KDE Plasma 6.4 ships with major usability and Wayland improvements

The richest and most customizable desktop for FOSS Unix

The second of three KDE point releases planned for 2025 is here, with more tiling options, accessibility improvements, and much more.

KDE Plasma 6.4.0 brings improved handling of window tiling, refinements to its dark mode, tweaked widgets and notifications, better sorting of search results from the built-in Krunner tool, a revamp to the screenshot tool Spectacle, among other things. The full changelog is nearly 3,500 lines long, so this is a significantly different release.

It's only about four months since we covered the release of version 6.3. That arrived one year after the long-awaited release of Plasma 6.0, a full decade after Plasma 5. After such a long time, the release schedule for 6.x feels rapid, as if the team is enjoying working on the fresh new version. There is a pre-planned release schedule, which indicates that Plasma 6.5 should arrive around October.

Right now, though, 6.4 is so new that on the day of release, the project's showcase distro, KDE Neon, had not yet been updated and still included version 6.3.5 of the desktop.

The bigger context

Right now, KDE Plasma enjoys two significant advantages over almost all other FOSS desktops. One is that it has full built-in support for Wayland. That means that KDE and GNOME are pretty much the only full-fledged desktops with native, integrated Wayland support. Most of the other Wayland environments currently available are much simpler tiling-windowing systems, which are mainly aimed at the sort of user who mainly lives and works in shell windows and doesn't want a full desktop.

The other thing is that KDE is not just a Linux desktop. It also runs on both FreeBSD and OpenBSD (both NetBSD and DragonflyBSD include the older KDE Plasma 5). As we reported last week, as well as dropping X11 support, the GNOME project is planning to introduce stronger dependencies on systemd. Since systemd is Linux-only, that effectively means GNOME is well on the way to becoming a Linux-only desktop – it will make life much harder for developers of other OSes to support GNOME. This could be good news for the cross-platform KDE, GNOME's slightly older and most popular rival.

The teams behind multiple other FOSS desktops are working hard on their Wayland support, and among those with preliminary or experimental support are the latest versions of LXQt, Xfce, Cinnamon, and Budgie. Even if the recently announced Xlibre fork of the X.org X11 server succeeds, though, there are many older desktop environments not in active maintenance that will very probably never make the leap. This ranges from old-timers such as CDE and its lookalikes to more recent projects such as the Unity desktop and LXDE – not to mention dozens of simpler window managers.

What's new?

Although Plasma is based around the model of stacked overlapping windows, it does have built-in tiling support, much like modern Microsoft Windows since Vista's Aero Snap. Drag a window to any screen edge, and KWin will offer to tile it to that edge or corner. What's more, it will then also offer to resize any other visible window next to it. Not only can you choose different layouts, such as grids, horizontal rows, or vertical columns, but now, in this release, KWin will remember different layouts for different virtual desktops.

Plasma 6.4 in dark mode, showing three tiled system monitors – two of them highlighted in the launch menu as newly installed – click to enlarge

The team has put work into improving accessibility, especially while using Wayland, with new keyboard navigation features, including the ability to control the mouse pointer via keyboard and support for multi-finger trackpad gestures to zoom in and out. The desktop now has more visual contrast, using shading to emphasize dialog boxes and make them easier to find. The dark mode now uses deeper tones and increased contrast. Controls for animations have been brought together into one place, making it easier to adjust them – or simply disable them, which makes things easier for some people. This even extends to the lock screen, whose controls now follow the mouse from one monitor to another.

Notification handling has been refined. There's an automated Do Not Disturb mode when in full-screen apps, such as games or movie players, and a history summary waiting for you in the system tray when you return to the desktop. If you mute the microphone, Plasma 6.4 will remind you when you try to use it. This is a welcome contrast to the GNOME design, which seeks to eliminate things like status icons and pop-up notifications.

Many of the individual widgets and apps have been tweaked. Some are relatively minor: the app launcher highlights new apps, file progress dialogs show the transfer speed, and the media player lets you adjust playback speed. Some have had more significant changes: the menu editor and screenshot tools have been redesigned, and the Disks & Devices tool now offers options to check and repair volumes.

There's improved management of graphics tablets and display color profiles, including for high dynamic range displays. These changes go some way to rectify the issues reported by artist David Revoy last year.

Rolling-release distros will get Plasma 6.4 very soon, but it's too late for the forthcoming Debian 13. That will use Plasma 6.3.5. Plasma 6.5 is scheduled for around the same time as Kubuntu 25.10 this autumn, meaning that it will probably be too late for inclusion – the next Kubuntu will probably use a later version of 6.4.x.

Bootnote

We checked again on Wednesday and the User Edition on the KDE Neon downloads page still hasn't been updated to the new Plasma release. A day after release, post-install, users must download and install nearly 400 MB of updates to get Plasma 6.4.0. On release day, the Testing edition still had a late beta version – and failed to install correctly in our testing.

KDE Neon upgraded to Plasma 6.4.0. The Wayland session works well, but as the terminal shows, it's no lightweight desktop – click to enlarge

We tested in VMware because under Virtualbox, Neon showed the same display corruption we saw in Fedora 39 two years ago. Even so, once upgraded to 6.4, we found that the X11 session was unusable. kwin crashed immediately, so we couldn't move or close windows. Wayland worked, but captured the mouse pointer, and the desktop did not resize with the VM's window.

While we are pointing out such issues, we note that the Testing and Unstable editions share identical descriptions, which is not at all helpful. The two versions urgently need better descriptions to differentiate them. Speaking of which, the description of the Developer Edition contains a typo:

Unstable Editon [sic] plus development libraries pre-installed.

Some critics will doubtless complain that we are quibbling, but we find such lack of attention to detail worrying. ®