KDE Plasma 6.6.5 Fixes NVIDIA Performance Regressions and Fixes Many Bugs

In preparation for the release of the upcoming release of KDE 6.7, KDE 6.6.5 has officially launched, bringing with it some fixes for performance regressions introduced with the recent NVIDIA driver 595 update. Release 6.6.5 isn’t a massive release for KDE, instead an update focused entirely on bug fixes, with the full list available in the official changelog. However, some of the biggest updates include improved color handling on NVIDIA GPUs and the removal of the CI/DCI external display option when users have HDR enabled—HDR, by definition, should be in control of brightness in order to function properly.

Another bug that was squashed with KDE 6.6.5 is a bug relating to the latest NVIDIA 595 driver, which appeared to be affecting users on Wayland and KWin across multiple distributions, with the Bugzilla thread on the matter featuring comments from users on both CachyOS and Fedora. The issue seemed to be related to multi-GPU setups, and such issues are not expected to happen on KDE 6.7, because the multi-GPU copy code has been rewritten to use Vulkan instead of OpenGL. Another issue that could be bothersome was that Spectacle, the KDE screenshot utility, would not properly copy screen captures. To correct this, the KDE developers changed the utility to stay open for a brief moment after taking a screenshot, allowing the system to correctly copy the image to the clipboard. Plasma 6.7 is slated to launch on June 16, 2026, and it is expected to be a much more substantial launch, with a new Union style engine based on CSS, the reintroduction of the famous Air and Oxygen themes, and improved session restore under Wayland.