The latest KDE desktop environment is out. Among other things, it comes with a pledge that it won't require systemd, and this version has improved OpenBSD support. FreeBSD 15.1's installer offers KDE too.
While The Reg FOSS desk was off for the half-term break, it's all been happening in the world of KDE. KDE Plasma 6.6.0 brings various functional improvements over last October's 6.5.0 release. The 6.6.0 changelog contains well over 2,500 lines, so although this isn't a major new version, it's clearly a significant one. We will return to what's new later in this article.
Three of the bug fixes in the changelog relate to OpenBSD support, which is good to see. Maintainer Rafael Sadowski, whose labors on KDE support in OpenBSD we mentioned back in early 2024, is clearly still hard at work. There are usually two OpenBSD releases each year. The current version, OpenBSD 7.8, was released in October 2025, nearly six months ago, so the signs are promising that OpenBSD 7.9 will include KDE Plasma 6.6 in a few months.
In other BSD-related KDE news, the FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Project reports encouraging progress in its last two updates. Six months ago, we reported that there was a plan for the FreeBSD 15.0 installation program to offer the option of installing KDE Plasma along with the rest of the OS. We looked at FreeBSD 15.0 back in December, and the desktop option didn't make it in. The good news is that the laptop project's December update reported:
A desktop environment option for the FreeBSD installer is in progress. We aim to have it ready for 15.1. This month we have refactored the code and added an Nvidia GPU selection menu, with plans to test this, add VirtualBox and VMware compatibility, and integrate everything into bsdinstall.
This is progressing, and the January update says it's now ready for testing. There's more info on GitHub, but as of yet, FreeBSD 15.1 is not even in alpha test – release is scheduled for June 2026. It's too soon to predict what version it will be, but it's likely it will be something recent. FreeBSD version 15.0-p3 already has Plasma 6.5.5 in its repositories.
Although the release of Plasma 6.6 brings KDE closer to version 6.8, which is planned to be Wayland-only, it remains very much a cross-platform desktop environment, and plans to stay that way. The new Plasma Login Manager does require systemd, but officially it's the only component that does. KDE communications officer Paul Brown posted what he called a quick anti-FUD FAQ to debunk "the KDE is forcing systemd!" hoax to Reddit, which emphasizes the point. Systemd remains a vexed and emotional subject. At the time of writing, the post has more than 150 comments, and very few are directly about KDE. As the post title suggests, the new display manager's dependency seems to have upset quite a few people.
On Unix-like OSes, the graphical login screen – formally called a display manager – is not closely tied to the desktop. In principle, they're optional and interchangeable. You should be able to use any display manager to launch any desktop – or even none, and just launch the desktop from the shell if you prefer. However, with increasing integration between components, this may not always work. These days a display manager may have to bring up Wi-Fi connections, configure a fingerprint scanner and validate a print, start a screenreader, and more besides.
KDE's recent developments seem to be alienating some long-standing ally projects. One recent example is the KaOS Linux distribution (we've used KaOS for screenshots of the latest Plasma version in the past). The distro's February release, KaOS 2026.2, drops the KDE desktop in favor of a custom desktop based around the Niri tiling compositor and Noctalia shell. This is significant because KaOS has hitherto been KDE-only for its entire 13 years of existence. The release announcement says the change is experimental, and is related to a planned move away from systemd toward the Dinit service supervisor.
The KaOS project followed its announcement with an explanation, four days later, talking about systemd and the future of KaOS. This goes into depth about some of the developers' reasoning, and it points out another component that needs systemd: the DrKonqi crash handler, which since mid-2025 also depends on systemd.
KaOS's change of direction echoes a similar one by Nitrux Linux. Nitrux only ever offered its own heavily modified KDE Plasma setup, but last November, Nitrux 5.0 replaced KDE with a custom environment based around the controversial Hyprland compositor. We looked at Nitrux 2.5 in 2022 and mentioned the release of Nitrux 3.0 a year later.
In the two years since KDE Plasma 6.0 appeared, there have now been half a dozen point-releases. As that frequency implies, they are not huge changes – but once again, the new features are welcome.
For touchscreen users, there's a new on-screen keyboard called Plasma Keyboard. The Spectacle tool for capturing screenshots and taking videos has some handy new features. When capturing video, it also allows the user to exclude selected windows from the recording. For static images, Spectacle can now grab text from images using optical character recognition, which sounds very handy and should help social media users include alt text for visually impaired people using a simple copy-and-paste operation. Another feature that can extract data from images is the Wi-Fi manager, which can now obtain connection credentials from QR codes.
Last week, we mentioned that Linux Mint was adding improved user account management, and so is Plasma 6.6. There's a new first-run wizard called Plasma Setup, which runs on the first boot of a new OS installation. This guides the user through creating a user account, choosing language, keyboard layout, and time zone, and setting network configuration. Plasma Setup can also help to remove user accounts and data to ready a used computer for a new owner.
They've done significant work on accessibility too. Plasma already had color filters for people with different types of color blindness and now there's a grayscale option. The magnifier tool also has a new mode in which the mouse pointer is locked in the centre of the screen, and the magnified area scrolls around it. Between them, both tools now have four different modes each.
There are multiple other features, including more control over theme selection, screen brightness, sharper screen images and smoother animation effects, and improved USB device support including the use of game controllers as desktop input devices. KDE's Discover app store can now manage fonts – on OSes that permit this – and the System Monitor app can now adjust process priorities, and more.
Plasma 6.6 is a significant release, if not ground-breaking. It brings X11 support another step nearer the exit, which some Wayland advocates are excited about, but which won't please everyone. Meanwhile, this vulture is still waiting for an option to globally disable hamburger menus and enforce conventional menu bars instead, but there's no sign of that. Even so, it's good to see the faster pace of development sustained after the long wait for KDE to move to Qt6. ®
Source: The register