Skip to content

Welcome to Planet KDE

This is a feed aggregator that collects what the contributors to the KDE community are writing on their respective blogs, in different languages

Thursday, 23 October 2025

In preparation for, and at the 2025 display next hackfest, I did a bunch of hacking on using more driver features for improved efficiency and performance. Since then, I polished up the results a lot more, held a talk about this at XDC 2025 and most of the improvements are merged and now released with Plasma 6.5. Let’s dive into the details!

Using more planes

The atomic drm/kms API exposes three important objects to the compositor:

  • connectors, which simply represent the connection to the display. In most cases there’s one per connected display
  • CRTCs, which roughly represent the machinery generating the data stream that’s sent to a display
  • planes, that are used to define which buffers are composed in which way to create the image on a given CRTC. There’s three types, primary, cursor and overlay planes

When trying to drive a display, the compositor needs to put buffers on at least one primary plane, connect it to a CRTC, connect that to a connector, and then do an atomic test to find out if that configuration can actually work. If the configuration doesn’t work, because of hardware or driver restrictions, the compositor needs to fall back to a different (usually simpler) one.

Up to Plasma 6.4, KWin (mostly1) only used primary and cursor planes. Using the GPU, it composited all the windows, decorations and co. into one buffer for the primary plane, and the cursor into another buffer for the cursor plane. Whenever the cursor plane wasn’t available or the configuration using it didn’t work, it would fall back to compositing the cursor on the primary plane instead (which is usually called a “software cursor”).

Why even use multiple planes?

While compositing everything with the GPU allows for fancy features, color management, blur, wobbly windows and more, it does require the GPU to process lots of data. Depending on the hardware, this may be somewhat slow or incredibly fast, but it always takes some amount of time, and often uses a lot of power.

By using a plane for the cursor for example, when you move it, the compositor doesn’t have to re-render the screen, but it can just set the new cursor position on the hardware plane, which basically immediately changes the image that’s sent to the screen - reducing both latency and power usage.

In other cases we don’t really care about latency so much, but power usage is more important. The best situation is possible with video playback: If the application uses hardware decoding and passes the decoded video to the compositor unmodified, it can put the video directly on a plane, and the rest of the GPU can completely turn off! This already works in fullscreen, but with more planes we could do it for windowed mode as well.

So now you know why we want it, but getting there was a longer story…

Preparing the backend

Our drm backend had a relatively simple view of how to drive a display:

  • every output had one primary and one cursor layer, with matching getters in the render backend API
  • this layer wasn’t really attached to a specific plane. Even if your hardware didn’t have actual cursor planes, you’d still get a cursor layer!
  • when rendering, we adjusted to the properties of the actually used plane, and rejected rendering layers without planes
  • when presenting to the display, the code made assumptions about which planes need which features

This was quite limiting. I refactored the backend to instead create a layer for each plane when assigning a plane to an output, have a list of layers for each output, and treat all of them nearly exactly the same. The only difference between the layers is now that we expose information about how the compositor should use them, which is mostly just passing through KMS properties, like the plane type, size limitations and supported buffer formats.

Last but not least, I changed the backend to assign all overlay planes whenever there’s only one output. This meant that we could use overlay planes in the most important case - a single laptop or phone display - without having to deal with the problems that appear with multiple screens. This restriction will be lifted at some later point in time.

Preparing compositor and scene

The next step was to generalize cursor rendering - compositor and scene both had a bunch of code specifically just about the cursor, listening to the cursor image and position changing and rendering it in a special way, even though it was really just another Item, just like every window decoration or Wayland surface. I fixed that by adding the cursor item to the normal scene, and adding a way for the compositor to hide it from the scene when rendering for a specific output. This allowed me to adjust the compositing code to only care about item properties, which could then be reused for different things than the cursor.

As the last cursor change, I split updating the cursor into rendering the buffer and updating its position. The former could and should be synchronized with the rest of the scene, just like other overlays, but the latter needs to be updated asynchronously for the lowest possible latency and to keep it responsive while the GPU is busy. With that done, the main compositing loop could use primary and cursor planes in a rather generic way and was nearly ready for overlays.

Putting things on overlays

The main problem that remained was selecting what to put on the overlay planes that are available. There are some restrictions for what we can (currently) put on an overlay:

  • the item needs to use a dmabuf, a hardware accelerated buffer on the GPU
  • the item needs to be completely unobstructed
  • the item can’t be currently modified by any KWin effect

To keep things simple and predictable, I decided to just make KWin go through the list of items from top to bottom, take note of which areas are obstructed already, and find items that match the criteria and get updated frequently (20fps ore more). If there are more frequently updated items than planes, we just composite everything with the GPU.

Last but not least, we do a single atomic test commit with that configuration. If the driver accepts it, we go ahead with it, but if it fails, we drop all overlays and composite them on the GPU instead. Maybe at some point in the future we’ll optimize this further, but the main goal right now is to save power, and if we have to use the GPU anyways, we’re not going to save a lot of power by merely using it a little bit less.

Putting things on underlays

The concept of underlays is quite similar to using overlay planes, just instead of putting them above the scene, you put them below. In order to still see the item, we paint a transparent hole in the scene where the item would normally be.

This is especially useful whenever there is something on top of the item that isn’t updating as frequently. The best example for that is a video player with subtitles on top - the video updates for example 60 times a second, but the subtiles only once every few seconds, so we can skip rendering most of the time.

There isn’t really that much more to say about underlays - the algorithm for picking items to put on overlays needed some minor adjustments to also deal with underlays at the same time, and we needed to watch out for the primary plane to have enough alpha bits for semi-transparent things (like window shadows) to look good, but overall the implementaiton was pretty simple, once we had overlay plane support in place.

The result however is quite a big change: Instead of getting an overlay in some special cases, KWin can now use planes in nearly all situations. This includes the newly introduced server-side corner rounding in Plasma 6.5! We simply render the transparent hole with rounded corners, and we can still put the window on an underlay with that.

There is one thing that did not land in time for Plasma 6.5 however: The current algorithm for underlays only works on AMD, because amdgpu allows to put overlay planes below the primary one. I have an implementation that works around this by just putting the scene on an overlay plane, and the underlay item on the primary plane, but it required too many changes to still merge it in time for Plasma 6.5.

Required changes in applications

Most applications don’t really need to change anything: They use the GPU for rendering the window, and usually just use one surface. If the entire window is getting re-rendered anyways, like in the case of games, putting the surface on an overlay or underlay is quite simple.

There are however some situations in which applications can do a lot to help with efficiency. If you’re not already using the GPU for everything, you’ll want to put the quickly updating parts of the app on a subsurface. For example, mpv’s dmabuf-wayland backend puts

  • the video background on one surface with a black single pixel buffer
  • the video on separate surface
  • playback controls and subtitles on another separate surface

which is the absolute best case, where we can basically always put the video on an underlay. If the video is also hardware decoded, this can save a lot of power, as the GPU can be completely turned off.

You also want to support fractional scaling properly; while some hardware in many situations is fine with scaling buffers to a different size on the screen, there are sometimes hardware restrictions on how much or even if it can scale buffers.

Using drm color pipelines

The described overlay and underlay improvements are great… but have one big flaw: If presenting the Wayland surface requires color transformations, we have to fall back to compositing everything on the GPU.

Luckily, most GPU hardware can do some color operations on the planes. The API for those color operations has been worked on for a long time, and I implemented support for it in KWin. With the relevant kernel patches, KMS exposes color pipelines - each a list of color operations, like a 3x4 matrix or per-channel 1D and 3D lookup tables, which the compositor can program in whatever way it wants. Every time we attempt to put an item on a hardware plane, we also attempt to match the required color transform to the color pipeline.

With the patchset for that, on my AMD laptop I can open an HDR video in mpv, and even if the video has subtitles, is partially covered by another window and the screen is SDR, the video is presented correctly without the GPU being involved!

How much does it really help?

Now the most interesting part: How much power does this actually save in the long run? I did some measurements with all the patches put together.

To test this, I played each video on a Framework 13 at 50% display brightness, with “Extended Dynamic Range” enabled and the keyboard backlight turned off, and recorded the power usage from the sysfs interfaces for battery voltage and current. The results you see in the table are the averages of 15 minutes of video playback, so the numbers should be pretty reliable.

On the application side, I used YouTube videos in Firefox with gfx.wayland.hdr enabled. As YouTube didn’t allow me to play HDR videos for some reason, I used mpv with the dmabuf-wayland backend to play back a local video instead.

Videowithout overlayswith overlays
4k SDR in Firefox13.3W11.5W
1080p SDR in Firefox11W9.6W
4k HDR in mpv13.4W12.4W

Or in terms of (estimated) battery life:

Videowithout overlayswith overlays
4k SDR in Firefox4.6h5.3h
1080p SDR in Firefox5.5h6.4h
4k HDR in mpv4.6h4.9h

As a reference for these numbers, the laptop being completely idle with the same setup uses about 4.5W, which equals about 13.5 hours of battery life. So while this is a good start, I think there’s still a lot of space to improve. At XDC this year I was told that we may be able to do something about it on the application side by using the hardware decoder more efficiently; I’ll do another run of measurements whenever that happens.

When can I start to use this?

Due to various driver issues when trying to use overlays, like slow atomic tests on AMD as well as display freezes on some AMD and NVidia GPUs, this feature is still off by default.

However, if you want to experiment anyways or attempt to fix the drivers, starting from Plasma 6.5, you can set the KWIN_USE_OVERLAYS environment variable to enable the feature anyways. If you test it, please report your findings! If there’s problems in the drivers, we’d like to know and have bug reports for the GPU vendors of course, but also if things work well that would be nice to hear :)

When we can enable it by default isn’t quite clear yet, but I hope to be able to enable it by default on some drivers in Plasma 6.6.




  1. If there was no cursor plane, it was able pick an overlay plane instead, but that was it. 

Recently, I’ve worked on making certain “less obvious” system settings more accessible for Plasma Mobile users. The modules I’ve worked on fall just outside the typical mobile phone use-case, but can be important to users of other types of devices. Specifically, users that plug in or connect a keyboard once in a while and need to change its layout or language, or devices that are connected using an ethernet cable, as often is the case with embedded industrial devices.

Mobile keyboard settings
Wired network settings

These two settings module offer a subset of their “desktop companions'” settings and cater to simpler use-cases while sporting a leaner and more focused user interface. Most of the business logic and the more complex UI components are also shared with the desktop versions.

Reviewers needed!

The merge requests for both are currently under review and I’d appreciate if people could help ironing out issues so we can go ahead and merge the code:

Wednesday, 22 October 2025

Welcome to the September 2025 development and community update.

Community Report

September 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results

17 forum members took on the challenge of the "A Breezy Day" theme. And the winner is… The Autumn Walk by @Mariusz_Galaj

The October Art Challenge is Open Now

For this month's theme, winner @Mariusz_Galaj has chosen "The Burden of Power".

With great power comes great responsibility, and your task is to depict an object to be worn by those with authority to physically or mentally remind them of that burden. Read the topic for further explanation, and find out how much you're power willing to take on.

Best of Krita-Artists - August/September 2025

This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 19 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:

The Resilence of Memory by @Suzuka

The Resilence of Memory by @Suzuka

Santa Elena Canyon by @Elixiah

Santa Elena Canyon by @Elixiah

Secretary bird study by @allenarak

Secretary bird study by @allenarak

Brave Sheep by @HappyBuket

Brave Sheep by @HappyBuket

Long between Posts by @BHiggins

Long between Posts by @BHiggins

Best of Krita-Artists - September/October 2025

Take a look at the nominations for next month.

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!

Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.

Other Notable Changes

Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from September 24, 2025 - October 20, 2025.

Stable branch (5.2.14-prealpha):

  • Touch Input: Improve the behavior of long-presses. Sliders now enter edit mode when double-clicking, not long-pressing (bug 471473). Long-press now summons context menus instead of making a right-click (bug 506042, bug 510229), which can be toggled in settings under General->Miscellaneous. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Touch Input: Make the Bezier Curve Tool's autosmoothing and double-clicking work with touch drawing. (bug report) (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Android: Fix showing the Android supporter badge on the welcome page if previously purchased. Purchasing is still disabled pending replacement. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
  • Android: Fix a crash when failing to save a document. (Change, by Agata Cacko)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.14-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Tuesday, 21 October 2025

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

  https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.12_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in around 2 weeks (November 6) and feature freeze one 
after that. Get your stuff ready! 

When direct contribution brings too much friction within your company, you might need a temporary intermediate layer as an interface. See how this evolution helps organizations maximize value flow and ROI when contributing to open source. 1. Introduction: Evolving the Model In the inaugural post of this series, “The Virtuous Open Source Cycle: Model Description“, … Continue reading Part 3: Evolving the Model by adding a company-driven open source project

How do you make a great desktop into a fantastic desktop? Easy — chip away at the rough bits, polish the good stuff, and add awesomeness. After 29 years of development, KDE’s got the foundation nailed down. Plasma 6.5 is all about fine-tuning, fresh features, and a making everything smooth and sleek for everyone.

Ready to see what’s new? Let’s dive into Plasma 6.5!

Want to help make Plasma even better? Donate to our fundraiser!

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

Highlights

Automatic Theme Transitions

Configure when your theme will transition from light to dark and back.

Caret Text Navigation

Zoom now swoops in to where you type

KRunner Fuzzy Search

Even if you type it wrong, KRunner will find it!

New Features

Plasma 6.5 includes a number of highly-requested features:

First up: rounded bottom window corners! Breeze-themed windows will now have the same level of roundness in all four corners. If you don’t like this, you can un-round them, too.

Another one is automatic light-to-dark theme switching based on the time of day. You can configure which global themes it switches between, and also which themes are shown on the manual toggles on System Settings’ Quick Settings page.

As a part of this feature, you can also configure whether you want the wallpaper to switch between its light and dark versions based on the color scheme, the time of day, or be always light or dark.

Next up is a “Pinned clipboard items” feature, which lets you save text you use regularly into the clipboard, so you don’t have to keep copying them over and over again.

You can now star clipboard items so they are always available for pasting.

For all the artists out there, you can now configure any rotary dials and touch rings on your drawing tablet using System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page. It also shows a warning if you try to configure a tablet that’s being managed by a custom driver, and the tablet page will be hidden if you don’t have any drawing tablets connected in the first place.

We’ve transformed the Flatpak Permissions page into a general Application Permissions page, where you can configure apps’ ability to do things like take screenshots and accept remote control requests.

The _Flatpak permission settings page has become a general App permissions settings page.

Plasma’s built in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) server now lets you share the clipboard. You’re also no longer required to manually create separate remote desktop accounts; now the system’s existing user accounts work as expected, and you can just supply their credentials to the RDP client app.

The utility that reads the level of ink or toner from your printer now informs you when it’s running low or empty.

And finally, you can now hibernate your system from the login screen.

Usability

Usability improvement has been a major focus in Plasma 6.5. Here are some examples of what you can expect:

System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page has been updated to show detected wireless networks, and you can connect to them directly from there.

Speaking of networking, when sharing the QR code of a Wi-Fi network, its password is now shown as well, so the person you’re sharing it to can easily connect. And to avoid mistakes, clicking “Connect” on a network in the Networks widget closes any other open password fields for other networks, so there’s only one visible at any given time. The widget also now provides visible messages like “looking for wireless networks” and “network has been disabled” to make it clearer what’s going on.

The network widget now shares the password with guests too.

Continuing with the System Tray, the notification telling you that you missed some notifications while you were in Do Not Disturb mode includes a button you can click on to see those missed notifications.

In the audio department, Plasma now warns you that keeping the “Raise maximum volume” setting active for prolonged periods may damage the device’s speakers, and when the system is muted, changing the volume in any way now un-mutes all playback devices.

Likewise, muting microphones with a dedicated "Mute Microphone" key (or using the very cool secret Meta+Mute shortcut) now mutes all microphones, rather than just the active one. This makes the behavior consistent between microphones and speakers.

For the gamers out there, you can now see more relevant info about game controllers on System Settings’ Game Controller page.

And finally, setting up a wallpaper slideshow has been made easier as you can now click on the entire grid item for each image to toggle it on or off. And once it’s set up, you can advance to the or previous next wallpaper with a keyboard shortcut.

Accessibility

Visually impaired users will be happy to know that the Orca screen reader now reads out changes to the Caps Lock state, and that we have improved the way screen readers describe actions and keyboard shortcuts on System Settings’ Shortcuts and Autostart pages. On a related note, users sensitive to color can now make use of a grayscale color filter, which desaturates or removes color systemwide.

New accessibility settings help color blind users.

Plasma has also been audited for cases where the screen could flash at just the wrong speed to trigger photosensitivity, and all discovered cases have been fixed.

The Zoom effect can now be configured to jump to the position of the text insertion point as it moves around the screen.

In addition to playing a sound, Plasma now shows a system notification when you plug in a device. This was done primarily to help people with problems hearing, but you can also turn the notifications off if you want, go back to just sounds, or receive no feedback at all.

Finally, keyboard navigation has been enhanced throughout Plasma and its apps.

Widgets

KRunner, Plasma’s search/launch/unit converter/calculator/“but wait, there’s more” tool, uses fuzzy matching to look up applications. This means that even if you misspell an app’s name, KRunner will probably still find it for you. How search results are ordered has also been improved, and KRunner will start to provide those results after the first character is typed.

Sticky Notes added to panels can be resized to be much smaller; you can change their background color from the context menu; and when you choose the “Transparent” background color, colored sticky notes’ backgrounds disappear entirely.

On Wayland, you can re-order virtual desktops directly from the Pager widget, and re-ordering them in the Overview effect’s grid view now re-orders them in the Pager widget, too.

Apps

Many of Plasma’s included apps have seen improvements, too. Here are a couple of them:

Discover, Plasma’s software management app/app store, has seen a focus on performance and feedback. You should notice that Discover is usually much faster to launch in Plasma 6.5. And when it’s not, it’ll be more verbose about what it’s doing, so you can tell which source is being slow.

Discover has also gained support for flatpak+https:// URLs, which allows the Install buttons on Flathub to automatically open Discover. Finally, Discover can show you hardware drivers available for installation on operating systems supporting this feature.

The first time you launch Emoji Selector app (try it with Meta+.), it will open to a page showing everything instead of an empty “Recent” page. Now the search field is always visible, and doing a search will always search through the full set of all emojis if there aren’t any matches on the current page.

Spectacle is Plasma’s screenshot/screencast utility, and will now also include in window screen recordings any popups that the target window creates.

HDR & Windows

The tone mapping curve used by KWin has been tweaked for when displaying HDR content and now it looks better than ever.

Plasma 6.5 implements support for an experimental version of the Wayland picture-in-picture protocol that promises to allow apps like Firefox to eventually display proper PiP windows that stay above others automatically.

Performance

We’ve added support for “overlay planes”, which promise to reduce CPU usage and power draw when displaying full-screen content using a compatible GPU.

By optimizing the splash screen code, re-arranging some of the startup steps and reducing the duration of the login animation, we have made the desktop load faster, making for a snappier Plasma experience.

…and there’s much more. To see the full list of changes, check out the complete changelog for Plasma 6.5.

Sunday, 19 October 2025

digiKam 8.8.0 Running Under Linux to Preview HEIF Images

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After four months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 8.8.0. This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency.

The digiKam team remains committed to providing a powerful, open-source digital photo management solution, continuously enhanced with new tools and optimizations for photographers and enthusiasts alike.

Saturday, 18 October 2025

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.5, and I think it’s gonna be a pretty darn good release when it comes out in 3 days! So eyes started turning towards features and UI improvements again, and you’ll notice a few of them this week.

Let me also draw your attention to another topic: KDE’s birthday! KDE is 29 this week and celebrating by kicking off our annual fundraiser. It’s a great time to donate if you’ve been on the fence or just want to show your love for Plasma!

The majority of KDE e.V.’s yearly budget comes from fourth quarter fundraising at this point, so it really does make a big difference. Donate today! And then check out this week’s goodies:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The Application Dashboard widget can now be configured to follow the color scheme, though it remains dark by default. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Application Dashboard’s light mode
Application Dashboard’s traditional dark mode

Keep in mind this dashboard hasn’t had any visual sprucing-up in years; if you’re tempted to complain that it’s ugly or unpolished, we probably agree, and would welcome any contributions!

You can now resize the area between Application Dashboard widget’s Favorites and Applications areas, allowing for one or the other to take up more space. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Klipper actions can now be disabled, without having to remove them. (Jonathan Marten, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Right Now

The Plasma Browser Integration add-on’s settings window now has a dark background when its browser is using dark mode. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

KWin’s Dim Inactive effect is now clamped to strength levels between 10 and 90%, because anything outside that range doesn’t really make sense and can produce nonsensical results. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

If you’ve deliberately masked the Systemd service for the firmware updater (fwupd), Discover no longer considers this an error to bug you about. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

The highlights for top-level menu items are now slightly rounded. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Rounded top-level menu highlight for dolphin’s Edit menu

When using the Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper provider, the thumbnail preview for the day’s wallpaper will now reflect the wallpaper’s actual aspect ratio — landscape or portrait — instead of always showing a portrait version of it. (Gergely Kovács, link)

Passwords for Wi-Fi networks are, by default, now stored globally (in a root-owned location, so not just anyone can go look at them), rather than per-user. This yields multiple benefits, including:

  • No more KWallet popups on misconfigured systems
  • New user accounts on the same system don’t need to manually log into common Wi-Fi networks all over again
  • Login screen features like LDAP account login that need internet access now always work out of the box

(Kristen McWilliam, link)

Frameworks 6.20

KRunner’s search results no longer dynamically change the priority of search results based on how often they’re used. This was a very clever feature, but ultimately made it impossible to offer a good default sort order because the actual sort order would be different for every person. Removing that makes the search result ordering predictable, and hence learnable. (Harald Sitter, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.6

The app chooser window now respects whether the app that opened it wanted it to be modal or not. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed two cases where KWin could crash when you put a laptop to sleep with an external display connected, and then woke it up again with the screen disconnected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash while closing after saving a file. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed a bug that could make remote desktop connections fail when using a recent version of ffmpeg. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed a bug that made it possible for screen content to not update frequently enough when using one of the full-screen colorblindness correction effects. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a visual issue that could make full-screen HDR content in certain games not actually look HDR. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Rotating a screen with HDR active no longer makes it become brighter than the surface of the sun for a few milliseconds. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a bug that made System Monitor sensors display the wrong values for certain NVIDIA GPUs. (David Redondo, link)

Notifications marked “transient” once again stay out of the notification history even if they include actions. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Fixed the scroll handle of the Application Dashboard widget; dragging it now works. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Fixed two layout issues with custom System Monitor layouts when using the “Maximum” height option, or more than 11 rows. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Large panels can no longer cover up the Edit Mode dialog when there are several of them in a complex layout. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Worked around a newly-introduced Qt 6.10 issue that made notifications about downloaded files inappropriately remain visible until manually closed. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.1

Fixed some UI issues in System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (David Edmundson and Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

Fixed a bug that could cause minor visual glitches when moving the pointer in and out of certain apps’ windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma tab bars not look quite right with non-default Plasma styles. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Discover no longer crashes when you’ve got Flatpak installed but it’s nonetheless not available for some reason. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed a bug that would store the IPsec passwords of some VPNs incorrectly, making them ask for the password every time you connected. (Mickaël Thomas, link)

Frameworks 6.19.1

Fixed a serious regression accidentally introduced into Frameworks 6.19 that made it impossible to write files into Samba shares. The relevant code will be covered with an autotest soon so it doesn’t regress again. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Frameworks 6.20

Separator lines throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now pixel-perfect, resolving an issue that could make them look much brighter than intended with a dark color scheme. Marco wrote an interesting blog post about this, too. (Marco Martin, link)

System Settings pages opened standalone using kcmshell6 no longer sometimes experience the bottom part of scrollable views being cut off. (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Fixed a bug that made the icon chooser dialog not let you re-select the same icon you selected the last time it was open. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Made some improvements to nested KWin sessions, including better performance and inhibiting global shortcuts outside of the nested environment. (Xaver Hugl and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

Plasma 6.6.0

kcmshell6 --list now sorts its output alphabetically. (Taras Oleksyn, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference.

If money is tight, you can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist, too.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

The Skrooge Team announces the release 25.10.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

Changelog

  • Correction bug 479854: The tool "Align sub-operation date..." don't update an operation
  • Correction bug 498606: ##WARNING: QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
  • Correction bug 507235: bad Unit import for Ms Money
  • Correction bug 507414: Regression: Error importing ISO20022 XML into Skrooge
  • Correction bug 510022: MS Money import: Dividends cause Unit Value = 0
  • Correction bug 510025: MS Money import: split transaction comments lost/overwritten
  • Correction bug 510027: MS Money import: Investment transactions not grouped
  • Correction bug 510115: MS Money import: Ignore (/import?) Classifications
  • Correction bug 492495: Empty New Account after CSV Import
  • Correction bug 491382: Wishlist: Add an option for work days in Schedule Transactions
  • Correction bug: Increase width of unit combo box
  • Correction bug: Not possible to create SEK and NOK units because they have the same symbol. Fiw by using CurrencyUnitSymbolUnambiguous
  • Feature: Search transactions from tool bar
  • Feature: Add benchmark mode in debug page
  • Performances: Improve various sql performances

Friday, 17 October 2025

I have a laptop – a Framework 13, AMD CPU – which I received for the purpose of making KDE-on-FreeBSD good on it. For KDE Akademy Reasons, that laptop is covered in stickers: bicycle stickers, KDE, RUN BSD .. and it got three Linuxes installed on it next to FreeBSD. I mentioned that KDE Akademy is people, and I’d like to thank Doug (openSUSE), Neal (Fedora) and Harald (KDE Linux) for helping me get the bits in place. Here’s some brief notes about the resulting systems.

  • I must have botched the openSUSE installation. This is my go-to Linux distro for the past ten years at least and … this time it just isn’t a very good experience. A KDE Plasma 6 session auto-starts, but it is the X11 version, and scaling is messed up on the 2880x1920 screen, such that fonts are too big and UI elements too small. The KCM for scaling doesn’t work nicely, and clicking on buttons like Apply is haphazard. It might just be X11 bitrot, though, and I have not sat down with the system to figure out what’s going on.
  • KDE Linux, I know it’s there, it starts, but I find that I don’t have confidence that the immutable + flatpak does anything useful for me, and I fear that it takes stuff away – although I can’t exactly articulate what, since I don’t want to sit down to try to turn it into my daily driver and then on day three find out that spacebar-heating is disabled in the flatpak portal. Dangit, I need my spacebar heating. Someday I’ll sit down longer with KDE Linux, but not with this laptop.
  • That leaves Fedora, which doesn’t deliver a stock wallpaper but does provide a really nice KDE Plasma 6 experience. Here, too, I can’t put my finger on what makes it nice, it just … is. It’s a wayland session. Using the Keyboard KCM and swapping ctrl- and caps- just works, and it stays there even in the face of jiggery-pokery with connected keyboards (unlike in an X11 session on FreeBSD). Scaling is reasonable at 170%. Scrolling with the touchpad goes the “right” direction. Focus-follows-mouse is easy to configure.

FreeBSD works pretty well on this machine, right now except for the oops-poor-choice WiFi, but that is enough to keep my from daily-drivering it just yet, and that’s why this post is all about Linuxes. The configuration space is the same, though.

One hardware trick I found since I last wrote about this machine: the hardware turns out to have a “Fn-lock”. Press Fn-ESC to prefer function-keys over media-keys. (Source: forum posts) It even says “Fn-lock” on the physical escape key, but I had not connected those letters with the desired functionality yet. This setting is preserved across hibernation and reboots.

Takeaway: fear of change is a genuine cause of non-adoption of technologies; Fedora KDE Workstation is pretty darn nice; like many others I have covered over the laptop’s branding with queer stickers.