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The second beta of KDE Plasma 6.4 just landed, and it is packed with fixes as KDE gears up for the final release scheduled for June 17th, 2025. While new features were largely locked down earlier, this beta focuses on squashing bugs and polishing what is already there, ensuring a smoother experience for everyone. A significant amount of attention has gone into refining the Audio Volume widget. Users will notice small textual headers now clearly separating audio input and output device sections, making it easier to tell your microphone from your speakers. The mute button has been neatly indented to align better with labels, and keyboard navigation, along with accessibility, have received welcome improvements. One of these is the icon for item-specific menus in list items, like those in the Audio Volume widget, switching to the view-more-symbolic icon, a change hinted at in KDE's weekly development summary last week. Furthermore, when you are playing media, the widget's Applications page will now show the name, which is particularly handy with web browsers juggling multiple sounds. KWin, Plasma's powerful window manager and compositor, saw fixes for XWayland leaking normal key presses when using keyboard layouts other than English and addressed an issue where custom tiles could collapse a bit too enthusiastically. Spectacle, the screenshot utility, had a crash fixed when using "Save As" in rectangle mode, and an issue preventing the --edit-existing command-line option from actually showing a window has been resolved. The Plasma Desktop itself received updates, including several for Kicker, the application launcher, tackling problems with its size, how it handles long application names, and keyboard navigation. Discover, the software center, benefits from fixes related to rpm-ostree for those on immutable systems and improved accessibility on its updates page. The Powerdevil service, which handles power management, received fixes for the battery monitor applet, preventing it from repeatedly asking to install Power Profiles Daemon (PPD) if it is already there and ensuring only one battery icon shows up in the desktop tray. Even Dr Konqi, the crash reporter, had a tweak to its minimum systemd requirement. Bluedevil, managing Bluetooth connections, now sorts devices with actual names first in its wizard, making device selection a little more straightforward. For more information about this release, you can check out the full changelog. In addition to that, you can grab the live image to test it out yourself. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of April): 1,811 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend

The Linux desktop ecosystem is powered by various desktop environments like GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, COSMIC (currently in development), KDE Plasma, and others, with GNOME and Plasma being the most popular. GNOME, despite its many controversies, remains the desktop environment of choice for users who prefer a simpler experience with less control over customization. KDE Plasma, on the other hand, is more suitable for users who enjoy tweaking the look and feel of their desktop. The KDE team just announced Plasma version 6.3 today, several months after the launch of version 6.2. This update brings improvements across different parts of the Plasma environment, including KRunner, KWin, and more. One notable improvement in 6.3 is that it is now easier to clone panels. To do this, enter edit mode, click the "Clone Panel" button in the panel settings, select the position of the duplicated panel, and that's it. Plasma’s window manager, KWin, also gets an improvement that artists and designers will appreciate. It now renders content more precisely by snapping elements to the screen’s pixel grid whenever possible, which the KDE team says will reduce blurriness and produce sharper images. Screen colors are now more accurate, especially when using Night Light. Additionally, you can adjust screen color accuracy, though this may impact system performance. Among the smaller changes in 6.3, there's now a "Help" category in the launcher. The "Settings" category has been merged into the "System" category. The desktop context menu has also been updated. When right-clicking on a symbolic link, there's now a "Show Target" option that allows quick navigation to the original file or directory. This highly requested feature was previously available only in the Dolphin file manager but is now accessible on the desktop. These are just some of the updates in 6.3. You can check out the announcement or the changelog here. Source Hope you enjoyed this news post. Thank you for appreciating my time and effort posting news every day for many years. News posts... 2023: 5,800+ | 2024: 5,700+ | 2025 (till end of January): 487 RIP Matrix | Farewell my friend