The KDE Project released today KDE Plasma 6.4.5 as the fifth maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 6.4 desktop environment series to address more of those pesky bugs, crashes, and other issues.
Coming a little over a month after KDE Plasma 6.4.4, the KDE Plasma 6.4.5 release adds a workaround for brightness flickering issues with the AMD GPU graphics drivers when changing GAMMA_LUT often. The workaround can be disabled by setting the KWIN_DRM_DISABLE_AMD_GAMMA_WORKAROUND variable to 1.
KDE Plasma 6.4.5 also promises a better fix for a top crash in the Plasma desktop that occurred when opening the Notifications history with any notifications in it, improves the reliability of restoring screen settings, and updates the Task Manager theme previews to use the correct color scheme.
Support for Flatpak apps has been improved in KDE Plasma 6.4.5 by fixing a nasty bug that would move the .desktop file for a Flatpak app installed in the home directory when it was dragged from the Kickoff application launcher or Task Manager, and an issue causing a broken copy of the app’s .desktop file.
This release also backports a fix for an issue causing Spectacle’s menus to appear in the screenshots on the Plasma X11 session, updates the plasma-apply-desktoptheme command-line tool to work as expected, and fixes an issue that caused NVIDIA GPUs to have the wrong names on Info Center’s “About This System” page.
The System Settings app received some attention too, as KDE Plasma 6.4.5 fixes selection highlights in the Region & Language page so that text has the right color when its list item is clicked or selected, an issue that would generate multiple duplicate entries for Plasma widgets on the Shortcuts page, and an issue with the warnings shown by the Fonts page in response to various conditions when adjusts all the fonts at once.
On top of that, KDE Plasma 6.4.5 improves the “Open in File Manager” button for camera devices in the Disks & Devices pop-up to take you to the right location, fixes a strange issue in the Kicker application menu that prevented search results from appearing when all the favorite apps where removed, and improves Plasma panel cloning to also clone the settings of the System Tray widget.
A couple of issues affecting KDE’s KWin window and composite manager were fixed as well, including a common KWin crash that occurred when changing display settings and an issue that could cause KWin to lag and stutter when changing the brightness on a laptop using an Intel CPU from the Tiger Lake family or later.
Among other changes, KDE Plasma 6.4.5 fixes several issues related to Plasma panel customization, a layout issue with the Audio Volume widget, an issue that could cause DDC/CI control of screen brightness to re-activate itself after a screen dims on idle, and some more bugs that could cause desktop icons to shift around, especially on multi-monitor setups.
Also fixed is a critical issue that could cause the text of a sticky note on a Plasma panel to be permanently lost if that panel was cloned and deleted, an issue where Plasma could hang after copying files from a slow network location and opening the clipboard pop-up, and an issue where the ksgrd_network_helper process could delay system shutdown.
Last but not least, KDE Plasma 6.4.5 fixes an issue that could allow buttons with long text to overflow from Plasma System Monitor’s process killer dialog when the window is too small, as well as an issue in the time zone chooser map that would cause it to not zoom to the right location when changing the time zone using one of the comboboxes.
Check out the full changelog for more details about the changes included in KDE Plasma 6.4.5, which will soon arrive in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, so you can update your installations. The next and last point release, KDE Plasma 6.4.6, is expected on November 11th, 2025.
