Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released Plasma 6.8, but we didn’t stop there: work on Plasma 6.9 has been coming in hot and heavy, and there’s a lot to talk about! So let’s jump right in:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

The Weather Report widget has received massive changes: a new layout that includes per-hour temperature and precipitation forecasts, and support for weather forecasts from Open-Meteo. (Bohdan Onofriichuk and tusooa the west wind, kdeplasma-addons MR #1037, KDE Bugzilla #451767)

Plasmas’s on-screen keyboard has been extensively re-worked, and now includes multiple desirable features: the option for a full-size keyboard including arrow and modifier keys; a flick keyboard for Japanese; and distinct layouts not tied to system locales. (Devin Lin, plasma-keyboard MR #109)

The Night Light feature now lets you temporarily enable or disable it for a specific period of time, independent of its normal schedule. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin work item #321)

If you’d prefer your System Tray icons to be really small, you can now configure them that way. (Jin Liu, plasma-workspace MR #6978)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8.1

Plasma now shows an OSD when you use the keyboard to increase the brightness when it’s already at its maximum level, just like it already does when when you do try to increase the volume when that is at its maximum level. (Pavel Radzivilovsky, KDE Bugzilla #505558)

Plasma 6.9

Clipboard-related keyboard shortcuts shown in System Settings are now grouped into their own section, rather than in the generic “Plasma Workspace” section. And the feature to basically rotate the entire clipboard history up or down (such that a new item becomes the top one, and you can easily paste it) now uses that terminology to make it easier to figure out how the feature works. (Taras Oleksyn and Tomáš Hnyk, plasma-workspace MR #7208, KDE Bugzilla #467252)

Plasma no longer shows a notification about a new screen being connected if it’s a virtual output. But if it’s a real physical screen, the notification now shows more information about that screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7233, plasma-workspace MR #7195)

Removing a network on System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page no longer hides the right pane until you select a new network in the sidebar. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511362)

On operating systems that configure Discover to use both PackageKit and “offline upgrades”, the page that includes details of every package being updated now also tells you the current package versions, not just the new ones. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #500663)

Qt 6.13.0

Qt now renders fonts with hinting when using a scale factor over 100%. (Infinality, Qt Bug #128874)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a bug that made Plasma’s built-in RDP server crash when the client uses a very large pointer. (Curious J Tuber, kpipewire MR #285)

Plasma no longer fails to launch on a system with a broken MIME type database. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7214)

Fixed a bug that made section headers go missing on System Settings’ Bluetooth page when using a language other than English. (Kai Uwe Broulik, bluedevil MR #270)

You can now disable the “running out of disk space” notification, if you’d like. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7202)

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a bug that made Plasma’s built-in RDP system unstable when using the Microsoft RDP client on Android. (Yury MonZon, KDE Bugzilla #520260)

Fixed a bug that prevented the feature to save your current settings as a new Global Theme from successfully saving whether or not the panel should float. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526843)

Plasma 6.8.1

Fixed a bug in the Task Manager widget that would occasionally make Plasma crash. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #7149)

Plasma’s built-in RDP system is now more reliable when receiving connections from the Microsoft RDP client on Windows. (Mauricio de Lima, krdp MR #251)

Fixed a few cases in the Audio Volume widget and its System Settings page where tooltips showed un-escaped HTML or ate ampersands. (Tobias Fella, plasma-pa MR #433)

Fixed a bug that made the Kup backup system’s background daemon auto-start when it wasn’t actually being used. (Iyán Méndez Veiga, kup MR #68)

Plasma 6.9

KRunner-powered search fields once again find power-related items like “Shut Down” and “Restart” without you having to type out the entire text. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #522158)

On System Settings’ Region & Language page, languages can now be dragged up and down in their list view without functional and visual glitches. (Vsevolod Stopchanskyi, plasma-workspace #7189)

Task Manager tooltips for Flatpak apps now always show media and volume controls when needed. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #518840)

Frameworks 6.32

Fixed a bug in the Breeze icon theme that resulted in GTK apps that respect the icon theme displaying certain Breeze icons at the wrong size. (Alexey Varfolomeev, KDE Bugzilla #493975)

Qt 6.12.1

Fixed a bug in Qt that could occasionally keep Plasma from quitting properly during logout when any panels had a visible Pager widget on them. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525727)

WirePlumber 0.5.19

Bluetooth devices renamed in the audio settings now correctly use their new name throughout the UI. (Julian Bouzas, wireplumber issue #1043)

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.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-42.

The importance of communities around software

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, community, ethics, governance

Good reminder that licensing is only one signal. The governance is what matters for Free Software communities. This means looking at more than just the license to pick your folks.

https://lumi.codeberg.page/blog/software-community.html

The RSS Universe — Readers, Tools & Standards

Tags: tech, rss, self-hosting

Nice resource listing many tools available around RSS. Plenty to choose from including self-hostable options (but not only).

https://toolbox.rss.here.now/

WING COMMANDER III to get a surprise remaster

Tags: tech, gaming, culture, history

OK, now that’s a blast from the past. I liked this game.

https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2026/10/wing-commander-iii-to-get-surprise.html

Triple-A Minesweeper

Tags: tech, gaming, satire

OK, that’s a funny one. You thought there was no back story to minesweeper? Time to see it differently.

https://minesweeper.mikelacher.com/

How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet

Tags: tech, amazon, business, criticism

Or how Amazon manages to enshittify things even outside of its platform…

https://www.not-ship.com/how-amazon-pushes-up-prices-all-across-the-internet/

‘Unprecedented’ Cyberattack cripples supermarket fridges across Europe

Tags: tech, iot, security

Looks like connecting everything isn’t the best idea after all.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supermarket-fridges-across-europe-as-hackers-activate-automatic-defrosting-delivery-and-store-prices-also-impacted-by-incident

How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, fake-news, surveillance, politics

Interesting opinion piece on how autocracies benefit greatly from the current AI arm race. But the short term benefit will also create new weaknesses.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/10/how-technology-empowers-and-imperils-dictators.html

AI agents aren’t ‘going rogue.’ Frontier labs are skipping security basics

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security

Between this and the scrapers behavior… the disregard for infrastructure and best practices is obvious. It’s just another externality those so called “labs” don’t want to deal with. And well, it makes for a marketing stunt each time isn’t it?

https://www.csoonline.com/article/4234854/ai-agents-arent-going-rogue-frontier-labs-are-skipping-security-basics.html

Steering AI Beyond Automation

Tags: tech, ai, economics, research

I’m not agreeing with some of the points in here. That said the core position of “it should be about collaboration not automation” I’m very much aligned with. It’s after all at the center of how we designed AI systems in my team twenty years ago. We really wanted systems helping the user in their task. It was about co-constructing the result with the support of the machine rather than answers from some kind of “oracle”.

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/steering-ai-beyond-automation

My self-hosted infrastructure with Incus OS

Tags: tech, infrastructure, incus, self-hosting

Looks like a very neat setup. Probably a few good ideas to borrow in there.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2026-10-15-selfhosting-infrastructure-incus-os.html

Branches in branch-free code

Tags: tech, cpu, compiler, security

Interesting case of the compiler not generating the code you’d expect on some platforms. The problem is that it can bring security implications you don’t want.

https://00f.net/2026/10/09/llvm-compiles-branch-free-code-into-branches-on-risc-v/

Lifeguard is a static analyzer to detect Lazy Imports incompatibilities in Python

Tags: tech, python, linting, tools

Early days but this could help better use lazy imports in Python. It’s not exactly a transparent process.

https://github.com/Facebook/lifeguard

2D Vehicle Physics Prototype

Tags: tech, game, physics, simulation

Nice! A recreation of the 2D physics simulation used in the very first GTA. Loved that game and it had a very nice feel in its simulation at the time.

https://patkerr.co.uk/2d-vehicles/

CSS for underlines

Tags: tech, html, css

This is finally a solved problem. No more ugly border workaround.

https://www.rubenerd.au/css-for-underlines/

The Boots Theory of Software Architecture

Tags: tech, architecture, business

Unexpected metaphor but it kind of works. Indeed, architecture work is expensive, that doesn’t make it unnecessary.

https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-boots-theory-of-software-architecture-e18cf0fa5a1b

The geometric model of maintenance

Tags: tech, maintenance, estimates

The article equates effort with lines of code a bit too much for my taste. That said I think this model can be useful to describe how maintenance works in a given project.

https://entropicthoughts.com/geometric-model-of-maintenance

How To Sound Smart When Talking About Charts

Tags: tech, data-visualization

Aphorisms and ideas on how to treat data visualization properly.

https://graphpaper.substack.com/p/how-to-sound-smart-when-talking-about

You Can’t Change Your Boss

Tags: management, work

Unfortunately it’s true. Terrible bosses are generally the one who can’t handle feedback and so won’t change.

https://jacobian.org/2026/oct/12/you-cant-change-your-boss/

Bye for now!

Kdenlive development for the 26.12 release is very active, and we would like to request some feedback regarding two of the upcoming features.

Title Editor

One of the feature is related to the title editor. Our title editor has always been functional but rather limited. A new feature was recently implemented by klg that allows having different font styles in a single text block.

Note that several other great improvements were made by other contributors, like: Undo/redo support, implemented by Jaimukund Bhan, and Copy/paste support, implemented by chocolate image.

Relative paths for projects

The second large change is the switch to relative paths in project files. This means that if your videos or images are in the same folder as the project file (or a subfolder), you can easily move your work to another drive and reopen it without issue. This should really improve the experience for people editing projects on several computers, or switching between different operating systems. And this should also fix issues for teams doing collaborative work with projects on network drives or removable drives.

How you can help

We did some regression testing and have some unit tests for both these new features, of course, but some real-life scenarios may not be covered, which is why having feedback from testers is very valuable to us. Download the binaries from the link below and use this development version (26.11.70) to test the steps as described below, then report your findings in the comments section.

To test the title editor changes

The goal is to ensure existing titles display exactly as before and that there are no changes to the position or attributes of the titles.

1. Open your project files, ensure your existing titles display and render correctly.
2. Save your project to a new file, try to reopen and ensure it still displays and renders fine.

To test the relative paths changes

The goal is to ensure that all files in existing projects are correctly found, that you can render, save, open again, and all files are still correctly found.

1. Open your projects, ensure that all files appear correctly.
2. Check in the project settings that the project folder is correctly detected (default location, parent folder, or custom folder).
3. Check that rendering works correctly (no missing images ore videos).
4. Save the project with a new name (Save As), then repeat steps 1 thru 3.
5. If you sometimes edit from multiple computers, save the project under a new name and ensure that you can open and save the project file correctly from your different computers.

Download

Experimental Builds

These downloads are for testing only, please do not use in production.
We do not recommend overwriting your existing projects by saving them with this version.
Reinstall a stable version after you have finished testing.

Linux Appimage can be downloaded from Kdenlive's unstable download folder. Make it executable from your file manager before running it.

Windows installer can be downloded from Kdenlive's unstable download folder.

Development Flatpak can be installed from KDE's cdn server.

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.7.

Plasma 6.6 was released in February 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

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

KDE today announces the release of Plasma 6.6.7: the first bugfix release in the Plasma 6.6 Long-Term Support (LTS) series, which will still receive bugfixes and backports for a period of 3 years. Plasma 6.6.7 includes numerous bug fixes, improvements, and backports, addressing issues reported by users and developers, improving the overall quality of the desktop.

For more than 20 years, I’ve been part of the KDE community, one of the largest and most impactful Free and Open Source software community world-wide. Yesterday, KDE turned 30 and this went accompanied with the premiere of the KDE documentary.
As former release manager, Plasma core developer and KDE e.V. board member, I’ve also been interviewed. A fairly prominent NPC role went out to Skippie, my cat.

Lately, I have been back into Free Software development, working on two apps that are closely related to hobbies of mine. Watch this space for news! Something nice has been cooking!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 21 Beta2.

When I joined KDE in 1999 I already thought of it as a mature project. I used the KDE desktop every day, and I was delighted with what it could do and how it felt. I had no idea that this would be one of the most impactful decisions of my life, or where it would lead me.

Today we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original announcement of KDE. The project is still alive and kicking. I still use it every day, just like millions of other people. Not only because it's great software, but because of the values it embodies.

KDE stands for freedom and being able to shape your own destiny. As the KDE vision says: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy." While I originally joined for the technology, this is what made me stay.

One of my favorite pictures illustrating the spirit of the community is the group picture of Akademy in Dublin in 2006. Brilliant people having fun working towards a shared purpose of digital freedom.

KDE gets a wonderful present for its birthday. The KDE documentary is premiering today. It tells the story of the founding, the rapid early development, and the license conflicts. How it became a solid product used by many people, and then put it all at risk with KDE 4. How we learned from that and turned it into this extremely resilient and lively community it still is today. I'm happy I could contribute to this story, and that I'm one of the people telling it in the documentary.

For me, KDE shaped my career and my life, and gave me the opportunity to grow and learn. It led to things I would never have expected when I started: my code running on millions of computers, talking to hundreds of developers at conferences, sitting at the negotiation table with Nokia in Helsinki, consulting as an expert in the German parliament. And much more.

Today, KDE is maybe stronger than ever. We reached a lot of new users with the Steam Deck. The Sovereign Tech Fund is investing more than a million euros in KDE. With the strategic goals the community set this year, we are addressing enterprise, documentation, and styling. It shows how much the project has matured, beyond what I could ever have imagined. It also shows in its contributors. While contributors leave over time, new generations come in every year and keep the community growing over the long run, combining stability and rejuvenation.

I'm proud and grateful. Proud of what the KDE community achieved. Grateful that I could be part of this amazing group of people. A team nobody could have hired.

Happy birthday, KDE.