The KDE team has announced Plasma 6.5 Beta today, meaning you can finally test out all the changes and improvements that have been in the works, some of which we"ve covered in our previous "This Week in Plasma" coverage. The final release is scheduled for October 21.
First of all, there is a new module called KNightTime, which centralizes control over your desktop"s light and dark modes. This project handles color temperature adjustment, as well as the automatic scheduling of the entire appearance of the desktop, switching not just the global theme but also the wallpaper from day to night.
In this beta, you"ll finally be able to test out the long-awaited rounded bottom window corners for borderless windows. For years, the default Breeze theme has had this weird inconsistency where top corners were rounded, but the bottom ones were a sharp 90-degree corner at the bottom. This change, which you can turn off if you hate it, fixes that without needing any third-party scripts.
The clipboard manager has been updated, at last fulfilling a 22-year-old (!) feature request. You can now finally star entries to keep important items from disappearing from your history.
Other things to look out for include Wayland Picture-in-Picture support, which leverages an experimental version of the Wayland PiP protocol that applications like Firefox can also use. The update also brings the "Pointer Warp" Wayland protocol, which is necessary for certain games and remote desktop applications that need to control the cursor"s position. For hardware, KWin now supports "overlay planes", a technical feature that will help reduce GPU and power usage for full-screen content like videos or games.
For digital artists, Plasma 6.5 adds configuration support for tablet dials and touch rings directly in the system settings. On the system side, the Discover software center can now install hardware drivers, and a new settings page lets you manage permissions for portal-based applications, not just Flatpaks.
You"ll also get notifications for low printer ink levels. The global search feature KRunner gets fuzzy matching for applications, so your typos might not matter as much anymore.
The full changelog, consisting of over 2000 changes, is available here.