This year’s edition of International Calligraphy Festival Keralam was yet another great experience, consisting of workshops, demonstrations and talks surrounding calligraphy & typography, much like the last time. Eminent calligraphers of about a dozen scripts shared their expertise and experience.
Pictures of a sample collection of the calligraphy works at the exhibition below.
For my talk, I presented the historical evolution of Malayalam script from rock inscriptions to the digital age, and how the vigilant volunteer community reclaimed the script with its rich conjuncts and conjoined reph/matra shapes, and made all the foundational digital technologies openly available for public good.
Many type designers, companies and enthusiasts were also at the 4-day programme, enabling lot of productive hallway talks as well. A recurring question was the usage of Open Font License, which I hope to have helped to clarify.
The most useful feedback after the talk came from a good friend, who pointed that my slides didn’t do enough justice to the body of work we’ve done (particularly as open-source); and helped me walk through some possible improvements. I did make some of those changes, and the slides (created using TeX) are made available.
This allowed us to remove all the expected fail marks which were still present on some of the tests.
With this QA safety net in place, we’ve been working on landing long-needed improvements around DAV support. For instance, it’s been migrated away from KIO to use QNetworkAccessManager leading to a large performance boost. Further performance enhancement is expected from the work to port the DAV Akonadi resource to ObserverV3 allowing batching of some operations.
IMAP4rev2 and WebDAV-Push
The work on QRESYNC support in the IMAP Akonadi resource has been completed, providing a very nice boost to email syncing by making it faster, and drastically reducing the network bandwidth used for a sync. This pretty much concluded the work on the IMAP4rev2 upgrade of our stack.
This allows us to move to the next step which is integration of the various components involved and the addition of new end-to-end tests to validate the whole chain.
An interesting side effect of this work has been the need to implement support for DAV sync-tokens, which is supported by most servers. This will simplify calendar syncs even if your server doesn’t support WebDAV-Push. We expect it to improve the syncing of calendars in a similar way to the improvements with emails we’ve experienced with QRESYNC.
This work is not completed yet, with a few merge requests still in flight. But expect next year’s release to fly for syncing IMAP and DAV.
Security
Plasma’s security infrastructure received a great deal of work in Q3. Much of it is non-flashy, but rather intended to shore up and modernize the foundations. As part of that work, Plasma’s lock screen gained a more flexible system that supports multiple authentication methods being configured and made available in different combinations:
Work is now ongoing to apply this feature to Plasma Login Manager, and share more security infrastructure between them.
Recoverability
Work began on adding a “safe mode” to Plasma, wherein you’ll be able to log into a dedicated troubleshooting environment that offers tools to help you get back to a working session.
This work is all in progress, with parts expected to start landing in Q4.
Work also began to remove blocking file access calls in KDE software, so that network shares accessed via mounts (FUSE or otherwise) are less likely to cause freezes and hangs — starting with Dolphin.
Data integrity
Q3 also saw a significant amount work on the topic of data integrity, from multiple angles.
First, the kio-snapshot service built in Q2 received a large amount of technical and user interface polish to make it a practical and reliable tool for users whose systems take Btrfs snapshots.
The Baloo file indexing system was also made aware of Btrfs snapshots — specifically, how to not index them!
And because the concept of “free space” can be somewhat fuzzy on snapshotted filesystems, work is ongoing to surface information in more comprehensible ways, starting with KDE’s Filelight app.
Leveraging this expanded use of KConfigXT, the team created a GUI config editor app that offers system administrators the ability to graphically visualize and change configuration options. This app is still a work in progress, but shows the promise and potential of fully adopting schema-based configuration.
Account Autoconfig
On the PIM side, work to ease setup is moving towards exposing the new facilities to the user. Indeed, the KAccountAutoconfig library is almost feature-complete with one patch still to go through review.
Once it’s merged, we’ll start the process of moving the library to KDE Frameworks, and then begin integrating it into KOnlineAccounts and the individual PIM apps. We already have a prototype port of kmail-account-wizard to use this new library — a good first use of this library to prove it works properly.
Kontact Flatpak
Last but not least, work on the Kontact Flatpak integration with Plasma has started, and we’re currently scoping out requirements. The dependency chain between Plasma and the PIM stack will be completely reworked: it will be D-Bus based, and we’re working on defining the interfaces.
Attending Akademy 2026 definitely helped, as we got interesting input during the PIM BoF on the direction to take. This will lead to options which might benefit more contexts than the desktop, and so hopefully one day help Plasma Mobile as well.
Stay tuned for more details when the implementation work will be underway.
Looking forward
User-facing work has begun! We anticipate that this will continue in Q4 of 2026. And we’re very grateful for the Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE that made this possible!
Great news for the community! The integration of QML Quick Editor into Qt Creator is now 100% complete. The plugin is officially available, bringing native workflow integration directly to your development environment. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!
Features:
Designed as an all-in-one QML code editor, this extension allows you to quickly prototype and test QML snippets without the overhead of creating a full project. Simply edit your code and preview the visual output instantly inside Qt Creator—speeding up your UI experimentation and debugging workflow.
This week, Plasma contributors put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.8, which is due to be released early next week, on October 14th.
A lot of the work was behind the scenes, and that’s why this week’s update may look a bit light. But nevertheless, here’s the bigger stuff that we thought was worth reporting on specifically:
Notable UI improvements
Plasma 6.8
When the Weather Report widget isn’t able to fetch any weather data, its tooltip now explains this, rather than being a tiny empty square. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1154)
Improved keyboard navigation using arrow keys in KRunner. (Christoph Wolk, milou MR #110)
Plasma 6.9
You can now disable the notification that Spectacle shows when it begins recording the screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, spectacle MR #596)
System Settings’ Printers page now asks you to check your firewall when it can’t find any network printers. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #526465)
The virtual desktop thumbnails in KWin’s Overview effect are now more harmonious and visually pleasing. (Abdallah Hammad, kwin MR #10036)
When using upower-1.91.4 or later, if your keyboard doesn’t have a backlight or doesn’t support controlling its backlight via software, the Brightness & Color widget will no longer show a spurious control for it anyway. (Tristyn Russelo, KDE Bugzilla #525916)
Plasma 6.8
Discover’s feature to automatically apply updates now always works for Flatpak apps. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519082)
Fixed key repeat with the Slow Keys accessibility feature. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #523419)
Fixed an issue that could cause lags and stutters when tiling windows while using certain NVIDIA GPUs with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522424)
Fixed a case where Qt-based apps using blur could crash when a tooltip disappeared while you were typing. (Anton Karasev, KDE Bugzilla #522547)
Country flags used to distinguish keyboard layouts now look better when using a scale factor over 100%. (Zhora Zmeykin, kguiaddons MR #235)
Notable in performance & technical
Plasma 6.9
You can now control the brightness level of backlit keyboards that are connected after login. (Tristyn Russelo, powerdevil MR #691)
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
Proving Rust Web Application Correctness with Lean 4
Tags: tech, safety, formal-verification, rust
As usual with such provers the model is fairly constraining. But nowadays it seems to start being usable in more cases. Deriving the Lean code from the source code is nice too.
A bit of an advertisement for the author’s book but the advice makes sense. The strangler fig pattern indeed works at smaller scales. Grow the new API first, test it, then port.
In September, I traveled to Graz, Austria, to attend KDE's annual conference - Akademy, which also marked KDE's 30th birthday this year.
Unfortunately I fell sick and was not able to celebrate as much as I would have liked. I wasn't able to attend the welcome event, not the first day of the conference. Luckily there was a great video team covering the event so I could enjoy the live streams.
Julius and Farid kindly replaced me on stage for the presentation about Kdenlive, you can view it here.
On the second day, I felt a bit better so was able to attend a few presentations, like the announcement of the new KDE Goals, and be on the group photo :)
This was also an occasion to meet and discuss with some people from the KDE and Qt community.
Kdenlive
We also used this time to make a few Kdenlive meetings since several of us were at the conference.
We mostly discussed the ongoing keyframes refactoring, how the UI should look, and reviewed some of the feedback we had, and promo topics. We also managed to finalize and publish our new homepage with highlighted features.
More exciting Kdenlive news will follow soon as our dev community is very active !
Agents Edit QML, But Don’t See the Result Without Building, Compiling, and Running
AI agents can make many UI changes in a single iteration. AI agents edit files, maybe run a build, and then report success. Every change can costs a full rebuild and relaunch, or it goes unchecked by the developer. Qt's QML Live Preview MCP tool makes autonomous AI agent work transparent for the developer at a low token expense: it runs the app and hot reloads changed QML files, without a rebuild and without a restart.
rajeesh
obiwan_kennedy
