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

Saturday, 6 December 2025

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixing, especially for the drawing tablets, printers, and monitors. Hardware is quirky!

But of course that’s not all; check out the rest, too:

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

You can now Alt+click/double-click on desktop items to see their properties, just like you can in Dolphin. (Méven Car, plasma-desktop MR #3349)

When a printer runs low on ink for multiple cartridges simultaneously, all the messages about this are now condensed into a single notification, instead of showing a separate notification for each low ink cartridge. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #291)

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now makes it more obvious when the lack of configurable pad buttons is due to a missing driver. (Joshua Goins, plasma-desktop MR #3234)

Spectacle now offers a Cancel button in the rectangular region overlay, so you can get out of it without having to press the Esc key. (Taras Oleksyn, bug #490980)

Locking the screen from the Application Launcher widget now closes it before locking so it’s not somewhat awkwardly left open after you unlock. (Christoph Wolk, bug #508725)

On distros that make you authenticate to toggle the feature to set the date and time automatically, closing the authentication window without authenticating no longer makes the page complain about an error. (David Edmundson, bug #501966)

Apps launched from the Favorites view of the Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard widgets are now added to the “Recent Apps” section. (Christoph Wolk, bug # 449834 and bug #435356)

Did a pass over several pages in System Settings to make sure they follow the KDE Human Interface Guidelines more closely. (Nate Graham, plasma-desktop MR #3309)

You’re no longer allowed to try to change the usernames of logged-in users, since this doesn’t work anyway. (Nate Graham bug #469665)

You’re now warned about the potential consequences if you try to disable the System Tray’s built-in Notifications widget, since those consequences may not be obvious. (Nate Graham, plasma-workspace MR #6044)

System Tray settings page showing a warning about disabling the Notifications widget

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed an issue that made the Orca screen reader’s “learn” mode speak too much and send extraneous keystrokes to apps. (Nicolas Fella, bug #512189)

Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause a crash when charging your system after the critical battery level notification appeared. (Anthony Fieroni, powerdevil MR #594)

Fixed an issue that made the screen turn black with certain older monitors directly connected via an analog VGA cable. (Xaver Hugl, bug #512146)

Fixed another source of the issue that made desktop icons move to the wrong screen of a multi-screen arrangement on login. (bug #512381)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to configure certain buttons of the Wacom Pen Pro 3D stylus. (Joshua Goins, bug #511488)

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now does a better job of handling weird tablets that say they have two stylii when they really only have one. (Joshua Goins, bug #508084)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma inaccurately warn that your printer was low on ink when it sent an unexpected ink level code but wasn't actually low on ink. (Mike Noe, bug #512602)

Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget’s “Forget recent [thing]” menu items unreliable for certain apps. (Méven Car, bug #480276)

Fixed a visual glitch in the Track Mouse effect when using a high DPI scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, bug #510029)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget’s “Forget” action for specific files only take effect after Plasma was restarted. (Christoph Wolk, bug #503840)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that could crash the open/save dialogs when you double-clicked on a column header while in Details mode. (David Edmundson, frameworks-kio MR #2070)

Fixed an issue that could make popups invoked from folders on the desktop misbehave when created from symlinks. (Lluc Simó Margalef, bug #479350)

Frameworks 6.22

Fixed an issue in the Quick Launch widget that made icons start dragging after right-clicking them. (Jonathan Marten, bug #384009)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for for per-DRM-plane color pipelines. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #6600)

Plasma now re-checks the battery level after waking from sleep, which handles the case of the battery draining (or charging) while asleep in such a manner that it would be appropriate to show or hide a notification about the battery level. (Ramil Nurmanov, powerdevil MR #592)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, the fundraiser has topped €100,000! And that’s just for the fundraiser itself; the yearly donation pop-up has also raised another €100k in just the past five days (!!!).

It’s kind of amazing. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

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.

Friday, 5 December 2025

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-49.


Steam Machine today, Steam Phones tomorrow

Tags: tech, valve, gaming, foss

Don’t trust the title, it misrepresent the content in my opinion. Still the interview is interesting, it shows quite well all the effort Valve is pouring into the Free Software ecosystem.

https://www.theverge.com/report/820656/valve-interview-arm-gaming-steamos-pierre-loup-griffais


Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization

Tags: tech, social-media, politics, science, research, psychology

A paper showing that social media algorithms foster political polarization and societal division. Who knew?? Sarcasm aside, the real value of the paper is showing that by modifying those algorithms we could quickly have positive effects. Most of the participants didn’t even notice they changed how they perceive others.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5584


How Should We Peer Review Software?

Tags: tech, science, research, politics

This is indeed one of the big issues of the computer science research community. It’s also something of importance in fields relying on simulations… which is almost all scientific fields nowadays. Peer reviewing the paper is well practiced, but the software is another story entirely. It’d require some investment in research… but that’s not where we’re headed at all.

https://mirawelner.com/posts/peer_review.html


How big tech is creating its own friendly media bubble to ‘win the narrative battle online’

Tags: tech, business, politics, journalism

Unsurprisingly the big tech players want their own information bubble too. This kind of propaganda machine isn’t really new, but they feel like they need their own now.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/29/big-tech-silicon-valley-ceo-media


Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

Tags: tech, hardware, geospatial

I don’t even get why this became a topic of conversation but here we go. At least this thought experiment is a good way to learn about electronics in space.

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/


AI Is still making code worse: A new CMU study confirms

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, quality, programming

The trend keep being the same… And when the newer models will be trained on FOSS code which degraded in quality due to the use of the previous generation of models, things are going to get “interesting”.

https://blog.robbowley.net/2025/12/04/ai-is-still-making-code-worse-a-new-cmu-study-confirms/


Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data

Tags: tech, ide, ai, machine-learning, copilot, security

IDEs allowing to spawn actions in the user environment are still a big security risk.

https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/google-antigravity-exfiltrates-data


GitHub → Codeberg: my experience

Tags: tech, git, tools, forgejo, github

This kind of migration is apparently easier than it sounds.

https://eldred.fr/blog/forge-migration/


pgFirstAid - PostgreSQL Health Check

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, reliability, performance, health

Looks like a nice kit to add to your tool belt. Does some handy checks if you have a Postgres database to manage.

https://randoneering.tech/blog/pgfirstaid/pgfirstaid/


So you wanna build a local RAG?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, search, self-hosting, foss

This is getting more and more accessible. It’s also one of the uses which makes sense for LLMs.

https://blog.yakkomajuri.com/blog/local-rag


Landlock-ing Linux

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, security, sandbox

This is a nice application level sandboxing feature on Linux. We should probably have more applications use it.

https://blog.prizrak.me/post/landlock/


How CRDTs and Rust are revolutionizing distributed systems and real-time applications

Tags: tech, rust, crdt, distributed

I admit I like CRDTs as well. They really are the foundation of cool use cases. Of course it raises questions related to security to broker properly the sessions between users. Still, it’s nice to see them more and more used.

https://kerkour.com/rust-crdt


In defense of lock poisoning in Rust

Tags: tech, multithreading, rust, safety, failure

Very Rust focused, still it’s an interesting debate. It gives a good overview of the different types of lock behaviors in case of failures. It’s very much advocating for the poisoning approach which is indeed an interesting one (coming with its own tradeoffs of course).

https://sunshowers.io/posts/on-poisoning/#fnref:1


Rust pattern: Display adapter

Tags: tech, rust, design, pattern

Another illustration of how to use a new type to declare intent for display of values.

https://articles.bchlr.de/display-adapter-pattern


Out of the Box Dynamic Dispatch

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

Shows that you don’t always need to put stuff in Box to get dynamic dispatch.

https://llogiq.github.io/2020/03/14/ootb.html


An Array of Pointers vs. a Multidimensional Array

Tags: tech, c, c++, memory

A reminder that small details at declaration can have large impacts on memory layouts.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/10/27/


Standard Ranges

Tags: tech, c++

An old one now, but still a very good overview of what C++ ranges brought to the table.

https://ericniebler.com/2018/12/05/standard-ranges/


How to choose good names in your code

Tags: tech, quality, craftsmanship, c++

It’s all written oriented toward C++ use. That said I think most of it equally applies whatever the language.

https://www.fluentcpp.com/2017/01/30/how-to-choose-good-names/


Treat test code like production code

Tags: tech, tests, quality

This needs repeating but yes, quality matters in test code too.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/12/01/treat-test-code-like-production-code/


Architectural debt is not just technical debt

Tags: tech, architecture, business, organization

This is a good way to see that the architecture questions are multi-layered. And yes, in enterprise contexts they go all the way to the company strategy level.

https://frederickvanbrabant.com/blog/2025-10-31-architectural-debt-is-not-just-technical-debt/


Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

Tags: tech, organization, team, productivity, devops, developer-experience

A bit too high on the “positive caricature scale” to my taste. That said there’s a kernel of truth there, focusing on the developer experience will lead to improved impact.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/developer-effectiveness.html


How to do effective video calls

Tags: tech, remote-working, video, conference

I agree with most of the points here. They make all the difference. The audio is too often underestimated.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/effective-video-calls.html


Reflections of an “Old” Programmer

Tags: tech, engineering, career, learning, knowledge

Some areas of our industry are more prone to the “fashion of the day” madness than others. Still there’s indeed some potential decay in what we learn, what matters is finding and focusing on what will last.

https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2016/reflections-of-an-old-programmer.php


On Being A Senior Engineer

Tags: tech, engineering, craftsmanship, expertise, knowledge, learning

An old one and a bit all over the place. Still, plenty of interesting advice and insights.

https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/


Software Failures and IT Management’s Repeated Mistakes

Tags: tech, quality, project-management, ethics, risk, failure

Decades that our industry doesn’t improve its track record. But there are real consequences for users. Some more ethics would be welcome in our profession.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures


We see something that works, and then we understand it

Tags: science, research, knowledge, innovation

Indeed, innovation is far from being a linear process. It’s actually messy, the breakthroughs already happened already and we describe it after the facts.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/12/04/we-see-something-that-works-and-then-we-understand-it/


Lazy Expert Syndrome: How to Stay on Top of Your Game

Tags: learning, teaching, mentoring

Or why it’s important to mentor others and not stay in your own bubble.

https://www.riskology.co/lazy-expert-syndrome/


Grow slowly, stay small

Tags: business, management, life, work, craftsmanship

An excellent piece, I like this kind of thinking. It works in fact as several level in your life.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/grow-slowly-stay-small/


Interviewing for Evidence

Tags: hr, interviews

Lots of good advice for better interviews. I like the structure it brings making sure you got balanced evidences.

https://dannorth.net/blog/interviewing-for-evidence/


A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Tags: tech, programming, language, satire, funny

OK, this is old so I wish it’d go beyond 2003. Still, that’s quite a funny read.

http://www.nerdware.org/doc/abriefhistory.html


Your next gaming dice could be shaped like a dragon or armadillo

Tags: tech, physics, mathematics, funny, research

Definitely fun research. Let’s not be fooled though it also has practical use.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/your-next-gaming-dice-could-be-shaped-like-a-dragon-or-armadillo/



Bye for now!

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:

  • Fix compile with libcamera 0.6.0 (MR)
  • New translations

Plasma Settings changes:

  • Fix issues with loading pages in some KCMs (MR)
  • Respect kiosk restrictions in modules model (MR)

Visit /info/independent-releases-25-12 for the tarballs.

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

Wednesday, 3 December 2025

KStars v3.8.0 is released on 2025.12.03 for Windows & Linux. MacOS release is expected in one week due to build issue on KDE CI infrastructure.

For Linux users, it's highly recommended to use the official KStars Flatpak hosted at Flathub. You can install the stable flatpak or try out new features by downloading the KStars Nightly Flatpak for x86_64 and arm64 architectures.

Live Stacker: LRGB Stacking

John Evans implemented generation of RGB and LRGB images from individual mono subframes. Watch R, G, B and optionally L directories and combine the individual stacks into RGB or LRGB images.


Add directories for R, G, B and optionally L subs. These are monitored and a single color image is displayed.


RGB images are combined with a Linear Fit type algorithm.  LRGB images are combined with a LRGB Combination type algorithm. SNR algorithm has been rewritten. Appears to work better but is more resource intensive.

Live Stacker: ImageMM Stacking Method

John Evans added an implementation of the ImageMM stacking method. This implementation strikes a balance between speed (it needs to be a Live Stacker) and fidelity.



To use: select ImageMM as the stacking method and play with the available controls. This method is considerably more resource intensive than "regular" stacking because it uses an iterative approach.

Live Stacker: Live Stacker Monitor

John Evans implemented the Live Stacker monitor. Live Stacking Monitor window is a popup from Live Stacker that shows a table of subs that match the chosen directory in Live Stacker.


The purpose is to allow analysis of Live Stacker, for example to allow investigation of bottlenecks in the stacking process.

When a sub is added to the watched directory, the sub is added to the Monitor's table. As the sub is processed by each step of the process information is updated in the table:
  • Waiting to load. The sub is in the queue to be processed but Live Stacker is busy with other subs.
  • Loading. The sub is loaded into memory.
  • Plate solving. The sub is undergoing plate solving (if appropriate).
  • Waiting to stack. The sub is waiting to be stacked (e.g. currently there are insufficient subs loaded to start a stack).
  • Calibration. Dark / Flat calibration.
  • Alignment.
  • Stacking.


Table columns and sort order are configurable. Changing cells can be highlighted (or not)

Task Queue system

Observatory startup and shutdown steps are now replaced by the new highly configurable Task Queue system. The Task Queue System is a modern, flexible automation framework that replaces traditional startup and shutdown scripts with a template-based, configurable task execution system. It provides a visual interface for building sequences of automated operations that can control your observatory equipment through INDI. It is accessible from Ekos Scheduler.


Why use it? The Task Queue system offers several advantages over traditional scripting:

  • Visual Management: Build and monitor task sequences through an intuitive graphical interface
  • Reusability: Use pre-built templates for common operations without writing code
  • Error Handling: Built-in retry logic and configurable failure responses
  • Device Compatibility: Automatic matching of templates to available devices
  • Progress Monitoring: Real-time status updates and detailed execution logs
  • Collections: Pre-defined task sets for startup, shutdown, and other common scenarios
  • Flexibility: Combine templates or create custom variations without programming

Safety Monitor

KStars scheduler now fully supports INDI Safety Monitor driver released part of INDI v2.1.7. A standalone driver may be used (independent of the equipment profile) that is running on a different INDI server to provide 24/7 safety monitor updates to the scheduler. No observatory operations shall take place unless it is deemed safe by the safety monitor.



The INDI Safety Monitor can listen to any number of sources including weather stations, UPS (uninterruptible power supply) monitors, and any auxiliary device that support the INDI's standard SAFETY_STATUS property.

Push-To Assistant 

Wolfgang Reissenberger added an incredibly useful tool for users with manual mounts: Push-To Assistant. Just attached a camera to your dobsonian and use this tool to center the target in the eyepiece. This tool assumes that both the camera center and eyepiece center are already aligned.

The new push-to assistant is intended as plate solving support for mechanical mounts in combination with a digital camera on a finder scope.


Setup: Create an optical train with the Telescope Simulator as mount and configure your combination of finder scope and digital camera.

Usage

  • Start Ekos
  • open the Push-to Assistant located in the Tools menu
  • move your scope as good as possible to the target you want to find
  • select the target from the catalog or enter its coordinates manually and press "Select target"
  • press "Solve position" to determine the position your scope is currently pointing at
  • as soon as the position has been solved, the assistant displays hints in which direction you should move your mount to be closer to the target
  • correct your mount position and press "Solve position" again

if you want to automatically repeat plate solving, configure the delay and press the "Repeat" button.


Bug Fixes


Tuesday, 2 December 2025

Huh, I started a blog post on November 11th, and then got distracted. What I was going to write was about KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD 14, how it does with Wayland, what kind of configuration surprises there are. And since then FreeBSD 15 has been released, which makes this title kind of moot, and I still need to write all the things down. The summary is short: with AMD graphics, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland is just fine for my workflow.

Performance improvement in Krita, Trust and Safety in NeoChat and files actions in Photos

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

We are still doing our fundraisers and in the past 48 hours, thanks to the crazy support from our users we managed to raise more than €90,000. Keep it going and if you can afford it, donate at kde.org/donate! Any amount helps.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Travel Applications

Volker Krause published a blog post about the current progress of KDE Itinerary in October and November. This includes an improved journey search page, fine-grained deletion control of tickets, altitude information in the live status view, and more! You can read all of that on his blog.

Grapics Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Mohammad Kazemi added a “Copy Without Line Breaks” action to remove line breaks when copying text (26.04.0 - link).

Quinten Kock added native pinch gestures with a touchpad in Okular (26.04.0 - link).

Photos Image Gallery

Noah Davis added more standard file actions in Photos when viewing a picture (26.04.0 - link).

KPhotoAlbum KDE image management software

Randall Rude made the metadata extractor also extract the creation date and time for videos (link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Agata Cacko improved the performance of the Liquify Transform tool making it a lot more smooth to use (link).

Agata also added a knife tool prototype to Krita (link).

Joshua Goins removed the error dialog when cancelling an export (link).

Utilities Applications

Konsole Use the command line interface

Matan Ziv-Av added two keyboard actions in Konsole for focusing on the next/previous view in split view mode (26.04.0 - link).

Sune Vuorela added an option to enable or disable whether Konsole listens to zmodem terminal codes, which might happen accidentally when outputting a binary file. (26.04.0 - link)

Kate Advanced text editor

Héctor Mesa Jiménez added some default configuration for netcoredbg, a standalone debug server for .NET Core. (26.04.0 - link)

Alligator RSS feed reader

Oula V improved the feed group feature of Alligator. Now when creating a feed group, you will get an error if another one exists with the same name. They also cleaned up the list of feed groups (26.04.0 - link).

Oula also fixed some crashes in Alligator after editing a feed (25.12.0 - link) and Stephan Seitz fixed some conformance issues with the OPML export feature (25.12.0 - link).

Salvo Tomaselli reordered the buttons in the menu, and now opening the current article in an external browser is the first button (25.12.0 - link).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Alex Hermann made KIO-powered applications like Dolphin keep the permissions of files copied from an SFTP server (link 1, link 2, link 3).

Social Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins continued efforts to improve Trust and Safety in NeoChat and added support for reporting rooms and users (26.04.0 - link).

"renner 03" fixed the KRunner integration of NeoChat when running the application in Flatpak (25.12.0 - link)

Browsers

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Stefano Crocco added a configuration page to configure Speed Dials in Konqueror. These speed dials are buttons that allow you to quickly open pre-configured links (26.04.0 - link).

Falkon Web Browser

Juraj Oravec added support to add items in the sidebar menu to the Falkon plugin API (link).

Angelfish Webbrowser for mobile devices

Rinigus Saar fixed an issue with retrieving the last visited entries (25.12.0 - link)

PIM Applications

Trojitá IMAP E-mail Client

Sandøy Hustad started pushing some work to make Trojita support Qt 6 (link).

Third-party Applications

Deskflow - Keyboard and mouse sharing app

Chris Rizzitello released Deskflow 1.25.0! The main changes are support for a symbolic tray icon which is recolored correctly even when using Plasma's Twilight theme; support for changing the application's language without restarting it; and initial support for the wl-clipboard Wayland protocol.

EasyEffect

Giusy Digital continued working on unifying the wording of the various physical units (e.g. dB, Hz, ...) all over the application (link).

Wellington Wallace ported some overlay sheets to Kirigami dialogs (link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. 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. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

STF needed a scalable, secure, and asynchronous collaboration system for representatives across multiple time zones. This article explains why AnyType was selected, how it is used today, and which features and challenges matter most as the Software Transparency Foundation.

Monday, 1 December 2025

Boosting PySide with C++ models

In a recent series of blog posts, we have demonstrated that Python and Qt fit together very well. Due to its accessibility, ease-of-use and third-party ecosystem, it is really straightforward to prototype and productize applications. Still, Python has one significant disadvantage: It is not necessarily the most performant programming language.

Continue reading Boosting PySide with C++ models at basysKom GmbH.

Saturday, 29 November 2025

In the past two months since the last post, KDE Itinerary’s journey search UI got simplified, you got more control over deleting individual entries and altitude information is shown on the live status page when available, among many other things.

New Features

Improved journey search page

The interface for manual public transport searches as been simplified. Filters for specific modes of transportation are now on a secondary page, and you don’t have to specify a trip to add the results to in the first step anymore. Instead, that’s now queried when actually saving a result.

Itinerary's journey search UI without trip selection controls and mode filters hidden behind a separate button.
Simplified journey search page.

Fine-grained deletion control

For multi-ticket or multi-traveler reservations, it’s now possible to delete just individual tickets or travelers rather than the entire entry.

Itinerary offering to delete only individual tickets in a multi-ticket batch.
Multi-ticket deletion dialog.

Altitude information in live status view

The live map on services with the corresponding onboard API now also shows the current altitude information when available.

Itinerary's train live map showing the current location, heading, speed, and altitude of RailJet 82 moving down the Brenner pass.
Live train position with altitude.

Infrastructure Work

Automatic geocoding for reservation data

For many of Itinerary’s features to work properly we need to know geo locations of the involved places, such as departure and arrival stops of a train trip. In many cases we get those from being able to recognize stop identifiers found in e.g. ticket barcodes. There’s a bunch of heuristics as fallback (such as knowing in which areas a train company operates), but that’s also not covering all cases.

To address this properly, Itinerary can now resolve those remaining locations by using OSM’s geocoder Nominatim. As this involves querying an online service, this is conditional on having online data sources enabled in the settings, same as for querying for delay information.

Transitous upgrade to MOTIS v2.7

Upgrading MOTIS, the software behind Transitous brought us a number of new features, with the following ones particularly relevant for Itinerary:

  • State and positions of currently available rental vehicles such as bikes and scooters can now be queried.
  • Support for GBFS station booking URLs.
  • Support for multiple language preferences. That means that secondary languages are now also considered when picking the best option for multi-lingual content such as disruption notes.
  • Location searches include the modes of transportation served at stops now.
Small part of a map with green bike and car rental icons, the car one showing how many vehicles are available at this station.
Itinerary's station map showing a car rental station and two free-floating rental bikes.

Android platform support

KDE’s Android build infrastructure (which Itinerary relies on) has been updated to Android’s NDK r28, which enabled compliance with the 16kB page size requirement enforced by the Google Play Store since November 1st.

While this is something that went mostly unnoticed by users, the next required update (to Qt 6.10) is unfortunately going to have some more side-effects. For the first time in many years this will require a higher minimum Android version, going from currently 21 (Android 5, from 2014, 99.8% cumulative use) to then 28 (Android 9, from 2018, 91.7% cumulative use).

This means any newer build of any KDE Android app would no longer run on anything older than Android 9. It’s unclear how many of our users would be affected by this, but it unfortunately does look like we have very little choice here beyond delaying this a bit.

If you have thoughts or feedback on this, feel free to join the KDE Android Matrix channel.

Events

There also were several events with Itinerary-adjacent topics in the past two months:

Itinerary also got mentioned in the whirlwind tour through the land of Wikidata-powered_apps at Wikimania in Nairobi.

And more is coming up, members of the Itinerary and Transitous teams will be at 39C3 end of December in Hamburg, Germany as well as FOSDEM at the beginning of February in Brussels, Belgium.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

  • Added or improved travel document extractors for Booking.com, CFR, citycity.se, Comboios de Portugal, Eurostar, Flixbus, FooEvents, GlobalTicket, Inviton, MÁV, NH Hotels, Predpredaj, Prioticket, Ryanair, TicketCounter, United, Ventra, Wiener Linien and ZSSK.
  • Consider bus stations and try harder to discard freight terminals when locating airport entrances.
  • Ignore seat qualifiers (“window”, “aisle”, etc) when comparing seat numbers.
  • Merge common parts of all elements of the same incidence such as a multi-ticket booking.
  • Consider names with swapped given/family name as equivalent as well

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

  • Add a vehicle feature flag for night trains (supported with MOTIS and Hafas backends).
  • Add support for agency/operator URLs (supported with MOTIS and OTP backends). This can be useful as this is the most widely available way towards actually booking something at this point.
  • Improved onboard API support for Frecciarossa and RailJet trains.
  • Improved performance of the location search page.

All of this also directly benefits KTrip.

Itinerary app

  • Editing now affects the currently selected reservation in a multi-ticket or multi-traveler batch.
  • Only load reservation data for the current trip group.
  • Re-add the top-level import action.
  • Fix performance issues and hangs when displaying journey search results.
  • Fix online updates for standalone Apple Wallet pass tickets such as Zügli D-Tickets.
  • Fix timer overflow in transfer monitoring with Qt 6.10.
  • Adding a journey search result when there’s no existing trip will now directly ask to create a new trip.
  • Fix updating platform information from scheduled online data in case the platform in the original ticket was wrong.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

The Kdenlive 25.12 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We made several changes to the user interface to improve your workflow, including a new widget docking system that makes rearranging panels much easier and more powerful, an enhanced audio display in the clip monitor with a waveform overview for faster navigation and zooming, and a new Startup and Welcome screen allowing to easily select a few options when launching the program.

image

Other highlights:

  • Added an editing layout and safe areas for vertical formats
  • Reordering of the menus to make them more logical
  • Introduction of markers with a time span (GSoC 2025)

Feedback Needed

Now is your chance to test it and let us know if you encounter any bugs or have suggestions to help us polish the final release. Share your feedback either in the comments below or directly with the team during our online Café, where we’ll be discussing this upcoming release. Join us next Wednesday, 3rd of December at 21:00 CET, on meet.kde.org

Update 30th of November 2025

The original RC Appimage for Linux was broken on X11, we have now fixed it and the download link will give you the RC2 version.

Download the binaries from below and give it a spin!

Pre-release binaries can be downloaded here.