I honestly love the 3d view of harmonicon, but it’s just eye candy. The amount of lines of code is exceeding 75.000 so I took the difficult decision to remove it, so I can focus on more important tasks.
I believe that harmonicon currently is the best harmonica song editor that exists, and removing some eye candy helps me focus on what it actually needs: polish and bugfixes.
That’s all.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 21 RC.
Clate Beta is out today, free for everyone. It's a no-code, AI-native UX design tool built for embedded and HMI applications, with QML under the hood, so designers can stay in control of the full user experience.
I am going to tell the story of fixing a very high priority bug that was 15 years old. Arguably the worst KIO bug.
In September 2011, against KDE 4.7, someone opened bug 281270: "When copying files to a removable disk, speed and progress reflect copying to the local cache not to the disk itself". The report notes the copy notification showed about 50 MB/s to a USB 1.1 device, which cannot go faster than 12 Mbit/s. The reporter had asked a kernel developer, Alan Stern, what was going on, and summed up his answer:
it shows that the copying operation is finished when it has not even been started.
Seventy-seven comments and 17 duplicates later, that is still how a copy to a USB stick behaves in the current release of KIO. My last post about copying was about making KIO copy faster. This one is about the opposite case, a destination that is slower than KIO, and about making the progress bar and copy completion accurate.
The changes are in four KIO merge requests: MR 2506 finds out which devices are removable, MR 2517 and MR 2518 flush the device at the end of a copy or a move, and MR 2283 adds the writeback window. All of it is merged, and will be in KDE Frameworks 6.32, released November 13th 2026.
We will see the cause of the bug, its history, and what it took to fix it.
The file worker copies a file by handing its data to write(). write() returns as soon as the
data is in the page cache, in memory. The kernel writes it to the device later, when it decides to.
On a local SSD, later means very soon, and you never notice. On a USB 2.0 stick that writes at
2.3 MB/s, it is another story. Here is a 128 MiB file:
For more than a minute, Dolphin considers the copy finished while the stick is still writing. The progress bar was showing how fast KIO filled memory. Pull the stick out during that minute, and your data is gone.
Network filesystems have a different symptom from the same cause. A large copy to an NFS or SMB
share leaves hundreds of MiB in memory to send to the server, and the progress runs far ahead of
it. On SMB it is worse than a wrong number: with the default cache=strict, looking at a file
waits until its dirty data is written. Listing the folder you are copying into looks at that file.
Over a 5 MB/s link, almost every listing during a 1 GiB copy waited 15 to 20 seconds.
The right tool actually showed up very early. Two days after the report, Christoph Feck asked whether there was a
way to learn when the data is really on the disk "without causing massive slow downs that any sync
type calls would cause". Two weeks later, the reporter passed on Alan Stern's answer,
sync_file_range(), and Christoph replied that it looked like "exactly what we need". That was
September 2011, and it is the call KIO now uses.
Then not much happened for years, apart from users confirming it and seventeen duplicates. In 2021, Nate
Graham raised it to the highest priority, because a move deletes the source files while the copies
are still in memory. In 2022, he changed the Disks & Devices applet, so that ejecting a device
explains that it is still writing. In 2024, Christoph tested the cachestat() call of Linux 6.5,
which reports how much of a file is still dirty in memory, but only for one file at a time.
This bug has been my white whale. I have been contributing to KIO since 2018, and I am still learning
how the Linux storage stack behaves underneath it. I tried twice in 2024 and did not get
sync_file_range() right. In MR 1718,
the sync_file_range() path stayed commented out. In KIO
MR 1764 and Dolphin
MR 862, the worker waited for the
writeback of the chunk it had just written, which had not started, so it never waited at all. Waiting
for the window before the one just written is what makes it work. I didn't spot the issue, nor any
reviewer unfortunately.
Since then, another contributor proposed turning off the cache for copies, in MR 2162, which was closed.
Making the copy correct is the easy part: call fsync() after every file, or open the destination with
O_DIRECT and skip the cache. Both make copies several times slower, and they would slow down
the fast local disks too, where nothing was wrong. Making it
correct without making it slow is what took fifteen years, and it needed several things that were
not there before.
tomaz
fsync(), which waits for everything.
sync_file_range() is Linux only, and its own manual calls it "extremely dangerous": it does not
write the file's metadata, so on its own it guarantees nothing after a crash. It can bound how
much is in memory, but the end of the copy still needs a real flush.KMountPoint made that cheap
enough to do for every copied file:statx() returns since Linux 6.8, instead of parsing
/proc/self/mountinfo on every lookup. A lookup by id became about 700 times faster.statmount(), which does not walk any path, so a network server that does
not answer no longer blocks the lookup. In that case, the lookup went from more than 15 seconds
to about 1 ms.CopyJob, in the application, knows
when the whole copy is over. So the flush needed a new worker command, and a way for the worker to
notify the job that a flush is needed. On the way, I found that FileCopyJob dropped the metadata
that the worker sent with a copy, so the CopyJob could never have seen it.Waiting for the device after every write would be correct but very slow. Waiting only at the end
leaves the progress wrong for the whole copy. KIO now does something in between, with
sync_file_range(), which lets a program start the writeback of part of a file and wait for it.
The data is written in windows. When a window is full, the worker hands it to a helper thread, which writes it back and waits for it, while the copy fills the next window. The copy only waits when the window before the one it hands over is not written yet. So at most two windows of the copy are ever in memory and not on the device, and the progress bar is never more than one window ahead of what is really written.
The helper thread was needed to accommodate CIFS, the kernel client for Samba and Windows shares. On CIFS, the call that starts the writeback of a window does more than start it: it sends the data to the server, and waits for the server to grant the credits to do so, blocking the calling thread for about 157 ms per 128 MiB window. So the copy could not fill the next window while the previous one was sent. With the helper thread making that call, sending a window and filling the next one overlap.
A window holds about 200 ms of writeback, at the speed measured on the window before. It starts at 1 MiB, can at most double from one window to the next, and stays below 16 MiB, or 128 MiB on CIFS. On a fast link the windows grow, so the copy keeps its speed. On a slow link they stay at about 1 MiB, and anything that has to wait for the file waits a fraction of a second, not for the whole file.
A window bounds how much is left in memory, but there is still something left at the end. For a removable device, KIO now also makes the end of the copy wait for it.
A file larger than the largest window, 16 MiB, is flushed with fsync(), and then its folder, before
the copy reports it done. By then the window has already written all but the last two windows, so the flush is
short.
Small files are the hard part. The obvious fix, an fsync() for every file, made 3000 files of
16 KiB take 10 seconds instead of 0.04 seconds on a local disk. So the worker flushes no small file
by itself. After a copy to a removable device, it notifies the job, and the CopyJob sends it one
more command before reporting success: write back the whole filesystem of the destination, with
one syncfs(). While that runs, the copy notification shows "Writing the copied data to the device...".
If the flush fails, the copy fails, because the data may not be on the device.
A move needed more than that. Before, KIO deleted each source file right after its copy, while the copy could still be only in memory, which is why the bug got its highest priority. Now a move to a removable device keeps its sources until the flush has succeeded, and deletes them after it. If the flush fails, or the stick is unplugged during it, every source stays. A source that changed while it waited for the flush stays too, with a warning. A copy or a move that stops on an error, or that you cancel, still flushes the device, and a move then deletes only the sources of the files that are on it.
Here is the same USB stick again, with the small files added:
Yes, the copies now take longer by the clock, but only because the clock now includes the time the stick spends writing. The time until the data is really on the stick did not get worse. The speed of this stick varies a lot from run to run, so the 28 seconds against 68 to 91 seconds for the large file is not a speedup I would count on. The small files never fill a window, so they only depend on the flush at the end.
A local fixed disk does not need any of this, and keeps the current behaviour exactly. With the removable policy forced onto a local disk for testing, the 3000 small files took 1.55 s against 1.54 s before the change.
Deciding what is removable is less obvious than it sounds. The filesystem type does not expose it: exFAT can be a memory card, and FAT is also the EFI partition of your laptop. Most USB disks do not even report removable media. MR 2506 adds a private function to KIO that asks sysfs: the disk's own removable flag, then the USB port or PCIe slot it hangs off, which the kernel marks removable when it can be reached from outside the machine, and SD cards. It follows encrypted and LVM volumes down to the disk under them.
Network filesystems are easier: every mount that KIO already considers slow gets a window. That is NFS and CIFS, but also Ceph, GlusterFS, 9p, sshfs, and FUSE filesystems such as rclone. The worker finds the mount from the mount id of the destination folder, without a round trip to the server.
To measure this, I used KIO's own copy job, comparing KIO master just before the change with KIO master after it, while another thread listed the destination folder every 50 ms. The SMB server ran on the same machine, with 2 ms of delay added to its traffic, and for the slow link a limit of 40 Mbit/s, about 5 MB/s.
On the slow link, the listing is the difference you would feel:
The copy runs about 3% slower with the window. On a fast link, the copy keeps up:
One of the five copies before the change failed with a write error from the share, so these numbers come from four rounds. The times vary between runs: in an earlier run, the copy with the window was 4% slower.
Getting there took me four tries. My first version was 10 to 20% slower on the fast link, because of the CIFS behaviour described above. Then, with the windows aimed at 500 ms, listings on the slow link went up to 4.2 seconds, because each request of a listing waits behind the window being sent. Aiming the windows at 200 ms brought the listings down to 1.7 seconds.
NFS, on the same machine with 2 ms of delay:
The copy times are close: 11% slower in the first round, and slightly faster in the two others.
Bug 423187 collects many ways in which a slow mount can freeze Dolphin. In one of its comments, Frank Gehann copied a 100 MB file to an SMB share while browsing it, and found two causes: Dolphin's main thread waiting for answers from the share, and folder listings waiting behind the queued upload.
The window helps with the second cause: each request of a listing now waits behind at most two
windows, about 400 ms of writeback, and a whole listing took 1.7 seconds on the 5 MB/s link instead
of 5 to 11. The statmount() change
helps with part of the first one. KFileItem::isSlow(), which Dolphin calls on its main thread
before it reads a file to find its type, no longer waits for any server, on Linux 6.8 or later. Work is underway to fix the
rest of the first cause in Frank's open
MR 2484 and
MR 2485.
One measurement sent me down a rabbit hole. During a large copy to the USB stick, listing a folder on the stick sometimes took about 15 seconds, before the change as much as after it. It looked like the writeback window was making something wait.
It was the stick. Roughly every 8 seconds, a single 120 KiB write to it took 4 to 7 seconds to complete, and the listing waited for a page that was stuck behind such a write. KIO cannot fix a device that stops for seconds at a time, but at least we now know the copy is not to blame. In the runs for this post, the slowest listing took 3.6 ms during the copy of the large file, but 7 seconds during the copy of the small files, against 15 seconds before the change.
One more thing landed along the way, and this one is a plain speedup. In 2021, in Frameworks 5.88, I replaced sendfile() with
copy_file_range() in the file worker, in
MR 602. At the time, Linux copied with copy_file_range() across
filesystems too. Linux 5.19 changed that back: between two filesystems, the call fails again with
EXDEV. Since then, a copy from one filesystem to another went through read() and write() in the
worker, one buffer at a time.
MR 2520 now falls back to
sendfile() in that case, which copies from one file to another inside the kernel:
A copy to the USB stick takes as long as before, because its write speed is the limit. This one is merged too, and will also be in KDE Frameworks 6.32.
With all this, a copy to a USB stick now finishes when the data is actually on the stick. On network filesystems, the progress now follows what the server has received, and the share stays usable during the copy.
sync_file_range() is mainly used by databases and storage engines. No other file manager that I
know of uses it. Now KIO, and so Dolphin, uses it too.
Happy unplugging.
Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.8.2.
Plasma 6.8 was released in October 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
View full changelogI’ve been learning Jujutsu (jj), a a version control system that serves as a frontend for git, but changes the workflow itself instead of just being a GUI or a set of aliases.
The thing is cool for many reasons, but the most important one is that workflows like rebase, splitting a commit, changing history or resolving conflicts are so, so much easier than with git. You can see this in I want to move added changes in a working copy ("currently checked out commit") into a parent change and I have a working copy with too many changes and I want to split it into multiple. It also has many quality of life features, like autorebase, autostash, a literal undo and redo command, the default behavior for squashing sends current changes to the parent commit (which is probably 90% of my squash usage pretty much), and it comes with nice TUIs for split, squash, and resolving conflicts.
It has facilitated my git workflow immensely, but it also scared me when it comes to some design decisions. After all, I’m familiar with git and know how to avoid screwing things up with it; I was unfamiliar with jujutsu and didn’t know how to not screw up there.
When I tried to apply it to my KDE workflow, I learned about what it does that I don’t want. Here’s my notes about it, in case anyone is interested in trying it.
For the record, I've done all the following workflows before:
Maybe I'll write about this in the future, we'll see. 
This section explains what I feel are required changes to the default Jujutsu settings so it matches my usage.
Jujutsu has a concept of “tracked bookmarks” (where a bookmark is essentially a git branch for our purposes). When you do track a bookmark, every time you push to a remote, all tracked bookmarks get pushed at the same time.
While this is handy for most people (like those who have their own small projects and don't need branches), well, in KDE we usually don’t ever commit to master unless the change is tiny and uncontroversial; instead we put our work in work/<username>/branch-name (a work branch) and make a merge request. And jujutsu defaults to tracking master/main.
If a contributor has the ability to commit to master, this may be a hazard. I can easily see someone making a commit in their local master branch for testing or whatever reason (bisecting? triggering tool behavior? I don't remember what for, but I've done this before), forgetting about it after some time, and then being surprised they pushed to master.
This may be an irrational fear, but I’d rather the tool cater to my own stupidity instead. Hence, I disable tracking the master branch.
@herzenschein:kde.org[git]
track-default-bookmark-on-clone = falseI once tried this setting after being confused at the official documentation, whose listed use cases seemed beneficial to me; in reality I don’t want it at all, and I spent quite some time trying to figure out why Jujutsu was not giving me the behavior I wanted.
As mentioned above, every tracked bookmark gets pushed by default when you do a generic jj git push without specifying a bookmark. Like in I don't want jj to track main/master unless I do so explicitly, there can be an accident where you accidentally push a change made to some branch you didn’t intend to push. This is probably more likely to happen here, in fact.
So the jujutsu defaults for this are fine, actually, and I just make a deliberate note here to avoid setting this up, and if I ever do, it will only happen with work branches.
# [remotes-origin]
# auto-track-bookmarks = "work/username/*"Jujutsu doesn’t have a concept of “current branch”. Instead, you work on “detached commits”, in git lingo, and just make a bookmark point to the tip of the last detached commit.
This is of course incredibly annoying to do every time you want to push your branch, so the jujutsu folks implemented a feature to do this: advance branches.
Every time you use jj commit, your branch is automatically advanced; in other words, the new commit becomes the tip of the branch.
For this I want two settings.
I want jj to only advance the bookmark in my work branches (I sometimes work on other people’s branches, I don’t want to push them to the remote accidentally):
[experimental-advance-branches]
enabled-branches = ["glob:work/username/*"]I don't want jj to ever move the bookmark on main/master unless I do so explicitly (again, for my (irrational) fear of accidentally committing something to master):
[experimental-advance-branches]
disabled-branches = ["main", "glob:push-*"]When I do want to have these settings to be different, I can just jj config edit --repo to apply that config to my specific repo. I do this for this blog's repository, for example.
Jujutsu does a neat thing where if you never specify a bookmark/branch name, it will simply autogenerate one for you in the push-randomletters format.
I can see why people would want that (in principle you don't need to care about branch names if you always do PRs/MRs immediately), but I don’t want it. It’s ugly and non-descriptive. While not exactly often, KDE contributors sometimes make branches that don’t get an MR until later in life; if I were to browse a list of non-descriptive branch names, it would be more annoying than helpful.
If it ever happens, I want it to be at least somewhat descriptive. So...
In the case I ever intentionally or accidentally push an autogenerated bookmark, I want jj to at least have a more readable default autogenerated branch name based on the commit name without spaces and without single quotes in lowercase:
templates.git_push_bookmark = "\"work/username/\" ++ description.first_line().replace(\" \", \"-\").replace(\"'\", \"\").lower()"There’s a bit of quote witchcraft going on because TOML, but this means the generated bookmark for a commit named Add setup page would be named work/username/add-setup-page.
This does have the limitation of being based on the last commit (I think?), but come on, I'm not that good with jj yet. 
The result, including username, email and ssh signing set up, resides in ~/.config/jj/config.toml:
[user]
name = "Your User"
email = "your-email@example.com"
[git]
# Don't want to track main/master
track-default-bookmark-on-clone = false
# [remotes.origin]
# Generic `jj git push` sends it to all tracked bookmarks
# auto-track-bookmarks = "work/username/*"
[templates]
# Any autogenerated bookmarks become work/username/add-setup-page
git_push_bookmark = "\"work/username/\" ++ description.first_line().replace(\" \", \"-\").replace(\"'\", \"\").lower()"
[experimental-advance-branches]
## Automatically runs jj bookmark advance on commit
enabled-branches = ["glob:work/username/*"]
disabled-branches = ["main", "glob:push-*"]
[signing]
behavior = "own"
backend = "ssh"
key = "~/.ssh/mysshkey.pub"Instead of manually specifying the path to the file, you can just run jj config edit --user.
If you want a programmatic way to set these settings, there's jj config set --user <name> <value>. For example: jj config set --user git.track-default-bookmark-on-clone false.
I’m not going to explain how jujutsu works in this blog post.
I am going to link you to the official documentation and to Steve Klabnik’s Jujutsu tutorial instead.
Here in this blog post I’m simply going to show you the jujutsu commands I use for my workflow, based on actions, so you know what you need to do in these situations.
jj git initjj git clone <repo-link>jj bookmark create work/username/i18n
jj git push --bookmark work/username/i18n
jj bookmark track work/username/i18n@originIt’s necessary to track the bookmark so it gets pushed with jj git push later on. Otherwise you may simply jj git push --bookmark <bookmarkname> every time.
jj newjj edit <change-or-bookmark>This is great. You don’t need to do the whole git dance to edit a previous commit at all:
You just jj edit, edit what you want, then you jj edit back to the tip/branch. All subsequent commits are automatically rebased for you, and jujutsu will warn you of any conflicts.
jj new
# Make a change
jj describe
jj bookmark advanceOr, with experimental-advance-branches:
jj new
# Make a change
jj commitI recommend using jj commit, but it’s good to know that it’s equivalent to jj describe + jj bookmark advance.
jj squash
# That's the same as
jj squash --from @ --into @-This is great because I feel the most common use case for a squash is from child to parent. You’d normally do git rebase --interactive and mark a commit as squash/s for this. Here you don’t even need to check the log or rely on tab completion.
Convenient if you’re the type to squash all changes into a single commit, but you really want to jj diff your working copy first to make sure your changes are how you want them.
jj squash --interactive --into <change-id>
# This will modify that change's change-id btw!
# Don't reuse the same id from shell history.If you know the change ID or commit you want to squash into, you can actually use it with interactive mode, which provides you a nice TUI to select the exact things you want to transfer.
# If I don't want to leave the current working copy:
jj squash --from @- --into @--
# Or if I do leave the current working copy:
jj edit @-
jj squashHere @ is the current working copy (like git’s HEAD) and @- is the working copy’s parent (like HEAD~ or HEAD~1). There’s stuff like @-- which is the parent of the parent too (like HEAD~2).
jj split --interactiveIt doesn't matter if your working copy is an existing named commit or if it's an anonymous working copy.
Let's say your case is the former: after splitting the changes, the ones that were marked will be the only things in the current named commit; the ones that you did not mark will be in a separate commit.
Let's say your case is the latter: after splitting the changes, the ones that were marked will be part of the current working copy, which will get a new name like if you did jj describe; the ones you did not mark will be in a separate commit.
Split does not create a new empty working copy (because you might want to split the commit further).
jj edit @-jj edit <commit>Yeah, you don't really do anything. You can just leave that commit and go back to it later, it's autostashed for you. See the next section.
jj edit @-
# Finished, I want to go back!
jj edit @+Of course, if the child change was an empty working copy, then this command fails with Error: Revset '@+' didn't resolve to any revisions, and you'll need jj new.
However, if there was work in an unnamed working copy before you moved to a parent commit, then trying to edit the child change actually will restore the working copy you had (with a different change id). You can think of this as jj essentially stashing your working copy changes, and restoring them immediately upon editing it again.
Let's think of a similar hypothetical scenario where, after doing jj edit @-, instead of doing jj edit @+ you were to do jj new. What happens then? Rather than abandon the changes, you branch it. The parent @- will actually have two unnamed children (that you can edit with their change ids), and jj log will show this.
This distinction is only briefly mentioned in the official docs despite being awesome, so I wanted to elaborate it here.
jj abandon --retain-bookmarksYou probably always want to use --retain-bookmarks. Might as well keep that in your shell history instead of jj abandon.
Using jj abandon with experimental-advance-branches means the tip loses the bookmark, and you’ll need to mark it again. With jj abandon --retain bookmarks the bookmark is sent to the previous commit. I wish that was the default when I have experimental-advance-branches enabled.
# Acts as a literal ctrl + z
jj undoThis reverts the last operation in jj operation log.
Particularly good when you’re resolving a conflict and you accidentally confirm the changes instead of quitting!
If the undo operation itself was a mistake, you can fix that with jj redo, which is a literal ctrl + y.
I wish I had that in git when I was starting... I've had so much trouble even trying to read the damn git reflog. 
jj arrangeThis is usually done with git rebase --interactive. It’s fine. I like that it semantically makes sense, though it takes a bit of effort to lose the muscle memory.
jj git fetch
jj rebase --onto master@originNo need to git pull --rebase origin master or update your local master branch to in turn rebase your branch locally, jj uses the remote reference directly. It just needs to know what has changed in the remote beforehand (hence the git fetch).
By the way, in KDE we rarely ever do merge commits, or that rebase process involving "merge master into commit" or something. In fact, I'm so used to our workflow that I actually don't know how to rebase that other way!
# Upon attempting to rebase, an error message will pop up
# Saying to do exactly the following
jj new <first-commit-with-conflicts>
jj resolve
jj diff
# If it's resolved
jj squash
# Continue resolving until everything is done
jj edit <bookmark>
jj git push --bookmark <branch you were working on>Probably the most elaborate process here.
It helps that jj resolve gives you a nice TUI with individual changed lines with context, like a git frontend TUI would.
jj log --revision 'trunk()..@'This is similar to:
git log master..HEADIn both jj and git it can be annoying to see the whole log, especially if the last commit on master/main was your own.
So... I'm working on something new for Oxygen. 
The idea is fairly simple: giving users the option to choose between symbolic and colourful icons for actions, the little things you see in toolbars and menus. One option for people who prefer the clean, monochrome look, another for those who like a bit more colour in their interfaces. You choose, and hopefully everyone is happy.
Sounds easy enough, right?
Heee... well, there's a small problem with that.
Oxygen is a theme, and themes are brutal things to maintain. Especially when you care about the details, and especially when you want to offer choices without making one of them feel like an afterthought.
Just to give you an idea of the scale of this particular problem, Oxygen has 719 colourful action icons in the 32×32 size alone. Breeze has roughly 1,200 icons, excluding copies and symbolic links. And I'm not simply scaling the existing artwork down and calling it a day. I'm drawing new versions from scratch for 16×16, 22×22, and 32×32, with 24×24 and 48×48 derived directly from the 22×22 versions.
That's a lot of little pictures.
So far, I've made approximately 130 new icons in each of those three sizes. You can follow the work in the symbolicActions directory on KDE Invent. with simlinks and sizes around 1150 new files in the past 4 days...
And each one has to work at its intended size, with its own limitations, proportions, and details. What looks perfectly fine at 32 pixels can turn into a muddy mess at 16. A detail that makes an icon recognisable at one size can become noise at another. Sometimes you have to redraw the thing almost entirely to make it work.
Multiply that by hundreds of icons, and you start to understand why maintaining a theme is such a monumental amount of work. And this is just one part of it.
But there's some good news too! Over in Oxygen Labs, we now have a working prototype of a patch for the KDE settings module (KCM) that lets you choose between symbolic and colourful action icons.
Which is rather the point of all this.
The user gets Options in the settings. Pick the style you prefer in the size you prefer, hit save, and carry on using your computer. They don't need to know about the hundreds of files, the different sizes, or the months spent adjusting individual shapes. Ideally, it just works.
So why bother?
Because We think user options matter. Even when they seem trivial, even when most people will never touch the setting that is very hiden :D, even when the work required to support them seems completely disproportionate to the little checkbox or dropdown that exposes them.
We all use our computers differently. We have different tastes, different habits, different ideas about what makes an interface comfortable to use. Some people love symbolic icons because they keep the interface quiet and consistent. Others prefer colourful icons because they make actions easier to recognise, or simply because they enjoy having a bit more colour around. And I cant make up my mind as i think it depends :D. Neither is wrong. And if we can offer both without compromising the quality of either, why shouldn't we?
Of course, every option has a cost. Someone has to design it, implement it, test it, and keep it working. In a theme like Oxygen, that cost can be enormous, because an apparently small choice can multiply the amount of artwork that needs to exist and be maintained.
But there is a cost to having no choice as well. It means deciding that everyone should use the same thing, whether it suits them or not. Sometimes that's a perfectly reasonable decision. We can't offer a setting for absolutely everything. But I don't think we should dismiss options just because the work behind them is invisible.
Because apparently, giving people a choice between two kinds of tiny pictures is how I choose to spend my free time. Anyway, there's still plenty to do, but I'm slowly making my way through this rather ridiculous pile of icons. One at a time. on the bright side my daily commits now rival Laurent :D,.... J.K. im only human 
On some other news, due to popular demand (all 3 of you) ;(, we are going to make a new video on the qml theming thing, I'm thinking on doing the switch element with a twist ( a literal one ). Wil keep you posted
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma. And it’s going to be a big one, folks!
This week, a familiar pattern played out: people upgraded to Plasma 6.8 and found all the bugs that nobody reported during the beta period, and the Plasma team worked incredibly hard to fix them! You’ll see the result below: tons of bug fixes.
It’s clear that not enough people are testing Plasma’s beta releases to uncover and report all regressions. We’re open for ideas on how to improve this.
In addition to the bug fixes, this week also saw a number of nice new features, UI improvements, and performance enhancements. Consequential stuff! Check it out below:
After extended testing, KWin’s support for the Wayland picture-in-picture (PiP) protocol has been deemed stable enough, and turned on by default! (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #10175)
Window sizes and positions are now remembered on a per-screen-arrangement basis!
This means if you arrange your open windows across two screens, then disconnect one, then rearrange the windows to suit the now-single-screen arrangement… then when you reconnect the second screen, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they last had on the two-screen arrangement. And when you disconnect a screen again, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they had on the single-screen setup.
Note that this only takes effect within a running session for open windows; it does not affect the positioning of windows that are closed and then reopened. That’s still being worked on. (Jakob Petsovits, kwin MR #10198)
You can now permanently deny XWayland-using apps from asking to control the pointer and keyboard, and also see which apps have been denied and revoke their denials. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521576)
In-progress downloads in Firefox that produce a nice native Plasma notification via Plasma Browser Integration can now be paused and resumed from that notification. (Simon Hürlimann, plasma-browser-integration MR #207)
Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Brave browser. (Geevarghese ST, plasma-browser-integration MR #179)
The Activity Switcher sidebar no longer stretches wallpaper images for screens without a 16:9 aspect ratio; now the wallpaper is shown faithfully, but cropped if needed. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #478784)
When you use a plain color as your wallpaper in conjunction with the “accent color from wallpaper” feature, the accent color is now set to the exact color of your wallpaper, not a generated shade of it. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #513851)
Holding down a key that plays or pauses media now plays or pauses it once, rather than repeatedly. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #521448)
When using the zoom feature with “Push” pointer tracking, zooming in or out some more will now center the zoom on the pointer’s current location. (Maxim Stomphorst, KDE Bugzilla #508098)
If you hold down the Shift or Ctrl keys to select multiple items on System Monitor’s Applications or Processes pages, the items in the list views temporarily stop rearranging themselves so you can actually select items properly! (Vladimir Pahomchik, plasma-systemmonitor MR #479)
System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now uses the more familiar “forget” terminology for removing networks. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #525844)
On System Settings’ Task Switcher page, the feature to preview a new Alt+Tab window switcher style now simply triggers it to appear rather than using a simulation, which ensures that it always looks right. This also fixes a bug that made certain visualizations un-preview-able. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #10154 and KDE Bugzilla #508088)
When your operating system hasn’t set up PAM and KWallet properly, the wizard that prompts you to create a new wallet now steers you in the direction of a Blowfish wallet, and instructs you in how to use GPG if you choose that option but no GPG keys are found. (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #353960)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while screens were being connected, disconnected, or rearranged. (Marco Martin, plasma-workspace MR #7249)
Fixed an edge case that broke the lock screen for people doing an in-place upgrade from Plasma 6.7’s X11 session to Plasma 6.8’s Wayland session. In-place upgrades are not recommended because they can and will unearth similarly unpleasant issues, but this one is fixed now. (David Edmundson, kscreenlocker MR #383)
Fixed a case where Spectacle could save an image to the wrong location after it had previously been saved to a different location. (Mohanraj Velayutham, KDE Bugzilla #526111)
Fixed an issue in the color scheme editor window that would make its preview area show the wrong colors much of the time when it was opened while using a dark system color scheme. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527382)
Fixed a visual glitch in System Monitor’s column configuration window. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527190)
The Meta+V clipboard popup now gets focused as expected when the system is using a higher than normal focus stealing prevention mode. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527326)
Remote desktop clients connecting to Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now see pointers with the correct colors when the server uses a colorful pointer. (Zhongli Wu, KDE Bugzilla #524148)
Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that would make it only accept the first connection made by the Mac remote desktop app currently named “Windows App for Mac” (formerly named “Microsoft Remote Desktop”), and fail for subsequent attempts until the server was restarted. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #527202)
Hardened KWin against crashing when given invalid global keyboard shortcut keys. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #4097)
Fixed a regression that could sometimes make files and folders on the desktop become temporarily invisible on the primary screen of a multi-screen setup. (Brodi Elwood, KDE Bugzilla #527226)
Fixed two regressions with pinned tasks on the Task Manager widget: one that made them fail to open in the correct positions when using certain settings, and another that made them briefly disappear when their window was moved to another screen while using the feature to only show tasks on the current screen. (Marco Martin and Samuel Collins, KDE Bugzilla #527189 and KDE Bugzilla #527507)
Fixed a regression that broke notifications using the sliding effect for people who had old non-default animation duration values in their config files. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #527478)
Fixed a regression that sometimes reset the wallpaper on certain screens in multi-screen setups. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527150)
Fixed a regression that made the lock screen stop blurring the wallpaper on the primary screen of a multi-screen arrangement while the interactive controls were shown. I think we managed to miss this one because Plasma 6.8’s default wallpaper is already kind of blurry! (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527569)
Fixed a regression that made the Activity Switcher sidebar slightly overflow off the bottom of the screen when there are any horizontal panels. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527158)
Fixed a regression that made the Fcitx5 CJK input method’s “candidates panel” force a floating panel to un-float. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #527067)
Fixed a regression that made the Activity Pager widget show two underlines for the active Activity, rather than just one. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527235)
Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that showed a blank screen for client apps lacking support for hardware-accelerated H.264 video. (Matteo Beretta, KDE Bugzilla #526931)
Fixed a long-standing issue that could make desktop widgets change their size on login when using a multi-screen setup. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #490687)
Fixed an issue in the Sticky Keys feature that made it sometimes not work quite right. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #509714)
Fixed multiple issues relating to the names and orders of virtual desktops getting out of sync between the Overview effect and the Pager widget. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #501660, KDE Bugzilla #501808, KDE Bugzilla #506247, and KDE Bugzilla #522322)
Fixed an issue with Plasma’s on-screen keyboard that could make it unexpectedly appear and get stuck there in Fedora KDE’s installer. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #524506)
Fixed an issue with the wrong window in a group getting highlighted when hovering over its Task Manager tooltip thumbnail. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527229)
Panel Spacer widgets now work correctly on vertical panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #518799)
The Media Player widget now correctly displays the name of media that includes non-ASCII characters. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #503405)
Scrolling on the Kickoff Application Launcher’s “All Applications” page now works properly with a touchpad when the page is configured to show apps in a grid, rather than in a list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #526911)
Discover no longer appears five times in the “Choose Application” window. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511886)
Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now tracks the pointer more accurately for scaled virtual screens, and resizes accurately when virtual screens are changed in size. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #273, krdp MR #277, and krdp MR #298)
Disabling a critical notification no longer makes it appear anyway while Do Not Disturb mode is active. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #519592)
Did you know that you can scroll horizontally with a traditional scroll wheel mouse by holding down Alt while scrolling? Or at least you could before Qt 6.12, but we’ve adapted to a change made in that Qt release that broke this functionality in the custom scroll handler used by Plasma and KDE’s QtQuick apps, and now it works again. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526317)
KRunner no longer incorrectly tries to pluralize the word “Hertz”. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #527386)
Fixed a Qt bug that made Plasma hang on logout while any System Monitor widgets were present. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #527240)
When Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server automatically generates a TLS certificate, it lasts for ten years, not one day. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #265)
Plasma’s system monitoring widgets no longer let you configure line charts to show so much history that their data collection would make Plasma lag and freeze. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #527627)
Buttons to copy text to the clipboard on websites displayed in the Web Browser widget now work as expected. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #523381)
The volume feedback sound now unconditionally uses the relevant sound from the active sound theme, fixing a few edge cases where it would sometimes use the system’s fallback sound theme instead. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #525954)
If you let the Plasma Login Manager sit there without logging anyone in, it will now eventually let the monitors enter power saving mode. (Raphael Erard, KDE Bugzilla #484015)
Improved the performance of the common SVG-reading code used throughout Plasma and many apps. (Mátyás Nyilas, ksvg MR #120)
All KDE software should no longer hang when a network share that was manually mounted and added to the Places panel becomes unavailable! (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #272361)
This week there are a number of new ways to help KDE!
The champions of the new KDE Goals for the 2026-2028 cycle will be answering your questions live on YouTube and PeerTube on October 29 at at 17:00 UTC. Leave them your questions at the KDE Forum post! As a reminder, the new goals are:
KDE’s annual end-of-year fundraiser has started, and making a donation is a hugely impactful way to keep KDE financially solvent. Due to… world events… costs for travel, computer hardware, and server infrastructure are higher than ever. KDE needs your help to keep the lights on, so donate today if you can!
Help us figure out how desktop icons should behave in various tricky situations by taking a survey on the topic.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma. And it’s going to be a big one, folks!
This week, a familiar pattern played out: people upgraded to Plasma 6.8 and found all the bugs that nobody reported during the beta period, and the Plasma team worked incredibly hard to fix them! You’ll see the result below: tons of bug fixes.
It’s clear that not enough people are testing Plasma’s beta releases to uncover and report all regressions. We’re open for ideas on how to improve this.
In addition to the bug fixes, this week also saw a number of nice new features, UI improvements, and performance enhancements. Consequential stuff! Check it out below:
After extended testing, KWin’s support for the Wayland picture-in-picture (PiP) protocol has been deemed stable enough, and turned on by default! (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #10175)
Window sizes and positions are now remembered on a per-screen-arrangement basis!
This means if you arrange your open windows across two screens, then disconnect one, then rearrange the windows to suit the now-single-screen arrangement… then when you reconnect the second screen, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they last had on the two-screen arrangement. And when you disconnect a screen again, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they had on the single-screen setup.
Note that this only takes effect within a running session for open windows; it does not affect the positioning of windows that are closed and then reopened. That’s still being worked on. (Jakob Petsovits, kwin MR #10198)
You can now permanently deny XWayland-using apps from asking to control the pointer and keyboard, and also see which apps have been denied and revoke their denials. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521576)
In-progress downloads in Firefox that produce a nice native Plasma notification via Plasma Browser Integration can now be paused and resumed from that notification. (Simon Hürlimann, plasma-browser-integration MR #207)
Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Brave browser. (Geevarghese ST, plasma-browser-integration MR #179)
The Activity Switcher sidebar no longer stretches wallpaper images for screens without a 16:9 aspect ratio; now the wallpaper is shown faithfully, but cropped if needed. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #478784)
When you use a plain color as your wallpaper in conjunction with the “accent color from wallpaper” feature, the accent color is now set to the exact color of your wallpaper, not a generated shade of it. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #513851)
Holding down a key that plays or pauses media now plays or pauses it once, rather than repeatedly. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #521448)
When using the zoom feature with “Push” pointer tracking, zooming in or out some more will now center the zoom on the pointer’s current location. (Maxim Stomphorst, KDE Bugzilla #508098)
If you hold down the Shift or Ctrl keys to select multiple items on System Monitor’s Applications or Processes pages, the items in the list views temporarily stop rearranging themselves so you can actually select items properly! (Vladimir Pahomchik, plasma-systemmonitor MR #479)
System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now uses the more familiar “forget” terminology for removing networks. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #525844)
On System Settings’ Task Switcher page, the feature to preview a new Alt+Tab window switcher style now simply triggers it to appear rather than using a simulation, which ensures that it always looks right. This also fixes a bug that made certain visualizations un-preview-able. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #10154 and KDE Bugzilla #508088)
When your operating system hasn’t set up PAM and KWallet properly, the wizard that prompts you to create a new wallet now steers you in the direction of a Blowfish wallet, and instructs you in how to use GPG if you choose that option but no GPG keys are found. (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #353960)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while screens were being connected, disconnected, or rearranged. (Marco Martin, plasma-workspace MR #7249)
Fixed an edge case that broke the lock screen for people doing an in-place upgrade from Plasma 6.7’s X11 session to Plasma 6.8’s Wayland session. In-place upgrades are not recommended because they can and will unearth similarly unpleasant issues, but this one is fixed now. (David Edmundson, kscreenlocker MR #383)
Fixed a case where Spectacle could save an image to the wrong location after it had previously been saved to a different location. (Mohanraj Velayutham, KDE Bugzilla #526111)
Fixed an issue in the color scheme editor window that would make its preview area show the wrong colors much of the time when it was opened while using a dark system color scheme. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527382)
Fixed a visual glitch in System Monitor’s column configuration window. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527190)
The Meta+V clipboard popup now gets focused as expected when the system is using a higher than normal focus stealing prevention mode. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527326)
Remote desktop clients connecting to Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now see pointers with the correct colors when the server uses a colorful pointer. (Zhongli Wu, KDE Bugzilla #524148)
Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that would make it only accept the first connection made by the Mac remote desktop app currently named “Windows App for Mac” (formerly named “Microsoft Remote Desktop”), and fail for subsequent attempts until the server was restarted. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #527202)
Hardened KWin against crashing when given invalid global keyboard shortcut keys. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #4097)
Fixed a regression that could sometimes make files and folders on the desktop become temporarily invisible on the primary screen of a multi-screen setup. (Brodi Elwood, KDE Bugzilla #527226)
Fixed two regressions with pinned tasks on the Task Manager widget: one that made them fail to open in the correct positions when using certain settings, and another that made them briefly disappear when their window was moved to another screen while using the feature to only show tasks on the current screen. (Marco Martin and Samuel Collins, KDE Bugzilla #527189 and KDE Bugzilla #527507)
Fixed a regression that broke notifications using the sliding effect for people who had old non-default animation duration values in their config files. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #527478)
Fixed a regression that sometimes reset the wallpaper on certain screens in multi-screen setups. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527150)
Fixed a regression that made the lock screen stop blurring the wallpaper on the primary screen of a multi-screen arrangement while the interactive controls were shown. I think we managed to miss this one because Plasma 6.8’s default wallpaper is already kind of blurry! (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527569)
Fixed a regression that made the Activity Switcher sidebar slightly overflow off the bottom of the screen when there are any horizontal panels. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527158)
Fixed a regression that made the Fcitx5 CJK input method’s “candidates panel” force a floating panel to un-float. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #527067)
Fixed a regression that made the Activity Pager widget show two underlines for the active Activity, rather than just one. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527235)
Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that showed a blank screen for client apps lacking support for hardware-accelerated H.264 video. (Matteo Beretta, KDE Bugzilla #526931)
Fixed a long-standing issue that could make desktop widgets change their size on login when using a multi-screen setup. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #490687)
Fixed an issue in the Sticky Keys feature that made it sometimes not work quite right. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #509714)
Fixed multiple issues relating to the names and orders of virtual desktops getting out of sync between the Overview effect and the Pager widget. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #501660, KDE Bugzilla #501808, KDE Bugzilla #506247, and KDE Bugzilla #522322)
Fixed an issue with Plasma’s on-screen keyboard that could make it unexpectedly appear and get stuck there in Fedora KDE’s installer. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #524506)
Fixed an issue with the wrong window in a group getting highlighted when hovering over its Task Manager tooltip thumbnail. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527229)
Panel Spacer widgets now work correctly on vertical panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #518799)
The Media Player widget now correctly displays the name of media that includes non-ASCII characters. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #503405)
Scrolling on the Kickoff Application Launcher’s “All Applications” page now works properly with a touchpad when the page is configured to show apps in a grid, rather than in a list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #526911)
Discover no longer appears five times in the “Choose Application” window. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511886)
Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now tracks the pointer more accurately for scaled virtual screens, and resizes accurately when virtual screens are changed in size. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #273, krdp MR #277, and krdp MR #298)
Disabling a critical notification no longer makes it appear anyway while Do Not Disturb mode is active. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #519592)
Did you know that you can scroll horizontally with a traditional scroll wheel mouse by holding down Alt while scrolling? Or at least you could before Qt 6.12, but we’ve adapted to a change made in that Qt release that broke this functionality in the custom scroll handler used by Plasma and KDE’s QtQuick apps, and now it works again. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526317)
KRunner no longer incorrectly tries to pluralize the word “Hertz”. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #527386)
Fixed a Qt bug that made Plasma hang on logout while any System Monitor widgets were present. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #527240)
When Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server automatically generates a TLS certificate, it lasts for ten years, not one day. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #265)
Plasma’s system monitoring widgets no longer let you configure line charts to show so much history that their data collection would make Plasma lag and freeze. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #527627)
Buttons to copy text to the clipboard on websites displayed in the Web Browser widget now work as expected. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #523381)
The volume feedback sound now unconditionally uses the relevant sound from the active sound theme, fixing a few edge cases where it would sometimes use the system’s fallback sound theme instead. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #525954)
If you let the Plasma Login Manager sit there without logging anyone in, it will now eventually let the monitors enter power saving mode. (Raphael Erard, KDE Bugzilla #484015)
Improved the performance of the common SVG-reading code used throughout Plasma and many apps. (Mátyás Nyilas, ksvg MR #120)
All KDE software should no longer hang when a network share that was manually mounted and added to the Places panel becomes unavailable! (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #272361)
This week there are a number of new ways to help KDE!
The champions of the new KDE Goals for the 2026-2028 cycle will be answering your questions live on YouTube and PeerTube on October 29 at at 17:00 UTC. Leave them your questions at the KDE Forum post! As a reminder, the new goals are:
KDE’s annual end-of-year fundraiser has started, and making a donation is a hugely impactful way to keep KDE financially solvent. Due to… world events… costs for travel, computer hardware, and server infrastructure are higher than ever. KDE needs your help to keep the lights on, so donate today if you can!
Help us figure out how desktop icons should behave in various tricky situations by taking a survey on the topic.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
