Want to try out the Plasma 6.4 desktop in Ubuntu? Here’s how to do the job in (K)Ubuntu 25.04 and/or (K)KUbuntu 25.10.

Plasma 6.4 is the next feature version that will be released on 17 June. KDE announced the first beta of this release in last week. And, KUbuntu developer team has made it into PPA for testing purpose.

KDE Plasma 6.4 is a big release. It updated the built-in screenshot tool (aka Spectacle) with new design. Similar to Flameshot, when taking screenshot with “rectangular region” option, it now has on screen editing options to add text, arrow, and other annotations before saving.

It also added new Animations setting panel, allowing to configure global animation speed, choose animations for window close, minimize, maximize, etc actions, and fading effects for login, logout, and popups.

The new desktop also features KWin-X11 module, splitting off the X11/Xorg specific code into its own package separate from KWin, and Aurorae theme engine for KWin window decorations. And, it added new context menu option for the app icons on task bar, allowing to hide title-bar and frame of selected app window.

Previously, when drag’n’dropping items in Dolphin, it always pops-up a menu asking what you want to do (move, copy, or link). In the new release, there’s new option in General Behavior setting page, allowing to set this behavior to “move”, so it just works like most other desktop environments (e.g., GNOME, MATE, Xfce) do. Though, user can press and hold Shift key when dragging to view that “what to do” pop-up.

Other changes in KDE Plasma 6.4 include:

• Monitor how much CPU, memory usage for background services in system monitor.
• Color code support in KRunner.
• Highlight newly installed applications in start menu.
• Custom tile layout in per virtual-desktop basis.
• Ability to disable system tray icons for apps without internal settings.
• And more, see the official release note for details.

How to Install Plasma 6.4 Beta in (K)Ubuntu 25.04

For KUbuntu 25.04 and KUbuntu 25.10 Dev releases, the developer team has made the new desktop packages into this official beta PPA for all supported platforms, including amd64, arm64/armhf, ppc64el, riscv64, and s390x.

NOTE: The PPA is only for testing purpose!! While the stable version will probably made into the backports PPA.

First, press Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard to open up konsole terminal emulator. When it opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta

Type user password when it asks for sudo authentication and hit Enter to continue.

After added PPA and refreshed cache (it should be done automatically), run the command below to update your desktop environment.

sudo apt full-upgrade

In case you want to try out Plasma 6.4 on Ubuntu 25.04 or other flavors, use the command below instead:

sudo apt install kubuntu-desktop

Finally, restart your computer. Search and launch “About this system” to verify your desktop edition.

How to Restore

To revert back to the Plasma stable desktop environment, open konsole (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command to install ppa-purge tool:

sudo apt install ppa-purge

Then, use the ppa-purge tool to purge that beta PPA and downgrade all the installed packages:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta

Finally, restart your computer to apply changes.