KDE Plasma 6.6 Turns Spectacle Into an OCR Tool and Ships a New Setup Wizard

The release also includes a new color blindness filter, an on-screen keyboard, and better high refresh rate display handling.



After almost 4 months of development, KDE announced the new major 6.6 version of its Plasma desktop yesterday.
The new version of this popular Linux desktop environment introduced a new on-screen keyboard (aka virtual keyboard), that will be automatically enabled when there’s no real keyboard detected.
Spectacle, the built-in screenshot tool now has OCR support. After installed tesseract package, user can enable the Text Recognition (OCR) feature in the configuration dialog, then use it to extract text from screenshots.
During screen area selection, it now also provides a on-screen “Cancel” button which is useful for touchscreen users. And, for any app window, a new “Hide from Screencast” option is added into the window header right-click menu, allowing to except that window from screenshot.
In the Colors & Themes settings page, you’ll see a new “Save Current Theme” button, allowing to save current settings (e.g., colors, window decoration, icons, cursors, desktop and window layout) as a custom global theme with custom name and thumbnail image.
Your saved themes are displayed as the global theme choices. And, they can be used for the day and night theme switching feature.
The new version also introduced Plasma Setup, a new first-run wizard for Plasma desktop, to create user account, connect to network, and configure other important things after installed the desktop environment.
The Windows List widget has been updated with Open on Hover option, and ability to filter out windows not on the current desktop or activity. Zoom and Magnifier now has a new tracking mode, always keep the pointer at center of screen.
Other changes include optional new plasma login manager, better high-refresh-rate screen support, as well as:
For more about Plasma 6.6, see the official announcement in KDE website.
The source tarballs for the new desktop release are available to download at KDE web-site via this link page.
As a Linux user, it’s recommended to wait for your distribution updates. Arch Linux has made Plasma 6.6 into its official Extra repository, and, Fedora has built it for the next 44 version.
For Ubuntu, plasma desktop is available through the community maintained universe repository. If Debian upstream includes plasma 6.6 before the Ubuntu 26.04 package import deadline, then the new desktop will be available in next KUbuntu 26.04.
KUbuntu also has an official PPA that backports new versions of KDE Platform, apps, and frameworks for the most recent KUbuntu release. Though, it probably won’t make 6.6 for current 25.10 due to Qt version mis-match.




Libinput, the input device management library for most modern Linux distributions, released new 1.31.0 version few days ago.
The new version of this input handling library added support configuring the timeouts of disable-while-typing and disable-while-trackpointing, allowing to set how long the touchpad or trackpoint should be should be inactive after key presses.
The feature of “disable touchpad while typing” is usually enabled by default in recent Ubuntu, Fedora etc distributions. The default “long” time-out after a key press + release is 500 ms, which is however bit short that can still causes mis-clicks while typing in some cases.

The new 1.31.0 version added two C API calls (listed below), making the first step for the adjustable timeout.
libinput_device_config_dwt_set_timeoutlibinput_device_config_dwtp_set_timeoutCurrently, the timeout can be set from 100 ms to 5000 ms (5 seconds), and, it’s intended for developer use. Meaning, it still needs some time for the feature being available to end-users.
Since version 1.28.0, libinput supports 3-finger (or 4-finger) dragging feature, allowing to move app window by dragging on touchpad. The feature is disabled by default because it would override the 3-finger swipe gestures that are enabled by default in many desktop environments.
With new 1.31.0, a new “fast swipe” feature is introduced. So that when you have 3-finger dragging feature enabled, 3-finger move quickly on touchpad still can trigger swipe gestures to do switch desktop, open overview etc actions.
The feature also works when you have libinput with 4-finger dragging enabled.

3 finger drag won’t override swipe anymore (AI generated image)
The version also added new API to get a tablet tool’s (marketing) name. And, for touchpad with INPUT_PROP_PRESSUREPAD property set (available in libinput 1.30.1 + Kernel 6.18 or higher), it will now assume it to be a pressure pad.
Other changes in libinput 1.31.0 include:
For more about the new release, as well as the source tarball, go to libinput project page via the link below:
For Ubuntu users who want to try out the new libinput library, keep an eye on this unofficial PPA. I’m going to update it in next few hours, but for testing only!
To add the PPA and update libinput, use commands (Ctrl+Alt+T):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/libinput sudo apt update sudo apt install libinput-bin libinput-tools libinput10
Then log out and back in to apply change.
If anything goes wrong, purge the PPA to go back the original libinput library:
sudo apt install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntuhandbook1/libinput


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