And by all accounts, it’s pretty good! So far Plasma 6.5 has been a rather smooth release, with the only significant regression I’ve seen so far being a compatibility issue with older AMD GPUs that turned the cursor into Swiss cheese. It’s already fixed, to be released with Plasma 6.5.1. We’re also following up on an intentional change to the blur effect that unintentionally made it uglier in some cases.
The upgrade to 6.5.0 went smooth on Manjaro KDE without any major problems, the performance was well-kept from 6.4, some minor problems in theming went after reapplying global dark theme and other UI problems in system tray went after rebooting two times, what remain are minor bugs like broken blur effect, broken corners in task manager tooltips, SDDM refusing to apply the new wallpaper…
With Plasma 6.5, I now have those transparent edges, which Dolphin windows have had for a while, in the lower (standard) panel. KDE Wayland. It looks very messy and broken when the background shows through. It seems more like a bug than a feature. I can’t imagine this is intended. Will this be changed?
First, I want to make clear that I genuinely appreciate KDE and use it as my daily driver. The criticism below isn’t emotional—it’s simply hard to ignore core issues that keep affecting real workflows.
I can only hope you eventually fix multi-monitor support for Virtual Desktop; in its current state it’s effectively unusable. I run a 9×9 grid (with Krohnkite-NG for dynamic tiling), but I’m forced to use only my primary display.
This reflects a broader problem: KDE’s multi-monitor support lags significantly behind other major desktop environments.
Two additional personal pain points:
• KDE configuration is fragmented. Configuration files are scattered across ~/.config and ~/.local/share. It would be a major improvement if everything specific to the KDE desktop environment (not third-party apps) lived within a well-organized directory structure. This fragmentation makes reproducible configs and backups unnecessarily painful.
• Making a KDE configuration replicable is virtually impossible. Some settings can be exported individually, but they cover only a fraction of the full configuration and are often unreliable. Shortcut import is notoriously inconsistent—some entries simply fail to import—and the same happens with various other settings.
This project tries to address the problem, but it’s Nix-specific: https://github.com/nix-community/plasma-manager
If desktop environments adopted fully declarative configuration—similar to modern infrastructure—most of these issues would disappear in favor of predictable, version-controlled state rather than scattered guesswork.
I KDE, which is exactly why this is frustrating. Shipping eye-candy like floating panels or rounded corners while core functionality continues to struggle feels like putting a glossy coat on a house with unreliable plumbing. The fundamentals matter more than cosmetics.
@cigo, those are good ideas, but they’re also very niche. Though in general there are folks working on these things, progress has been slow, likely because of how niche they are. Most people do not look inside hidden system folders or have 81 virtual desktops. If you’re a person to cares deeply about those topics, you’re the perfect person to help out with them!
@Vidar never mind, I can reproduce it. It seems to happen when a dark panel floats or de-floats. I haven’t seen any bug reports about this yet; can you open one on https://bugs.kde.org? Thanks a lot!
I’m a long time (since v1.x, in 2001!) KDE user and while I’ve been through a lot (good and bad) I beg to disagree that Plasma 6.5 was a “smooth release”. Or maybe “smooth” as in “at least it did not have more bugs than before …”
Notably:
#433611 (Dolphin freezing when mounts are slow/unavailable),
#508868 (Discover going into an infinite crash-restart-crash loop when updating Flatpaks),
#509174 (Discover showing running background snapd updates as ‘errors’ which they aren’t),
(submitted multiple crash reports) plasmashell going into a crash-restart-crash loop when the mediaplayer applet is active (new),
(submitted multiple crash reports) reproducably crashing all running apps when suspending and resumig with multiple screens attached
interrupt my work a dozen times a day and are really getting on my nerves at the moment.
I’m a developer, but not a C++ developer unfortunately, so there’s not much I can do except submit bug reports with debugging enabled backtraces and try to reproduce stuff again after updates.
KDE, which is exactly why this is frustrating. Shipping eye-candy like floating panels or rounded corners while core functionality continues to struggle feels like putting a glossy coat on a house with unreliable plumbing. The fundamentals matter more than cosmetics.