KDE Plasma’s update makes it the newest victim of the rounded corners wave (but you can turn them off)

Have you noticed that your software has gotten less sharp lately? Whether you’re using an app or browsing a website, it seems that more and more UI designers are giving their buttons and windows a smooth, polished look. The style has its fans, but it also has people who would rather go back to the old, boxy look.

Well, if you’re in the latter camp, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, KDE Plasma 6.5.0 introduces rounded corners by default. The good news is, you can absolutely toggle them off again if you’d rather keep your corners nice and sharp.

KDE Plasma 6.5.0 releases with a ton of UI tweaks

In a post on the KDE Blogs, the team goes into detail as to what the newest update brings to the table. The highlight feature is rounded corners that give your windows a smoother look, and they’re enabled by default. To be honest, I think the new corners look great; however, if you disagree, KDE is quick to point out that you can turn them off and revert to the previous appearance.

There’s also a huge wave of UI tweaks, which KDE explains on its blog:

• The sidebars in Discover and System Monitor are now resizable. And they also remember the size you choose in the state config file, not the settings config file. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2 and link 3)
• The Disks & Devices widget now lets you mount a disk without checking for errors, or manually check for errors without mounting. These can be useful for huge disks full of stuff where you know everything is fine, which otherwise take a while to check for updates while mounting. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, link)
• Started working on a project to improve the ordering of search results in KRunner. Changes made so far include not increasing the priority for KDE apps and items marked as favorites, both of which tended to make the results feel more random. More changes will be coming soon; this is not the end! (Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)
• Plasma‘s Weather Report widget now fetches weather data immediately upon waking from sleep when the computer was sleeping for more than 30 minutes. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, link)
• When you start creating a user on System Settings’ Users page, there‘s now a “Cancel” button you can click on to easily stop the process and go back. (Rémi Piau, link)

KDE Plasma 6.5.0 also fixes a pretty annoying bug with HDR mode. If you’ve noticed that your cursor on the lock screen isn’t dimming properly while you have HDR mode enabled, give the software an update, and it should behave as it normally should. Additionally, KDE released updates for other tools, including Gears and Framework. If you want to know everything that was updated in the last week, be sure to read the full blog.

If you want to check out more information about KDE Plasma, be sure to read our piece on these seven tools to make your Linux desktop look amazing, in which KDE Plasma makes an appearance.