sharp corners, you can disable these the Settings app.

Also on the visual front, KDE Plasma 6.5 is able to automatically switch between light and dark themes based on time of day. You can choose which themes it switches between, and whether the wallpaper changes — it’s your choice.

Pinned clipboard items let you save text you copy and paste regularly, e.g., email or IP addresses, code snippets, emoji or anything else. Just star items in the clipboard history to keep them available for easy pasting.

Plasma 6.5’s built-in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server can share clipboard with remote sessions, and system user accounts now work with RDP – no need to create separate accounts.

It’s now possible to mute all microphones using a dedicated key/shortcut, mirroring the way audio muting works in Plasma (previously only the active microphone would be muted).

If system audio is muted and you try to change volume, all playback devices unmute rather than stay silent. And if you keep “Raise maximum volume” setting enabled Plasma will remind you about this every so often (as it can damage your speakers).

When you open the emoji selector for the first time (hit super + . to bring it up) you’ll see all emoji rather than, as before, an empty “Recent” page. Also, the search field is always shown, and it now sifts through all emojis when search in a subcategory finds no matches.

Settings & Applet Tweaks

KDE Plasma 6.5 offers a new general Applications Permissions page (expanding its previous Flatpak Permissions page). Here you can do the usual stuff to control or curtail which apps can do things like take screenshots, use your webcam or detect location.

A new Drawing Tablet page in System Settings (which only shows if supported devices are available) makes it easier to configure devices, including (new in Plasma 6.5) rotary dials and touch rings. A warning is also shown when a tablet is managed by a custom driver.

The Wi-Fi & Networking page in System Settings now shows detected wi-fi networks and lets you connect to a wireless network from the settings app directly rather than, as in older versions, you needing to connect through the system tray Networks widget first.

The Networks widget also sees improvements: when you share a Wi-Fi network via QR code the password is shared too; clicking “Connect” on a network hides other password fields; and you’ll see status messages, e.g., “looking for wireless networks”.

KRunner adopts fuzzy matching when you search, meaning any typos should return (close) matches. Search results also now appear as soon as the first character is typed, and the ordering of results tweaked to show most relevant matches first.

KDE Plasma 6.5 alerts you when ink levels are low or empty using printer ink and toner monitoring utility. This will give you a timely heads-up to buy some supplies before you next need to print something.

You can resize Sticky Notes to be smaller than before. You can also change the background colour of sticky notes in KDE Plasma 6.5 from the context menu and, though it could text harder to read, a new “Transparent” background option was added.

Performance & Rendering

Support for overlay planes has been added to reduce CPU usage and power draw when full-screen content is displayed via on compatible GPUs. The login animation was shortened (a small change that leads to noticeably faster desktop loading).

KDE devs says HDR content “looks better than ever” in Plasma 6.5 as KWin (the window manager used by the desktop) tweaks its tone mapping curve when HDR content is displayed.

Elsewhere, Plasma 6.5 intros an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol which will, in time, apps (like Firefox) can display proper PiP windows that float above others automatically, no workarounds required.

KDE software management app Discover now launches quicker and gives more indication of what it’s doing whilst it’s initialising (useful if it is slow). It also gains support for flatpak+https:// URLs, so when you click an install button on Flathub it opens Discover.

Other changes

A host of other UI refinements, performance boosts and feature finesse come included, a few choice picks of note include:

• Hibernate option added to login screen
• Multi-monitor wallpaper setups use less memory
• Wallpaper slideshows can be changed using keyboard shortcuts
• Visual revamp of Digital Clock widget’s calendar add-on page
• ‘Icon change’ button in Properties dialog made more obvious
• Pager widget can be used to reorder of virtual desktops on Wayland
• App window screencasts now show any dialogs/popups spawned

Accessibility changes:

• Device plug-in events now show notifications alongside sounds
• Zoom effect can jump to the text insertion point as it moves
• Onscreen flashing audited for photosensitivity triggers
• Orca screen reader now reads caps lock state changes
• Grayscale colour filter added

This update also includes ample bug fixes, accessibility improvements and requisite package, framework, library, and tooling updates.

Check out the raw changelog should you wish to pore over a list of every fix, tweak, and commit made between the final KDE Plasma 6.4.5 point release and this KDE Plasma 6.5.0 stable release.

Get KDE Plasma 6.5

If you use Kubuntu 25.10, you will not be upgraded to Plasma 6.5 through software updates, but it may become available through backport repos/PPAs in due course.

KDE Plasma 6.5 begins rolling out to users of KDE neon (stable edition) and the KDE Linux alpha from today. If you use a different rolling-release Linux distribution you may receive this update in the near future, but check with your distro maintainer.

Don’t want to wait? You can download the Plasma 6.5 source code from, as ever, the KDE website.