Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week something that I know a lot of people have been wanting for a long time was implemented: the ability to limit virtual desktops to only the primary screen! Thanks very much to Kristen McWilliam for this long-awaited feature, which arrives in Plasma 6.6.

But wait, there’s more…

Other Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The Networks widget now has a little button you can click on to connect to a network using a QR code, via the Qrca helper app. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The DrKonqi crash reporting system now notices crashes for non-KDE apps too, and prompts you to report them to their developer or your distro. (Harald Sitter, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.3

Added support for the MHC2 tag in ICC profiles, which is a non-standard tag used in Windows, but without support for it, profiles used on Windows won't produce identical color effects when used in KWin. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Colors picked using the color picker now reflect the raw RGB values of the color, rather than a tinted version that might be affected by the Night Light effect or the use of an ICC profile. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Breeze-themed GTK apps now have a bit of extra padding on either side of their toolbars to prevent the leading and trailing items from touching the edges of the window, and some ugly black lines have turned into nicer-looking appropriately-colored lines. (Kevin Duan, link 1 and link 2)

System Settings’ Remote Desktop page now displays any errors inline, so you don’t have to go digging around in the journal log to find them and wonder why it’s not working. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Hot-corner effects now trigger for all screens, rather than just the corner of one screen. This can be disabled if you don't like it. (Yiqun Lian, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.2

Fixed a regression that broke adding a new widget by clicking on it, as opposed to dragging it somewhere. (Nicolas Fella, link)

The text at the bottom of the time zone picker map is now translatable, and should start being translated into languages other than English soon. (Nicolas Fella, link)

The selection checkbox for wallpaper slideshow grid items no longer overlaps with the “I have light and dark versions available” icon in the corner. (Adam S. link)

Fixed an issue that made some toolbar items in the Font Viewer app invisible. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Fixed an issue that could make the text displayed by the “Show Compositing” and “FPS” effects appear off-screen with certain multi-monitor setups. (Pavel Duong, link)

Plasma 6.5.3

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you removed widgets or panels. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash while installing a Flatpak app. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed a weird regression that made it impossible to put icons on desktops of screens that didn’t have any panels on them. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed a regression that made inactive windows get activated if you happened to hover over anything in them that made a tooltip appear. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue that could unexpectedly give screens in HDR mode a greenish tint when using the Night Light feature. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Closing the lid on a laptop whose screen had already been disabled no longer sometimes shifts the layout of external screens. (Méven Car, link)

Fixed a visual glitch in “Active Window” mode screenshots that made their window borders look a bit weird when using a fractional scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed a few more cases where desktop icons could shift around, this time in response to changes in screen resolution and arrangement. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Added another page to the HDR calibration wizard to determine the maximum fullscreen average luminance. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Clarified an unclear label in the OpenConnect VPN authentication dialog. (Philipp Kiemle, link)

Frameworks 6.20

Fixed a case where the DrKonqi crash reporter could itself crash when you clicked on the “Details” button of a notification about something else crashing. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a case where trashing a file on an NFS share would move it to the local trash (which might be very slow, depending on the network) rather than the remote trash. (Oliver Schramm, link)

Fixed a regression that could make Discover prompt you to send feedback about it every time you launched it. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Electron 40

Fixed a bug that resulted in all system tray icons of Electron-based apps having the same ID, which meant that changing the icon visibility setting for one of them changed it for all of them. (Damglador, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 35 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 30 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.2

Fixed a source of elevated CPU usage in the SDDM login screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.3

Made KWin more robust against a graphics issue that could make the screen go black after the system displays the Plymouth boot splash screen, but before it gets to the SDDM login screen. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a source of elevated CPU usage in Plasma’s wallpaper dialog and page in System Settings. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Improved visual smoothness while switching modes on multi-monitor setups with VRR-capable screens. (Hongfei Shang, Link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Reduced Plasma’s memory usage by over 100 MiB by being cleverer about unloading wallpaper images that aren't needed anymore. This had the side effect of making tiled wallpapers impossible with the new system for technical reasons, so tiled wallpapers have been re-introduced in the form of a new “Tiled” wallpaper plugin, so you can still rock out to your favorite KDE 1 nose wallpaper. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the robustness of drag-and-drop operations between XWayland-using windows and native Wayland windows. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Toggling Bluetooth can no longer briefly freeze the UI of whatever you used to toggle it. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The current activity is now stored in the state file, not the config file. (Nicolas Fella, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we're up to 91% of our €75k stretch goal! This is tremendous, and I can't thank everyone enough for their generosity. Thank you everyone for helping to keep the lights on!

If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.

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.

Today I’m putting on a different hat and announcing that Techpaladin Software is hiring! Right now we’re looking for a software developer who loves KDE Plasma and wants to see it thrive and shine, with the passion and self-motivation to make that happen.

In this role, you would be working on topics related to KDE Plasma that Techpaladin’s clients want improved, such as general polish and QA, implementing new features, fixing specific bugs, working on private hardware-specific software that supports Plasma, backporting fixes, release management, and so on. It’s always KDE-related!

This is a fully remote contract position open to anyone in the world not living in a country sanctioned by the U.S. government (sorry, it’s just gotta be that way for legal reasons). The start date is flexible and can be whenever you’re ready.

We have no lists of explicit qualifications, minimum years of experience, or formal education requirements. But working for Techpaladin might be a good fit the more this sounds like you:

• You’re a KDE contributor. Your profile page on https://invent.kde.org is more blue or purple than it is white, or at least it has been in the past. You’ve used and developed KDE Plasma, or related technologies (Qt, KDE apps and frameworks, C++, QML, etc).
• You’re a good communicator. Your “online voice” is gentle, not harsh. You’ve generally got a positive attitude. You keep on top of your email. You can handle working remotely in written and spoken English with a geographically distributed team split across 6 time zones.
• You’re a team player. You review other people’s merge requests and triage bug reports. You’re willing to work on what the clients want done. You accept decisions made in public with your input that nonetheless didn’t go your way.

Does this sound a bit like you? We’d love to hear from you at jobs@techpaladinsoftware.com (please don’t send anything clearly written by AI; it will be discarded immediately) with your resumé, KDE Invent profile, links to KDE-related projects you’re proud of, or anything else that seems relevant.

Looking forward to hearing from folks!

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-45.

The Authoritarian Stack

Tags: tech, politics

The trend has been clear for a while. This is a well crafted job of clearly mapping it out. Time for Europe to wake up maybe?

https://www.authoritarian-stack.info/direction-generale-de-la-securite-interieure-(france)

Why I Choose Email Over Messaging

Tags: tech, email, messaging

Yes, same here I way prefer email (even though messaging can have its uses of course).

https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926/

I use Typst now

Tags: tech, latex, typst

I admit I’m tempted to look at Typst more nowadays. It looks like it can simplify the production of content quite a bit compared to some of the good oldies we still carry around (like LaTeX). That said, Typst is still young and not that stable yet.

https://www.christopherbiscardi.com/i-use-typst-now

A generator, duck typing, and a branchless conditional walk into a bar

Tags: tech, python, programming

Neat stories explaining those three important features of Python.

https://mathspp.com/blog/a-generator-duck-typing-and-a-branchless-conditional-walk-into-a-bar

Try Out JEP 401 Value Classes and Objects

Tags: tech, java, type-systems, performance

A long needed improvement to Java on its way to the JDK. Looking forward to this one stabilizing.

https://inside.java/2025/10/27/try-jep-401-value-classes/

Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust

Tags: tech, rust, programming, quality, smells, pattern, type-systems

A good list of code smells to pay attention to in Rust. Also provides patterns to avoid such smells.

https://corrode.dev/blog/defensive-programming/

The state of SIMD in Rust in 2025

Tags: tech, rust, simd, performance

This is unfortunately still a bit complicated for my taste. Ideally std::simd should be stabilized, but since it’s not the case yet options have to be evaluated.

https://shnatsel.medium.com/the-state-of-simd-in-rust-in-2025-32c263e5f53d

Text rendering and effects using GPU-computed distances

Tags: tech, graphics, shader, text, fonts, gpu

We take text rendering for granted. That said, it’s easier said than done, especially on the GPU.

https://blog.pkh.me/p/47-text-rendering-and-effects-using-gpu-computed-distances.html

</> htmx ~ The fetch()ening

Tags: tech, web, frontend, htmx, api

A larger transition coming to HTMX. Interesting choices and good lessons on how to manage the API transition.

https://htmx.org/essays/the-fetchening/

Why Nextcloud feels slow to use

Tags: tech, nextcloud, web, frontend

I use it mostly from the DAV integrations, so I don’t notice this much in practice. That said, if and when I have to use the web GUI, it indeed always feel sluggish to me. There might be a reason behind it indeed, those bundles seem way off.

https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/11/03/nextcloud-slow/

Your URL Is Your State

Tags: tech, web, frontend, browser, state

There’s indeed value at using the URL to store some of the frontend state. This is too often forgotten.

https://alfy.blog/2025/10/31/your-url-is-your-state.html

Just use a button

Tags: tech, web, frontend, accessibility

Just use the semantically appropriate HTML element. It makes it easier for browser to advertise the GUI properly.

https://gomakethings.com/just-use-a-button/

Game design is simple, actually

Tags: tech, game, design

Deceptive title! It’s far from simple and the article confirms it. It’s fascinating to see all the dimensions you have to deal with to design a game though.

https://www.raphkoster.com/2025/11/03/game-design-is-simple-actually/

The Learning Loop and LLMs

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, learning, maintenance

Indeed, if we weaken the learning loop by using coding assistants then we might feel we go faster while we’re building up the maintenance cliff. We need to have an understanding of the system.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/llm-learning-loop.html

An Introduction to Domain Driven Design

Tags: tech, ddd

An old introduction to DDD. Not necessarily the best reference on the topic (which is probably still the blue book). Probably a good resource to skim over the important points and get started though.

https://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/archive.php?id=97

Extreme Programming Revived?

Tags: tech, agile, xp, coaching, teaching

Unfortunately and as far as I can tell we’re still not there. I’m trying to do my part in how I push for those topics when working with teams and organizations. So many things to help with on the practice level and making developer teams function properly.

https://ronjeffries.com/articles/2015-03-21-xp-revived/

Too Clean?

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, quality

A good reminder that you don’t want your code base clean to the point of being sterile. You have to fight off the mess yes, but some of it can stay if it provides affordances.

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2018/08/13/TooClean.html

Guilds: Get Stuff Done Together

Tags: tech, agile, team, organization

We can cast doubt on the “Spotify Model” (not really a model anyway…) all we want. Still, I think the whole “guild” idea in there was spot on. This article gives a feel of how it can be setup and the benefits it can bring.

https://medium.com/hootsuite-engineering/guilds-get-stuff-done-together-3d0826209390

Failure to communicate

Tags: tech, remote-working, team, organization, management, decision-making, note-taking

Very interesting maturity model about proper communication in a remote work setup. I think it definitely makes sense and doesn’t feel too difficult to evaluate.

https://another.rodeo/4-levels-comms/

Why aren’t smart people happier?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, intelligence, learning, life, problem-solving, philosophy, psychology, science

The title is a bit misleading in a way (and I almost didn’t click through for a start). That said, it is an interesting essay dealing with the topics of intelligence, problem solving etc. I’m not sure I agree with everything in it, but that’s still good food for thought.

https://www.theseedsofscience.pub/p/why-arent-smart-people-happier

Teller Reveals His Secrets

Tags: magic, culture, art

Nice little article to get an idea of the culture and art behind magic tricks.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-his-secrets-100744801/

Bye for now!

The last maintenance release of the 25.08 series is out with fixes to issues with clip pasting on projects with different fps, subtitle styles, image rendering, as well as problems with image sequences. This version also adds support for SVG file replacement and correctly checks for disk space when archiving among other improvements.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

Meeting Link:
https://meet.kde.org/playback/presentation/2.3/13c9edf5ab7dc3a850feebda14fe5ed07fbe3577-1762448228740

We got together with the PenPot team’s leader, Pablo Ruiz, to discuss our updates and changes to migrate to PenPot from Figma.

One are of focus for this discussion was in the “sharing” aspect of the libraries built in PenPot. We have use cases where developers and designers need to interact with the graphical assets in a way that makes sense to each group.

We talked about working together in building a sharing model that helps both groups. We are hoping we can have things like:

• Selective library sharing
• Automatic library publication (Without the need for a library export)
• Automatic library updating
• Easy code and graphical contributions, where users can have a copy of the library in their own PenPot instance and submit changes or updates to the original library.
• Easier library management.

Current issues

• We also received updates on the latest changes PenPot is doing around their Web Assembly + Skia library work. They hope to have a working beta version for the KDE team, and others, to test in 2-3 weeks. The team is still deciding how to propose this beta.

Ticket Review

• The team also provided a graphical update on tickets we have submitted. Some are more important than others but still, these tickets are on their radar and they are processing them.
  

Over 180 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

• kdenlive: Fix some images not rendered in timeline preview (Commit, fixes bug #511249)
• kosmindoormap: Also render staircases in corridors (Commit)
• kwalletmanager: Make sure entrylist context menu is created for empty list (Commit, fixes bug #510780)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 25.08 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 25.08.3 source info page
• 25.08.3 full changelog

A new version of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings have been released

We have a new release of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings!

Plasma Camera changes:

• Timestamp EXIF data is now added to photos (MR)
• Fix log of libcamera property names (MR)
• Don't default to first pixel format by libcamera (MR)
• Selectable filename pattern and output path (MR)
• New translations

Plasma Settings gained the ability to show all settings modules (for all platforms, such as desktop) under a toggle. It now supports the ability to show an "Apply" button for settings modules that do not want settings to save automatically. The header being misaligned on category pages is now fixed.

• Use custom page stack (MR)
• Have larger delegates on mobile (MR)

Visit /info/independent-releases-25-11 for the tarballs.

Please note: most Plasma Mobile software is now shipped under the Plasma or KDE Gear release cycles.

This post is about how we met KITE‘s team and visited some schools during our family visit trip in Kerala. For those who don’t know, KITE stands for “Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education”; they are in charge among other things of the GNU/Linux distribution for Kerala schools and training teachers to use it. GCompris is used a lot there, as it is the main software used in their ICT curriculum textbooks for classes I to IV. The widespread and official use of Free Software in Kerala schools really is an awesome model.

The connection with KITE happened thanks to Aiswarya’s sister’s husband, Karunraj K. He recently got hired by KITE, so even before going we knew we would try to meet some of their team. During some discussions with him, I understood they did some small customization to their GCompris package to fit their specific needs, but most importantly they added translations and voices for Tamil and Kannada languages. They need those with Malayalam and English as the Kerala state shares borders with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, so they have many pupils in border areas speaking those languages. Of course my first reaction was to look for their sources to upstream those translations and voice files missing from our GCompris package. Sadly, after searching through their distribution and online, the sources were nowhere to be found, the only way to get them was to ask for it. This was one more motivation to get in touch with their team.

Karunraj invited us to visit KITE’s office of Kannur district, where we were warmly greeted by the local team. We met Surendran Aduthila (head of the local team), with whom we could start discussing several topics, including how to get their translation files. He made some calls to investigate the issue, and soon enough we got in contact with KITE’s CEO Anvar Sadath who invited us for a meeting at KITE’s headquarters in Trivandrum a few days later.

For this meeting, they also invited several team members from various districts involved in their GNU/Linux distribution and software development projects. First, I explained how important it is to publish their sources, especially for customized Free Software packages, ideally using both some public git repositories and the standard way to publish source packages for debian-based distributions. Using public git repositories could also help them to organize their work, and allow some external contributions. It seems they understood it clearly, and decided to follow this path.

I showed them for reference the French education forge portal, which includes a dedicated gitlab instance for teachers to host and share their projects (mostly software and tutorials), and a dedicated instance of matrix chat server for internal communications. They looked very interested, and discussed about how they could do something similar and reuse some of the educational content available from this forge. I also showed them the work from Primtux, the French GNU/Linux distribution for primary schools, which has a lot in common with their own distribution.

We discussed about how we could collaborate, like how it would be better for their translation team to work directly with us, or how we could develop some new activities together. We also discussed especially about how GCompris is used for children with special needs, and how the coming “GCompris-teachers” (a new side application we are working on, allowing teachers to create customized datasets and analyze pupils results) could be useful for this use case. And I spent some time with the head of their GNU/Linux distribution project, Abdul Hakeem, giving various tips, especially to improve their customized packaging of GCompris. And of course I could get those wanted translation and voice files from his computer, with all the necessary info to add them to our repositories

Also, I gave them some tips about how to turn some of their in-house software into proper Free Software projects, as it is something they were interested to do but were missing some insights about how to proceed.

Finally, Aiswarya shared her experience with Kerala’s Free Software based education and how it helped her to build her career. Also, she helped me a lot during the meeting when translating some things to and from Malayalam was needed.

Globally it was a very tight-scheduled session, but I think we could cover all the most important topics. I’m very happy of this meeting, and looking forward to future collaborations.

It was covered by the press, and an article was published in The Hindu newspaper the next day (original article behind a paywall).

Two days later, I was invited to Kannur district’s “IT MELA” (IT Fair), a yearly school event with some competitions on IT topics. On this day was the digital painting contest, which I was very interested to attend: pupils had one hour to paint an image on a given subject, using either Krita or GIMP and a mouse(!). Digital painting without a graphic tablet is super difficult, so I was very impressed to see what those pupils could achieve this way. There was also a Malayalam typing contest (using a special in-house software to track typing), and a web design contest. Again I was super impressed to see what some pupils could produce in one hour with pure HTML+CSS (no frameworks allowed).

This time again my visit was covered by the press, and the next day almost all local Malayalam newspapers had an article about it.

Finally, I had the chance to visit Kuttiattoor’s primary school where I made a little speech to pupils about the importance of Free Software in education. The teachers showed me the ICT “PLAYBOX” textbooks, and gave me an English hard copy of the book for class I.

I’d like to thank again all those who were involved in the meeting organization, the IT MELA visit and the school visit. And thanks a lot to our family in India for the support!

This year we again participated in Google Summer of Code and we had 12 successful projects.

Akonadi/Merkuro

Merkuro is a modern groupware solution and uses Akonadi as backend. This year we had two mentees working on Akonadi, and in particular on how the resources and their configuration dialogs interact with Merkuro on mobile.

• Pablo Ariño worked on improving the memory usage of the Akonadi agents and resources. He did that by ensuring the configuration dialogs of the agents is moved to a separate plugin which is then loaded on demand by the application, instead of having the agents being GUI processes which handle their configuration dialogs directly.

• Shubham Shinde worked on the UI side of things by writing the infrastructure for config dialogs to be written in QML. This is extremely important to get mobile optimized dialogs on mobile and is also a good occasion to clean the dialog code up. All the major code changes can be found on the following merge requests: Akonadi and KDE PIM Runtime.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive brings you all you need to edit and put together your own movies. We had 1 project for KDE's full-featured video editor:

• Ajay Chauhan improved the supported for timeline markers in Kdenlive. Previously, we only supported single point markers, which can be used to mark a specific point in time. Ajay added support for duration-based markers that define a clear start and end time.

ISO Image Writer

• Akki Singh worked on a port of ISO Image Writer from QtWidgets to Kirigami. Akki also added a bunch of features to the app such as allowing you to download ISO images for some of the more popular KDE distributions, or from an URL automatically.

OSS-Fuzz Integration

OSS-Fuzz is a program by Google were our code is fuzzed by them in search for vulnerabilities.

• Azhar Momin focused his work on improving the OSS-Fuzz integration in the KDE libraries. Azhar moved our configuration to our repos, making them easier to maintain, and the fuzzer now scans many thumbnails formats (e.g. poppler, syntax highligted text, krita archives, mobipocket and many more). He also fixed some of the bugs detected by the fuzzer like a memory leak in the blender thumbnail extractor.

KDE Linux / Karton

• Derek Lin worked on the new virtual machine manager from KDE named Karton. He implemented, among other things, keyboard input support, basic SPICE viewer (non hardware accelerated) and audio support.

Since the end of GSoC, he has also added hardware acceleration to the playback and you can find more information about that on his blog.

GCompris

GCompris is KDE's educational suite for children learning at home or school. It comes with around 200 activities to learn while having fun. The next iteration of the suite adds a teacher panel to follow the progress of children and provide customised exercises to focus on specific topics.

• Ashutosh Singh worked on adding new dataset editor for an in-progress GCompris admin software for teachers. This feature will allow teachers to send customized exercises to children and Ashutosh has added multiple editors: Learn decimals activities, Graduated lines activities and Fractions activities. These activities have been chosen as they are the ones most used at schools.

Mankala

The Mankala engine is a project that was started during last year's GSoC. The project is still in review and is pending integration into KDE.

• Srisharan V S worked on a cross platform GUI for MankalaEngine. On the desktop, it is possible to play Mankala games against a remote opponent provided both players have XMPP accounts. The GUI uses QXmpp for networking. The GUI works on both desktop and mobile, though network play is not yet available on mobile as support for this needs to be re-enabled in the QXmpp library.

Krita

Krita is KDE's free and open source cross-platform application for creating digital art files from scratch.

• Ross Rosales worked on improving Krita's usability by adding a UI to display common selection actions after selecting a layer. More details on Ross journey are available on his blog. The feature request was opened in 2022 and will be available in the upcoming 5.3 version of Krita.

Cantor

Cantor is a powerful mathematical and statistical computing front-end within the KDE ecosystem. Two contributors worked on improving Cantor this year:

• ZhengJiahong added features to improve Python support. Once the merge request is finished, users will be able to switch Python virtual environments to improve the user experience.

• Lv Haonan worked on integrating KTextEditor in Cantor to replace the custom made spreadsheets. This has several advantages: the current spreadsheets lack some features (auto-indent, code completion, spell checks...), they require extra maintenance from developers where a better solution already exists within KDE, and it will bring consistency between the different backend editors.

Mentorship Portal

One of the current KDE Goals is to improve the long term sustainability of KDE by recruiting and keeping more newcomers.

• Anish Tak worked on extending the current mentorship website to make it cleaner and with more information for newcomers.

Next Steps

The 2025 GSoC period is finally over for KDE. A big thank you to all the mentors and contributors who have participated in GSoC! We look forward to your continuing participation in free and open source software communities and in contributing to KDE.