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!
Tagoross published its first open content package, one day after KDE turned thirty. Two good days in a row Yesterday was a great day for me. KDE turned thirty years old. The KDE documentary, published to celebrate the anniversary, was delightful. Today is no less special for me. The first Tagoross package This morning, Tagoross … Continue reading Tagoross releases its first open content package on AI openness
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.
KDAB have just published a video featuring me talking about design, QML, and something I keep coming back to: what happens when the tools we use to make software become more capable, while the interfaces we build with them seem to get increasingly predictable?
This started with me playing around with QML, trying to see how far I could push some ideas about the look and behaviour of an interface.
Things that are perhaps a little excessive, things that might be annoying in everyday use, things that are difficult to justify in a design review. The sort of things you might want to try before somebody with more of a brain than you explains why you shouldn't.
And its something I have been thinking about for some time, the place we leave for this kind of work, particularly in open source.
OSS has a rather unusual relationship with creativity. We can inspect how things work, modify them, share our experiments, and build on each other's work. There is room for someone to follow an idea simply because it interests them, it does not require a market research, there is no need to demonstrate that it will appeal to the largest possible audience before writing the first line of code or in my case drawing the first squigly line in inkscape.
And yet, sometimes our projects can be surprisingly cautious about appearance. We globaly spend a great deal of effort making software coherent and predictable, which is understandable and a good thing when you have to maintain it for years and support a wide range of users. But those concerns can also make it difficult to explore alternatives. The existing conventions gradually become the boundaries of what we consider reasonable. Trust me I was that guy shooting down what I believed were bad ideas. because of all the work that it would create, or because it was just 2 insane etc....
BUT
Now as a designer, I find that a little frustrating. Especially when the technology itself offers so many possibilities. I don't expect every application to become an animated art installation, and I certainly don't want every interaction to demand my attention (expect the ones I create ;)) . But I'd like to see more people curious about what an interface could be, rather than starting from what an interface is supposed to look like.
Which brings me to OxygenLabs.
We started a new repository under KDE in the playground area, intended as a space for exploring visual ideas and seeing where they lead.
What interests us is the willingness to put care into visual details, to explore a particular character or mood, and to take the appearance of software seriously enough to question the usual answers.
We would like OxygenLabs to give that process somewhere to happen. Not every piece of work needs to arrive as a finished feature, actually the opposite and not every experiment needs to graduate into a product. Sometimes it is useful just to make something, live with it for a while, and find out what you learn from the experience.
For now it just has 2 things I was playing with, one of them a request people have for a long time to be able on only use colourful icons . on the plasma panel via giving the icons KCM area a specific configure option per theme...
Anyway, that's the thinking behind it. The video goes into some of the questions that led me here, and OxygenLabs is a small, practical way of exploring them.
Have a look at both, and let me know what you think. I'm curious to see what comes out of this.
Plasma 6.8 is released on a very special day: KDE’s 30th birthday. Today we celebrate three decades of the KDE community providing the world’s greatest free and open-source software.
Plasma 6.8 is no exception, offering enhancements across much of the user experience and beneath the surface.
6.8 is all about launching Plasma into the future: adding changes you’ll notice right away, combined with major but subtle improvements designed to set the stage for decades of service to come.
Dive in and find out what the desktop environment of tomorrow looks like!
Watch the KDE Documentary The Story of Free Software Underdogs, tonight, October 14th at 19:00 CEST.
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
Improvements you can use today
Better accessibility
Part of our continued effort to bring digital control to everyone, a new “dwell clicker” feature can send a mouse click when the pointer stops moving. Designed especially for users with mobility issues, an external app is no longer required to use your system in this way; now it’s built right in!
Serving more users worldwide
Plasma 6.8 gains support for the Bikram Sambat calendar in the Digital Clock, and the Amharic language in the on-screen keyboard. These are just two more additions of the dozens incorporated into Plasma over recent versions in our effort to make Plasma a truly universal desktop.
Bikram Sambat calendar
Amharic on-screen keyboard
System monitoring
Gain an extreme level of control over your system with Plasma’s System Monitor. In Plasma 6.8, you can assign compute-intensive tasks to only the CPUs of your choosing from directly within the monitor, and keep your machine running smoothly.
You can also monitor your VRAM more easily, as it now shows the load as an easy-to-read percentage.
Remote desktop
We’ve invested a great deal of time into polishing the experience provided by Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server. In Plasma 6.8, you’ll be able to enjoy the following improvements — with more in the pipeline:
Much better performance and quality that prioritizes latency and responsiveness by adapting to slow networks and rapidly-updating screen content.
Exclusive mode optionally locks the server’s screen and provides the client with a virtual screen that exactly matches its window size.
Bi-directional clipboard synchronization makes it easier to exchange content between the server and client.
These features will only take effect in remote desktop client apps that support them.
Screen casting and recording
Spectacle can now optionally include both system audio and microphone input in its screen recordings, making it possible to narrate a recording or accurately record everything that’s going on.
Plasma’s screen sharing portal dialog lets you create a virtual screen to share, instead of an existing display. In Plasma 6.8, you can now specify the resolution of the virtual screen instead of being limited to only 1920 × 1080.
In addition, the quality of screen recordings and screencasts has been improved.
Nicer-looking third-party app windows
We’ve added support for window rules that add desktop shadows, outlines, and rounded corners to client-side-decorated windows that can’t provide these visual niceties themselves. Plasma 6.8 ships with one such rule for Steam, making it feel more at home in Plasma.
BeforeAfter
Window management
We’ve added new global shortcuts to help power users manage their open windows with the Task Manager widget. By pressing Meta + Ctrl + Page Up or Page Down, you can cycle between the previous and next tasks. By also holding Shift, you can move the active task backwards and forwards.
Setting the stage for decades to come
Theming
Four months ago, Plasma 6.7 included an alpha release of the new Union theming system, demonstrating its ability to style Qt Quick applications.
Plasma 6.8 builds on this with a beta release of Union, including not only refinements for Qt Quick theming, but also the ability to style Qt Widgets applications! This includes KDE’s more traditional desktop applications, such as Dolphin, Kate, and Konsole.
Dolphin themed with Union’s Breeze style. Can you tell the difference?
While Union is not quite ready to be used by default, Plasma 6.8 brings it ever closer to being a single source of truth for styling all of KDE’s products, and more. To learn more about the current state of Union, read the blog posts from Arjen and Akseli.
To try Union, ensure the union package is installed (name may differ depending on your distribution), apply “Breeze (Union)” in System Settings → Colors & Themes → Application Style, then restart your apps or the system.
Apps are expected to look nearly identical to how they do with the traditional Breeze theme. If you’ve found a Union-specific issue, please report it.
If you’re interested in experimenting with creating your own Union style, you can find out more in Union’s documentation.
Wayland
30 years is an impressive milestone for a community like KDE. But even older is the venerable X Window System (or “X11”), first released in 1984! After 42 years of faithful service, support for starting X11 sessions in Plasma is being retired, in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system.
Compared to X11, Wayland offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively developed.
The small number of individual apps that still require X11 will continue to work via the “XWayland” compatibility layer.
KDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future.
Performance, colors, and graphics
As part of the backend improvements included in Plasma 6.8, we’ve made changes to help Plasma load faster and use less memory. Discover’s update notifier now uses less memory, too.
With KWin, NVIDIA GPUs now use triple buffering by default, and all users will have better-looking HDR when using an ICC color profile. We’ve also added support for the HLG transfer function, which means that certain media and applications that did not previously work in HDR are now working as expected.
But that’s not all…
Plasma 6.8 is chock-full of smaller changes, including:
A new kscreenctl tool makes managing displays from the command-line easier and also offers the potential for scripting and automation.
Kup, the KDE backup tool, has been polished up and is now released as a part of Plasma.
We have added EAP-TTLS authentication support for StrongSwan VPNs.
You can enable and disable auto-starting apps without having to delete and recreate their entries.
Use the arrow keys to move screens pixel-by-pixel in Display Configuration.
The system shows a warning notification when trying to print using an unavailable printer.
Copying secrets such as passwords to the clipboard now clarifies why they are not included in history.
Emojis in the Emoji Selector can now be shown at different sizes.
…and countless bug fixes and small tweaks to make Plasma better than ever!
The second maintenance release of the 26.08 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include improved project handling and ability to set the frame count to start at 1 in the Dynamic Text filter which is useful for animation workflows. This release also fixes several issues in proxy clips, titles, and audio levels.
Kdenlive needs your support
Our small team has been working for years to build an intuitive open source video editor that does not track you, does not use your data, and respects your privacy. However, to ensure a proper development requires resources, so please consider a donation if you enjoy using Kdenlive - even small amounts can make a big difference.
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.
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