Introduction

The KDE community has just published KDE Gear 25.12, the newest quarterly update to its suite of applications. This refresh brings a mix of enhancements, bug fixes, performance refinements, and new features across many popular KDE apps, from Dolphin file manager and Konsole terminal to Krita and Spectacle. With this release, KDE continues its tradition of incremental yet meaningful upgrades that make everyday use smoother and more productive.

KDE Gear updates are not limited to the KDE Plasma desktop; they also benefit users of other desktop environments who install KDE apps on their systems. Whether you’re running KDE on Linux, BSD, or even Windows via KDE Windows builds, Gear 25.12 delivers improvements worth checking out.

Highlights from KDE Gear 25.12

Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, receives several enhancements in this update:

• Improved thumbnail generation for more file types, making previews quicker and more dependable.

• UI polish in the sidebar for easier navigation between folders and mounted drives.

• Better handling of network shares and remote locations, improving responsiveness and reducing hangs.

These changes combine to make everyday file exploration more responsive and visually informative.

The KDE terminal emulator, Konsole, gets attention too:

• Search field improvements help you find text within long terminal scrollbacks faster and with fewer clicks.

• Tab and session indicators are clearer, helping users manage multiple tabs or split views more easily.

• Stability fixes reduce crashes in edge cases when closing multiple sessions at once.

For developers and power users who spend a lot of time in a terminal, these refinements are genuinely useful.

Krita, KDE’s professional painting and illustration application, also benefits from this release:

• Improvements to brush performance, reducing lag on large canvases and complex brush sets.

• Better color management and palette handling, smoothing workflows for digital artists.

• Fixes for certain configuration edge cases that previously caused settings not to persist across sessions.

Artists and digital illustrators should notice fewer interruptions and smoother performance when working on large projects.