Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty!

This blog series will cover the work done throughout KDE’s software stack that’s funded by the investment KDE received earlier this year from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency.

Commissioned work on a variety of projects has been done by KDE contributors working for KDE e.V. itself, as well as the Techpaladin Software and enioka Haute Couture companies.

This post will cover the work done in the second quarter of 2026. Let’s get into it!

Quality assurance and testing

The bulk of the work consisted of getting KDE’s house in order when it comes to automated testing — ensuring things that are working stay working, and providing early warnings about incompatibilities from updated dependencies.

The Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE included substantial funding for this work across KDE Plasma, KDE Linux, and KDE PIM, providing a strong technical foundation for all of the future funded work.

On the PIM side, we set up a dedicated test suite and an extensive set of newly-created tests for both IMAP and CalDAV/CardDAV resources. You can read more about it on Kevin Ottens’ blog. In any case, it helped uncover some issues which were promptly fixed (most notably recurrence exceptions are properly handled now), and identify dead code which has been cleaned up.

A similar process unfolded on the KDE Linux side, with a dedicated testing server managing a new openQA-based system that runs integration tests for many high-level cases relevant to Plasma in general and KDE Linux specifically. You can read more about it in this blog post by Thomas Duckworth. And it has also already borne fruit, including detecting an accidental regression in KWallet and protecting users from a KWin crash caused by a brief regression in Arch Linux’s gcc tooling.

IMAP4 revision 2

Beyond the QA, work also proceeded on the PIM side for the topic of improving support through the KDE PIM suite for IMAP4 revision 2. This led us to add support for more IMAP4 extensions in our stack like BINARY, LIST-EXTENDED, or LIST-STATUS. We also completed support for CONDSTORE and QRESYNC. Altogether, it allowed us to speed up IMAP resource syncing while using less network bandwidth — sometimes in a fairly drastic way, lowering the sync of a given mailbox to a single server round trip in the best cases!

We had more good news on this front too. It turned out to be less work than expected, as our IMAP implementation is in a fairly good shape! It will free some time to go further on the QA and testing side.

Automatic account configuration

Additional PIM topics included initial work to build a system for automatically discovering and setting up resources based on nothing more than an email address and password. We already have partial support for this kind of magic in KMail, but it doesn’t go beyond configuring email; that will change soon!

For this work, we’re preparing a new library which will implement the relevant draft RFC. The API is mostly in place, although we keep improving it. We’re now at the stage where we can plug this new implementation into KMail, and later on integrate the whole feature set via System Settings’ Online Accounts page. It will be nice when you just give an email and password there, to automatically see all your PIM apps automatically configured: mail, calendar, and identity.

WebDAV push notifications

The latest work started on the PIM side is about supporting push notifications for DAV calendars. This is based on a draft specification proposed by the DAVx⁵ folks. We’re currently mostly in the design phase, even though some adjustments to KDAV are already being made.

Ultimately this should lead to more targeted syncing when something changes on the server, reducing the network bandwidth requirements. It will also make your calendars sync with the server almost immediately instead of waiting for the next poll interval.

Network share handling

On the Plasma side, work also began to overhaul the way network shares are handled throughout KDE. So far the work has concentrated on beefing up KDE’s FUSE-based network share mounting in a variety of ways.

Perhaps the most notable way being explored is to create the FUSE mount in response to a request to access a file on a network location even if the user has not already accessed it from Dolphin. This work is in progress.

Work is also in progress to mount these FUSE mounts at a standardized and predictable path, and to surface them in the standard Places panel for ease of access.

Data integrity

To improve data integrity throughout KDE, we created a new service for interfacing with Btrfs snapshots. This will form the backbone of various user interfaces integrated throughout KDE software (starting with Dolphin) to offer users the possibility to restore earlier versions of their files from snapshots, and use those snapshots for traditional backup systems.

In addition, we put some work into improving KDE’s Kup backup system, in the form of UI improvements for determining what gets included in backups, and modernizing the user interface of its Plasma widget.

Configuration management

Work began on an overhaul of KDE’s configuration management infrastructure in the form of porting software to use the more modern KConfigXT system. This system uses a declarative syntax with defined schemas, allowing KDE software’s available configuration options and default settings to be knowable without having to read the source code.

This effort will eventually open up the possibility of writing a management app similar to GNOME’s DConf Editor tool that can offer administrators the ability to graphically visualize and change configuration options.

Looking forward

So it was a busy quarter of shoring up some of the foundations in KDE to lay the groundwork for future efforts. We’re very grateful for the Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE that made this possible! Once the QA efforts wind down, we’ll be in a great position to start working on the more user-facing elements of the investment.

Want to make a meaningful contribution to KDE beyond coding? Help us organise Akademy 2027!

Every year, Akademy brings together KDE contributors, users, partners, and the wider Free Software community to collaborate, learn, and innovate. Now it's your chance to help shape the next Akademy by hosting it in your city.

We are looking for proposals to host Akademy 2027 during June, July, August, September, or October. Download the Call for Hosts guide and submit a proposal to host Akademy in your city to akademy-proposals@kde.org by October 1, 2026.

Have questions? We'd love to help! Whether you need advice, guidance, or support while preparing your proposal or organising the event, the Akademy team is here for you every step of the way.

Let's work together to make Akademy 2027 an unforgettable event!

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.7.4.

Plasma 6.7 was released in June 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds three weeks’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

In the feedback about dropping X11 support, one very surprisingly common comment is from users saying they "need" kgamma, a simple tool that allows the user to adjust the gamma, red, blue and green that gets drawn to the screen operating directly on the X server.

On our Wayland session we have colour management that blows simple gamma adjustment out of the water, so on the face of it it seems weird that this would come up. However at the same time, I get it. ICC profiles are very confusing and it's not the same as a few basic sliders that anyone can understand.

We want people to have the best transition to Wayland we can offer and this is a relatively easy fix.

The new tool

I have made a simple tool that edits the relevant part of an ICC profile - VCGTs.

"VCGT (Video Card Gamma Table): An optional, private tag inside an ICC file that stores 1D grayscale/gamma curves loaded directly into your graphics card's hardware Look-Up Table (LUT)."

That's a lot of fancy terms, but the key point is it's a tiny subset of the thing Kwin already supports. We can add a UI around those few values and not need to add a second code path in kwin or kscreen.

The UX is deliberately similar to the old UI.
Obviously it needs a round of polish (volunteers welcome!), but it's functional.

Why this is even better than on X11

Unlike KGamma on X11, this new tool:

• Supports multiple monitors with independent values

• Works with night colour rather than fighting over the same settings, Kwin will blend the two sets on top of each other

• Gets applied by Kwin on startup so the first frame is perfect, rather than glitching during loading

What next

Whilst changing your red/green settings wtih sliders might be something a few users do, and we got a few comments it remains a niche case.
My intention is to post it as a standalone application on Flathub and not as part of Plasma. I think that strikes the right balance of providing support without holding ourselves back longterm.

Getting it

The new tool is available at:

https://invent.kde.org/davidedmundson/kgamma2

Usual CMake + build instructions apply.

Feel free to make pull requests and let me know if it helps solve your issue!

… is now hosted on KDE infrastructure, instead of this blog! Check out the July 2026 post, or the entire series here.

Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Month in KDE Linux hosted on blogs.kde.org!

Previously, these posts lived on Nate Graham’s personal blog. But KDE Linux is growing up and becoming a more important part of KDE, larger than its individual contributors! So it’s time to move the public communication to KDE infrastructure, and that’s where you’ll be able to read these posts going forward.

Without further ado, here’s how KDE Linux evolved in July:

QA & testing

This month, Thomas Duckworth and Bhushan Shah integrated the next-gen QA system they’ve been building!

It’s now testing tons of conditions to make sure KDE Linux continues to work as expected, and it also acts as a full-stack integration test suite. To illustrate the utility of such a thing, it’s already identified and protected users from two significant issues:

1. A login-breaking KWin crash caused by a regression in gcc from Arch Linux (already fixed).
2. A regression in automatically unlocking your wallet at login (also already fixed).

These tricky problems could only have been caught by the kind of full-stack integration test suite that KDE Linux has now.

If you’re interested in the details, Thomas Duckworth’s blog post on how the system works is worth a read. Thanks very much to Thomas and Bhushan for building this lovely system!

Security

Hadi Chokr implemented some kernel-hardening tweaks we learned about from the SecureBlue project that were relevant to KDE Linux and wouldn’t noticeably burden users.

Efficiency & performance

Nate Graham removed the kernel modules for various hardware watchdogs that aren’t relevant for desktop use, which slightly reduces CPU usage and improves boot times.

Thomas Duckworth switched the CUPS printing system to use socket activation, which allows its services to only run when needed.

Software support package downloader + support for Java and DOS apps

Hadi Chokr implemented a major improvement to the “Package Compatibility Helper” tool that now allows it to — with the user’s consent — download software from Flathub to handle files that the user tries to open, but that nothing on the system can currently open.

Hadi then made this work for Java apps; the first time you try to launch one, the tool will ask you if you want to download a Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If you approve, it will do so and then launch the app using the JRE:

After that, Hadi implemented support for DOS apps; trying to launch one will offer up DOSBox. Now you can have that authentic 1993 Doom experience:

This system can be extended to support even more things in the future! And it’s been written in a generic enough way that it would be useful for any other image-based OS using Flatpak, as well.

Bugs fixed

Philip Grant fixed the mechanism that ensures that existing KDE Linux systems have the same Flatpaks installed as are pre-loaded on new systems, as it had various bugs that prevented it from working properly.

David Fundament fixed the script that disables USB auto-suspend for input devices so that it works with devices lacking a product name.

WenChao Zhang restored the esp4 and esp6 kernel modules that had been removed to mitigate the “DirtyFrag” vulnerability. The vulnerability has been fixed now, and missing those modules had broken IPsec VPNs, so they’re back now.

Hadi Chokr made WWAN modems work out of the box.

Documentation

Thomas Duckworth documented how to use and extend the new QA system.

Nate Graham documented how to make the Fcitx 5 input method (for CJKV input) work with apps still using the XWayland compatibility layer.

Hadi Chokr documented how to set up bootloader menus so you can choose between booting KDE Linux or another OS on the same computer. However, setting up such a system is left as a manual exercise for the reader, as currently the KDE Linux installer does not yet formally support complex disk setups. This will come later.

Grab bag

Prajna Sariputra pre-installed vulkan-virtio, improving performance in VMs whose graphics drivers support Vulkan.

Thomas Duckworth made the set-up-systemd-extension and toggle-developer-mode tools only prompt for authentication once.

Nate Graham removed the “Push Services” library and System Settings page, because it’s not mature enough for shipping yet.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and is now 83% of the way there.

There’s lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

• User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
• Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
• Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
• Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
• OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.

for the past few months i have been working on implementing rich text in drawy as part of google summer of code 2026.

Overview on the old implementation:

The old text logic depended on a manual implementation, almost everything was built from scratch using a string. Placing the cursor, caret movement, selection operations, line and word boundary detection, editing operations were all implemented from scratch.

I found implementing all of this impressive, but while it worked for plain text editing, this code was hard to maintain / extend, and it would have been nearly impossible to add the features that were added.

Phase 1: Refactoring
Goal: Rewrite without breaking anything

I replaced the string with QTextDocument , all the things that were written manually before was gone and now editing operations are handled by QTextCursor.

Phase 2: Rich Text

1. adding IME support
An Input Method Editor (IME) is how the OS handles input for languages that can't be typed with a single key press per character without it user can't type with Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, dead keys, etc The OS sends this as a QInputMethodEvent, which Drawy previously didn't handle. IME now works correctly here is demonstration of how it works with CJK input:

https://youtu.be/2W2R9udyKKU?si=BLwUmLpcg_E9XE9T

2. Properties:
user now have much more control over properties i added support for choosing font family, font style, text alignment, list format.

per range formatting is also now implemented meaning user can set different colors, size, font, style to different parts of the text.

3. Word Wrapping:

When the text box is resized, text now wraps to fit within its bounds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqGJd5Bf6sw

4. undo / redo:

text history is managed by two stacks: drawy global stack, and QTextDocument's internal one. Only one is active at a time. While the user is editing text, the global stack is disabled and QTextDocument's internal stack takes over, handling text edits and property changes, etc. Once the user exits edit mode, the internal stack is disabled again, any changes go through Drawy's global stack instead, stored as HTML.

5. Spell checking

In my proposal, I didn't plan much time for spell checking, I thought that I'd just wire Sonnet in and be done with it. I later found out that Sonnet's ready-made integrations are built for QTextEdit and QML, so I had to write my own spell-checking pipeline instead.

1. Each block (paragraph) is passed to Sonnet::gusser to guess its language and determine which dictionary to use.

2. Text is split into words using QTextBoundaryFinder.

3. Sonnet::Speller checks whether each word is misspelled.

4. Misspelled words are highlighted using QSyntaxHighlighter.

added new menu to settings using Sonnet::ConfigWidget to allow customizing spell checking:

Note: Everything mentioned in this blog is on the gsoc2026 branch currently and will be merged once GSoC is completed.

Gratitude:
I am very grateful to my mentor Laurent Montel for his time and effort guiding me throughout this project.

Time for another bi-monthly update on what happened around Itinerary! Since the previous report there’s a new combined journey view, support for ride sharing services and new Apple Wallet pass formats, among many other things.

New Features

New combined journey view

With more and more journeys being backed by online realtime and schedule data, access to the journey details (intermediate stops, journey map view, etc) via nested actions has become increasingly cumbersome. Therefore Jonah redesigned the details pages for all transport entries (trains, buses, ferries, flights) to have a new bottom toolbar to easily access that information.

The journey details view now also allows to query public transport departures at any intermediate stop, which is useful e.g. when doing manual rerouting in case of more complex disruptions.

Ride sharing

After Transitous got support for ride sharing earlier this year, this has now also reached out client applications. Both Itinerary and KTrip have a mode filter for this now, and Itinerary can add ride sharing trips to the timeline.

New Apple Wallet pass formats

Itinerary can now display a new variant of the Apple Wallet pass format, so-called “poster event tickets”. Conceptually those are similar to the existing event tickets but have very different layout and content, which wouldn’t render at all so far.

The background blur effect and some of the font sizes are still off, but at least the relevant content is now displayed correctly.

There’s also a few format additions affecting all pass types that are now supported:

• Four additional barcode types (EAN13, Code 39, Codabar and ITF).
• Multi-row auxiliary fields.
• RGBA color values.

A few gaps in the existing format support were also fixed while at it:

• Correctly displaying date-only and time-only fields.
• Finding image assets only existing in a higher pixel ratio variant.
• Fixed organization and description fields not being translated.

Besides the visual representation Apple Wallet passes can in newer versions also contain machine-readable semantic information about their content, something that is now used in the travel document extractor as well.

Infrastructure Work

Booking links in Transitous

Thanks to Jonah’s work, MOTIS, the routing engine behind Transitous got support for the GTFS Transit Ticketing Extension. This makes booking links available for more operators, which are then shown by Itinerary or KTrip.

Android and Linux platform integration

There has been generic work on platform integration for all of KDE’s (mobile) apps, which of course also benefits Itinerary.

For Android there’s a dedicated blog post. Since then locale-aware comparisons have been fixed in Qt (for 6.13), and Itinerary got built-in crash reporting that is already helping during development. Some necessary changes to finally fix not being able to open files from cloud shares is still stuck in review though.

For Linux the focus has been on permission checks and GPS access in a Flatpak sandbox (blog post). The foundation for the Qt permission API to support the Flatpak persmission system has been integrated meanwhile, for Qt 6.13.

Indoor OSM standardization

There also have been efforts on evolving and standardizing modelling and mapping of indoor spaces in OpenStreetMap. While that is of course done with the entire OSM ecosystem in mind, it also benefits Itinerary, Transitous and Kongress. There it helps with improving routing through buildings and with visualizing building interiors.

GBFS v3 support continued

The previous report had mentioned work on improving the support for GBFS v3 sharing vehicle data. This continued and now also has some more visibile results:

• The GBFS feed database has been updated to contain about 1.500 feeds from all over the world, and can now be online updated independent of the application itself.
• Rider capacity for vehicles is shown when available (mainly relevant for cars).
• Opening hours of rental vehicle stations or rental vehicle networks can now be displayed.

Events

A few members of the Transitous community will be at State of the Map 2026 in Paris end of August, and I’ll be speaking about Transitous there.

In September there’s KDE Akademy 2026 in Graz, which is probably one of the largest gatherings of the Itinerary community. I’ll be presenting how continuous delivery helps Itinerary with QA.

Beginning of October we have the second Open Transport Community Conference in Bern, both the Transitous and the Itinerary community will be present there. A few tickets are still available.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• New or improved extractors for 12go, Accor, BDŽ, Collegeboard, Doodle, DRK, Flixbus, HVV, IRCTC, KTMB, PKP, Polferries, Sportio, SRT, Ticketspot and VR.
• Fixed extracting return descriptions from standard UIC FCB NRT ticket barcodes (bug 520826).

This has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Allow location searches without explicitly selecting a country.
• Improved aggregation and sorting of stop search results.
• Added support for Amtrak onboard API.
• Added support for resolving locations from coordinates and booking URLs for LTG Link.
• Fixed sorting of countries on the backend configuration page.
• Fixed DB booking URLs for connections where they don’t actually sell tickets.
• Fixed displaying text on light line colors with light color schemes.

All of this also directly benefits KTrip.

Itinerary app

• Allow to add transfers between multi-day events.
• Fixed activating booking links on details pages.
• Fixed too narrow global drawer.
• Fixed timer overflow on timeline updates for trips too far in the future.
• Fixed notification configuration when running in a Flatpak sandbox.
• The time picker on Linux now has a button to easily select “now”.
• Fixed France accidentally not being considered part of the EU roaming area.
• Show all reserved seat numbers on the vehicle layout page.

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.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

…but before we start, here’s a quick reminder that we’ve entered the last week to submit your proposal for the next KDE Goals cycle! If you’re not ready to champion a goal, you can still get involved by joining one of the existing proposals as a contributor or supporter.

And now, without further ado…

In addition to the headliner feature and expected UI improvements and bug fixes, this week features some promising technical and performance improvements. Have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

You can now make the emojis in the Emoji Selector window bigger or smaller. (Jason Uithol, plasma-desktop MR #3878)

On System Settings’ Display Configuration page, you can now move screens pixel-by-pixel using the arrow keys while in layout editing mode. (Antti Savolainen, kscreen MR #476)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.4

The Emoji Selector window is now always tall enough to accommodate its sidebar without scrolling. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #523090)

Spectacle now detects QR codes in screenshots that you take in such a manner that the main UI is never shown; if you click “Annotate” from the notification about it, the QR code will be detected there. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #521097)

Plasma 6.8

In Spectacle’s settings window, image quality controls are now only available for image types whose quality level is adjustable. (Zhora Zmeykin, spectacle MR #568)

Clarified the instructions on System Settings’s Remote Desktop page a little bit. (Nate Graham, krdp MR #224 and krdp MR #225)

Kup 0.11.0

Modernized the UI for the Kup backup system’s System Tray widget, so now it matches other Plasma widgets that can similarly show multiple items, each with their own actions. (Bharadwaj Raju and Tomáš Hnyk, kup MR #53 and kup MR #54)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a case where the ksystemstats background service could crash seemingly randomly. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #523562)

Fixed a recent regression that made blank document icons appear in the notification history view. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #522846)

Fixed a bug that could make extremely long words in Plasma tooltips overflow rather than wrapping. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523614)

Fixed a bug that made third-party widgets fail to inhibit power management more than once. (Vincent de Robert, KDE Bugzilla #523605)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a visual glitch where the highlight area for expanded list items in various System Tray widgets would sometimes be too small to fit its contents. (Bharadwaj Raju, KDE Bugzilla #506295)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed an issue that could sometimes corrupt very large screenshots taken in Spectacle when they were pasted elsewhere. (Cezar Craciunoiu, spectacle MR #566)

Frameworks 6.29

Opening various windows and dialogs using Kirigami components no longer makes the content scroll into view for no particularly good reason. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, KDE Bugzilla #515811)

ddcutil 2.2.8

Fixed multiple issues that could make the powerdevil background process freeze or crash. (Sanford Rockowitz, ddcutil issue #581 and ddcutil issue #587)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Significantly improved performance with external GPUs. Read more about this on Xaver’s blog! (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #7101)

You can now change the size (and effective resolution) of virtual screens created for screencasting, rather than them being fixed to a resolution of 1920 × 1080 pixels. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #512620)

Panel floating-ness can now be changed using Plasma desktop scripting. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #521549)

KWin now recognizes the “Pick up phone” and “Hang up phone” keys on some keyboards, allowing them to be used in keyboard shortcuts to trigger actions. (Méven Car, kwin MR #7892)

Frameworks 6.29

Fixed a performance issue that could make Plasma freeze when it sent a notification with a lot of emojis in it. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #508070)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. 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.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.