Plasma 6.6 - KDE Community

Plasma 6.6 - KDE Community
Plasma 6.6
A visual guide to the best desktop in the known universe (according to us)
Plasma 6.6 is all about making your life as easy as possible without sacrificing any flexibility
Tuesday, 17 February 2026
Plasma 6.6 makes your life as easy as possible, without sacrificing the flexibility or features that have made Plasma the most versatile desktop in the known universe.
With that in mind, we’ve improved Plasma’s usability and accessibility, and added practical new features into the mix.
Check out what’s new and how to use it in our (mostly) visual guide below:
Highlights
On-Screen Keyboard
Enjoy our new and improved on-screen keyboard
Spectacle Text Recognition
Extract text from screenshots in Spectacle
Plasma Setup
Set up a user account after the operating system has been installed
New Features
Those who like tailoring the look and feel of their environment can now turn their current setup into a new global theme! This custom global theme can be used for the day and night theme switching feature.
A more subtle way of modifying the look of your apps is by changing the color intensity of every frame:
Choose emoji (
Meta
) skin tones more easily with a new skin tone selector:
A major focus of Plasma 6.6 has been speeding up common workflows. So if the system has a camera, you can quickly connect to a new Wi-Fi network simply by scanning its QR code:
Hover the pointer over any app’s icon playing sound in the task manager, and scroll to adjust its volume:
And save yourself a click by enabling
Open on hover
in your
Windows List
widget. You can also filter out windows not on the current desktop or activity:
Hold down the
Alt
key and double-click on a file or folder on the desktop to bring up its properties:
To help everyone use and enjoy Plasma, we’ve improved accessibility across the board.
If you have colorblindness, check out the filters on
System Settings
page, under
Color Blindness Correction
. Plasma 6.6 adds a new grayscale filter, bringing the total to four filters that account for different kinds of colorblindness:
Still in the area of enhancements for the visually impaired, our
Zoom and Magnifier
feature has gained a new tracking mode that always keeps the pointer centered on the screen, bringing the total to four modes:
In addition, we added support for “Slow Keys” on Wayland, and the standardized “Reduced Motion” accessibility setting.
Screenshots and Screen Recording
Speaking of accessibility, Spectacle can now recognize and extract text from images it scans. Among other use cases, this makes it easy to write
alt
texts for visually-impaired users:
You can also filter windows out of a screencast by choosing a special option from the pop-up menu that appears when right-clicking a window’s title bar:
Virtual Keyboard
Plasma 6.6 also features a new on-screen keyboard! Say hello to the brand-new
Plasma Keyboard
Plasma Setup
Plasma Setup
is the new
first-run wizard for Plasma, and creates and configures user accounts separately from the installation process.
With Plasma Setup, the technical steps of operating system installation and disk partitioning can be handled separately from user-facing steps like setting up an account, connecting to a network, and so on. This facilitates important use cases such as:
Companies shipping Plasma pre-installed on devices
Businesses or charity organizations refurbishing computers with Plasma to give them new life
Giving away or selling a computer with Plasma on it, without giving the new owner access to the previous owner’s data
But That’s Not All…
Plasma 6.6 is overflowing with goodies, including:
The ability to have virtual desktops
only
on the primary screen
An optional new login manager for Plasma
Optional automatic screen brightness on devices with ambient light sensors
Optional support for using game controllers as regular input devices
Font installation in the
Discover
software center, on supported operating systems
Choose process priority in
System Monitor
Standalone
Web Browser
and
Audio Volume
widgets can be pinned open
Support for USB access prompts and a visual refresh of other permission prompts
Smoother animations on high-refresh-rate screens
To see the full list of changes, check out the
complete changelog for Plasma 6.6
In Memory of Björn Balazs
In September, we lost our good friend Björn Balazs to cancer.
An active and passionate contributor, Björn was still holding meetings for his
Privact
project from bed even while seriously ill during Akademy 2025.
Björn’s drive to help people achieve the privacy and control over technology that he believed they deserved is the stuff FLOSS legends are made of.
Björn, you are sorely missed and this release is dedicated to you.
Live Images
The easiest way to try it out is with a live image booted off a USB disk. Docker images also provide a quick and easy way to test Plasma.
Download live images with Plasma
Download Docker images with Plasma
Package Downloads
Distributions have created, or are in the process of creating, packages listed on our wiki page.
Note that packages of this release might not be available on all distributions at the time of this announcement.
Package download wiki page
Source Downloads
You can install Plasma directly from source.
Community instructions to compile it
Source Info Page
Feedback
You can give us feedback and get updates on our social media channels:
Discuss KDE on the
KDE Forums
You can provide feedback direct to the developers via the
#Plasma Matrix channel
Plasma-devel mailing list
or report issues via
Bugzilla
. If you like what the team is doing, please let them know!
Your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Supporting KDE
KDE is a
Free Software
community that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether it is help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the
Supporting KDE page
for further information or become a KDE e.V. supporting member through our
Join the Game
initiative.
About KDE
KDE is an international technology team that creates free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. Among KDE’s products are a modern desktop system for Linux and UNIX platforms, comprehensive office productivity and groupware suites and hundreds of software titles in many categories including Internet and web applications, multimedia, entertainment, educational, graphics and software development. KDE software is translated into more than 60 languages and is built with ease of use and modern accessibility principles in mind. KDE’s full-featured applications run natively on Linux, BSD, Windows, Haiku, and macOS.
Trademark Notices.
KDE
and the K Desktop Environment
logo are registered trademarks of KDE e.V..
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries.
All other trademarks and copyrights referred to in this announcement are the property of their respective owners.
Press Contacts
For more information send us an email:
press@kde.org