The last maintenance release of the 26.08 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Project management is more robust, with improvements to recovering corrupted projects, autosave behavior, and handling of archived projects. Other highlights include fixes to several crashes and freezes, keyframe copying, custom effects and improved undo/redo performance.

Under the hood, we fixed compatibility with Qt 6.12 and added improvements to the regression test suite and packaging build-related fixes. This version also includes a fix on MacOS for a Qt related startup crash triggered by the latest MacOS updates.

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.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 26.12 releases to them

Next Dates:  
  November 12, 2026, 23:59 UTC: 26.12 Freeze and Beta (26.11.80) tarball creation
  November 13, 2026: 26.12 Beta (26.11.80) release
  November 26, 2026, 23:59 UTC: 26.12 RC (26.11.90) tarball creation
  November 27, 2026: 26.12 RC (26.11.90) Release
  December 3, 2026, 23:59 UTC: 26.12 tarball creation
  December 4, 2026: 26.12 packages released to packagers
  December 10, 2026: 26.12 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.12_Schedule

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week many widgets shipped with Plasma got quite a bit of polish. Feature work and performance work were also notable this week… really, a bit of everything! Have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

There’s a new picture of the day wallpaper plugin that displays art made by noted FOSS artist David Revoy. (Guillermo Villafuerte, kdeplasma-addons MR #1150)

You can now choose the position of OSD popups on the screen, if the default position doesn’t work for you. (Mathias Schuh, KDE Bugzilla #501654)

Running systemd-ask-password --no-tty in systemd-257 or higher now shows a nice KDE-style password prompt. (Daan De Meyer, plasma-workspace #6433)

Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Glide browser. (Jan Buchar, plasma-browser-integration MR #178)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.8

You can now click to focus the Calculator widget and then interact with it using the keyboard as expected. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1191)

The Media Frame widget now changes the image displayed in its compact form immediately when the slideshow displayed in the popup advances to the next image, rather than after a delay. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1199)

Plasma 6.8.3

Opening the font dialog from the Digital Clock widget now pre-selects the currently-used font. (Niccolò Venerandi, plasma-workspace MR #7348)

Plasma 6.9

Widgets added to the desktop are now created at a size that makes them large enough to be useful without any cut-off content. (Felix Desyatirikov, plasma-workspace MR #7342 and bluedevil MR #274)

Spinning a mouse wheel over a scrollable horizontal row of Task Manager thumbnails now scrolls them, as expected. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #448504)

The way multiple panels interact with one another at screen corners has been improved in a variety of ways. (Niccolò Venerandi, plasma-workspace MR #7330)

Multiple graph styles used in System Monitor widgets are now presented in a nicer and more appropriate way when used on a panel. (Niccolò Venerandi, libksysguard MR #498)

New

Old

The Calculator widget now animates the buttons being pressed when you interact with it using the keyboard rather than the pointer. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1190)

The Dictionary, Disk Quota, and Konsole Profiles widgets now use up-to-date behaviors and styling for their list views. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1192, kdeplasma-addons MR #1193, and kdeplasma-addons MR #1220)

Launcher menus now use “natural sorting”, meaning something like “Transformers 10” is shown after “Transformers 9”, rather than after “Transformers 1”. (Peder Bergan, KDE Bugzilla #524466)

Searching for a keyboard layout on System Settings’ Keyboard Layouts page now works a lot more intuitively. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #4060)

You can now use the “Forward” button on your fancy mouse to trigger actions on the desktop. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #494216)

You can now open the clipboard settings from its Meta+V popup, just like you already can from its panel widget popup. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7345)

Frameworks 6.32

When using a non-integer scale factor, icons throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now a little bit less blurry and pixelated, and also don’t wiggle around so much while their parent window is being resized. (Arjen Hiemstra, Ilya Fedin, and Eike Hein, KDE Bugzilla #522336, KDE Bugzilla #527335, and kirigami MR #2225 respectively)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.8

Keyboard navigation within the list of timers in the Timers widget now works as expected. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1247)

The “Timer finished” message you can configure the Timer widget to show is no longer hardcoded to English by default. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #413374)

Plasma 6.8.3

Fixed a recent regression that made KWin crash when a DisplayLink screen was connected. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #527984)

Fixed a case where System Monitor could crash when you scrolled around after killing some processes. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #502879)

Plasma no longer lets you use scripting to set a panel’s spacing value to 0, since that would make Plasma freeze when its widgets were dragged to rearrange them. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #528228)

Using the Pager widget’s “Selecting current virtual desktop: Shows the desktop” setting no longer triggers rapid flashing when you scroll over it. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #471241)

Using the Minimize All widget to minimize and then restore all windows now restores focus to the previously-focused window as well. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #450137)

Fixed an issue that could make icon positions sometimes get scrambled on multi-screen setups when one screen was disconnected at the same time as another one was connected. (Błażej Szczygieł, plasma-desktop MR #4163)

Fixed an issue that could break the layout on System Settings’ Display Configuration page if you used it to turn off a screen and then immediately reverted that change. (Błażej Szczygieł, KDE Bugzilla #527131)

Timers saved in the Timer widget can once again be dragged around to re-order them. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1224)

Plasma 6.9

Fixed an issue that could freeze an RDP stream initiated from the very confusingly-named “Windows App” RDP client app for macOS. (Chris Maria, krdp MR #289)

Opening the color dialog from the Color Picker widget no longer makes Plasma freeze while it’s open. (Madhur Dhillon, KDE Bugzilla #525094)

When the Timer widget is placed in a vertical panel, it no longer acts as a trap for the Up and Down arrow keys when focusing widgets with the keyboard. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1225)

Rapidly clicking on the “Previous Image” and “Next Image” buttons on the Media Frame widget no longer sometimes tries to open the current image in an external app. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #371832)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8.3

Spectacle’s “background mode” feature is now a little bit faster to launch and consumes less memory. (Frog Chen, spectacle MR #621)

Plasma 6.9

Plasma no longer leaks a little bit of memory when you right-click on files or folders on the desktop. (Zühtü Eren İncekara, plasma-desktop MR #4152)

Fixed a couple of memory leaks in System Monitor. (Méven Car, libksysguard MR #479)

Spectacle is now faster to launch in general. (Kai Uwe Broulik, spectacle MR #618, spectacle MR #619, and spectacle MR #620)

System Settings’ Accessibility page is now much faster to load. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #4183)

System Settings’ Spell Check page was ported to Qt Quick, giving it a more modern UI and opening the door for faster and easier future improvements. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #3975)

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.

KDE’s annual fundraiser has raised 35% of the funds we’re hoping for, but with two months left in the year, we need your help to get it over the finish line! If you can, consider making a donation.

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.

Here's the data!

Thank you all for filling the survey I mentioned in my other post here. We got 1518 full responses total, which is a lot!

Without further ado, here's the data in charts.

FYI: I am not a data scientist, just a random guy trying to piece up something.

General usage statistics

First I want to go through some general usage stuff.

What is your desktop icon usage like?

In general, people tend to actually not use them much. They still may have some icons, but they get mostly ignored.

A lot of people use the desktop as a place to store temporary files they're working on, then presumably move them somewhere else when done with them. As a to-do list of sorts.

Then there's shortcuts to applications people use a daily.

Lastly, not as many store files on desktop regularly.

So to me it seems that people ignore them most of the time, but use them as shortcuts for apps to do work, or just need a temporary place for something they're working on.

Note that this was a multichoice question. I allowed people to pick "I don't really use desktop icons", because I believed all these could be true at the same time: People don't necessarily think about them often, but they use them.

Average desktop icon amount

I calculated the average of the icon values, and it seems the average of everyone is 9 icons on desktop.

There were some people typing in 128937128973987 or similar so I removed those. Sorry, I don't believe you! Send me proof!

But the largest amount I'm willing to believe was 150 icons. That's a lot!

Automatic or manual sorting?

This is surprisingly even. I expected way more people move icons around, but it's literally 60/40 situation.

Icons on side of monitor when screen changes

Here's the real juicy parts: How do we want icons to behave when something happens?

When icons are placed on the side of the monitor, and screen resolution changes, we did not really know what users want the icons to actually do.. Until now!

The survey had users to make choice between example images. I have added the images here as a refresher.

Monitor resolution expands

Leave icons at current position.

Move icons to the new resolution.

Overwhelming majority of you want the icons to move to the new resolution and not stay in the current position, which I find interesting, as some might find that a bit jarring! But in a way, it makes sense.

Monitor resolution shrinks

Rearrange icons to fit the new resolution in their original form.

Rearrange them automatically to new position, from start.

This had even more overwhelming majority! Only 71 of you want the automated arrangement. So this preference is quite clear!

Monitor resolution shrinks, but the area where you move new icons has already some icons

Move all icons, to make room for the others.

Rearrange them automatically to new position, from start.

Here 1/3 of the people wanted them to be automatic and start over from the beginning. Moving all icons makes sense, but I think it's going to be more difficult to make and more bug prone.

Desktop is full of icons

You have added so many files on the desktop that it's full, then you add some more! We wanted to know what should happen in this case.

Add a scrollbar so you can scroll for more icons!

Tell user the desktop cant show more icons, but they can be found from Desktop folder.

Show user an "overflow menu" that has the icons that do not fit inside a popup.

Most of you seem to want the popup, which makes sense as this is very much what happens on mobile: When there's a lot of icons on the screen, and you try to add more, they turn into folders instead.

I was surprised the scrollbar was the second choice, as that's already what happens on Plasma, and I have heard so many times that it's confusing.

My personal favorite, the warning, is at third. It's my favorite because it's the least complex. :)

Monitor is changed to vertical mode

A usecase I very rarely encounter, but felt like we should look into anyway.

Keep icons where they are, just rotate them in place.

Rearrange icons so that they are somewhat close to the original arrangement.

Most of you want a rearrangement, though rotating in place seems to fit many as well. I would prefer rotating in place as implementor as it's the simplest, since we do not have to relayout everything.

Monitor disconnection

This is one of the most difficult ones to solve, as screens often behave weirdly when plugged/unplugged. Sometimes we do not know fully if the screen is ready or not, reporting back weird resolution, etc..

As a note for this question, the reverse would happen: The icons would be back on the reconnected screen.

They move to the remaining screen.

They aren't visible on the remaining screen.

I was expecting most to vote for the moving to the remaining screen, and I was right! However, I did not expect it to be this small divide.. A lot of you are fine with the icons not showing on the remaining screen!

Conclusions

Most of these things are what I expected, though I did not expect as much divide: I was expecting 90/10 divisions, not 60/40!

But thank you all for answering to the survey. I will have to properly mull over and plan now with all this data in my hands.

Note that this data does not decide anything, but it works as a guidance for us.

There's a lot of writing for me to read about the icons, so I will go through that over time. But thank you for these responses, as it will help us KDE folk figure out how to fix the desktop icon situation, as it's still bit flakey.

No promises when, but I want to get into it when I have gotten more Union bug fixes done.

Thank you again! Your help has been very valuable. <3

ps. Hope you don't mind my crappy charts. I am using chartjs for it, but if you have javascript off, you should see the images I took instead.

I didn’t post last week, but I did read a bit. Between this and some catching up this week… Behold the web review double issue for the week 2026-45!

Reading in decline? Barnes & Noble is un-Daunt-ed

Tags: tech, book

Bookshops still have a future and it can be bright. It looks like ebooks can’t displace regular books further.

https://chadcomello.com/reading-in-decline-barnes-noble-is-un-daunt-ed/

I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it’s everywhere)

Tags: tech, physics, mathematics, osint

Very impressive stuff. This is an extremely powerful OSINT method to narrow down where some sound might have been recorded.

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

Serbia just elected the world’s brainiest parliament

Tags: politics, science, sociology

I guess this will be an interesting social experiment to follow in the coming years.

https://www.science.org/content/article/serbia-just-elected-world-s-brainiest-parliament

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

Tags: tech, browser, funny

This is a funny browser extension idea.

https://charliegerard.dev/blog/overgrown-extension/

Walker Playground

Tags: tech, web, funny

This is really cool. Makes me want to play Lemmings again.

https://markblah.github.io/lemmings/

Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse

Of course it has some of the social media flaws bit the Fediverse is the only good option. At least it can’t seems to enshittify due to corporate capture.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/07/05/Choose-Mastodon

This $48 e-paper display can be whatever you want it to be

Tags: tech, hardware, self-hosting

Interesting device. The self-hosting of the server part seems a bit involved still. It gives plenty of ideas of cool things to try though.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/11/this-48-e-paper-display-can-be-whatever-you-want-it-to-be/

Why big tech stopped building useful stuff

Tags: tech, innovation, business

The reasons invoked definitely make sense. It’s kind of the age of mediocrity and it’s really boring.

https://www.rubenerd.au/why-big-tech-stopped-building-useful-stuff/

Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, innovation, business, organisation, craftsmanship

Interesting essay. It’s not really a differentiating productivity which businesses will find but a clear homogenization. When everyone will come up with the same ideas, everything will be tasteless and mediocre. Will we properly notice? Will it be an era where craftsmanship will be back?

https://www.noemamag.com/now-entering-the-era-of-bleh/

Why Wikimedia Is Speaking Up in a Major AI Copyright Case

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, wikipedia, copyright, law

Important statement from Wikimedia. The brief is likely to have quite some impact in the ongoing copyright cases around the LLM industry.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/30/why-wikimedia-is-speaking-up-in-a-major-ai-copyright-case/

Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, foss, community

Interesting report showing the impact of LLM based contributions on communities. Note the obvious limit of this survey being declarative. It gives some food for thought though.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/oss-development-gen-ai-era-2026?hsLang=en

Webinar: Copyrightability of LLM-generated code

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, copyright, foss, law

Very interesting webinar. Lots of food for thought regarding LLM produced code being de facto public domain and the consequences. A bit frustrated it glances a bit over copyright infringement during the talk part but it’s explored more during the Q&A. Clearly it shows that there are still quite a few blurry lines so the legal risks are real. It looks like we’ll have to wait for court rulings and/or laws being clarified.

https://nlnet.nl/events/20261029/index.html

AI: EU Member States approve “digital expropriation” of Europeans for AI companies

Tags: tech, europe, law, privacy, ai, machine-learning, gpt

There’s really a problem with the EU Commission and Council… How can they swing positions like this?

https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expropriation-europeans-ai-companies

Why I Resist Generative “AI”

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism, ethics, ecology, cognition, politics

A good summary of everything that is wrong with the current LLM industrial complex.

https://estherweidauer.com/articles/why-resist-generative-ai.html

US data centers could wipe out 15 years’ worth of progress in greenhouse gas emissions

Tags: tech, infrastructure, ecology

Let’s hope most of the new data centers just won’t be built or get on line…

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/us-data-centers-could-wipe-out-15-years-worth-of-progress-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-report-claims-buildouts-could-emit-as-much-carbon-dioxide-as-all-of-mexico

AI Isn’t Replacing SREs. It’s Deskilling Them.

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, reliability, learning, engineering

The question is explored from the SRE angle but it applies more widely. The deskilling in teams which automate as much as possible is real. What can you do them when you encounter something novel not covered by the automation? You’re quickly stuck.

https://newsletter.signoz.io/p/ai-isnt-replacing-sres-its-deskilling

Security advisory: openssh-server password authentication bypass

Tags: tech, ssh, security

OK, this is a really bad one. Check your alpine based machines and containers.

https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/2026-11-05-openssh-password-authentication-bypass/

Be Aware of What’s in Your Logs

Tags: tech, debugging, logging, privacy

A bit lengthy but that point stands. When you send application logs it has privacy implications every time. Developers can and should try to limit the risks though.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/be-aware-of-whats-in-your-logs/

UUIDv7 doesn’t have the properties you think it does

Tags: tech, uuid

Don’t just blindly use it. Lots of properties will depend on the exact generator you use.

https://alexsci.com/blog/uuidv7-is-weird/

We can do better than line-buffered output

Tags: tech, terminal, system, performance

Indeed there are other approaches which can give better result.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/11/05/

It’s the memory latency, stupid

Tags: tech, rust, memory, performance

Another illustration than the memory access patterns are the most important factor for performance.

https://pivotlake.io/blog/its-the-memory-latency-stupid/

Go concurrency distilled

Tags: tech, go, multithreading, asynchronous

Nice reference material on the Go concurrency primitives.

https://antonz.org/go-concurrency-distilled/

Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions

Tags: tech, programming, design, api

This is indeed a good guideline to follow when designing interfaces.

https://matklad.github.io/2026/10/29/pub-calls-pub.html

Thinking in Traits

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

The writing is maybe lacking structure a bit. Still that gives a worthwhile tour of all the nice features one can build with a trait system and carefully designed APIs.

https://corrode.dev/blog/thinking-in-traits/

C++26 DIS failed, how does C++ survive?

Tags: tech, c++, standard

This is of course a big deal. Will the deadlock be solved? Will the language be able to move forward again with the bases of the institution quite shaken? Only time will tell.

https://andreasfertig.com/blog/2026/11/cpp26-dis-failed-how-does-cpp-survive/

In C++, = default and {} are not the same constructor

Tags: tech, c++, performance

Different safety profile but also different performance depending on the compiler. To keep in mind if there’s too much performance pressure.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/11/02/default-and-braces-are-not-the-same-constructor/

Modern C++ Is a Mindset, Not a Standard

Tags: tech, c++, safety

Indeed there’s an educational problem. Too much C++ code is wrote “the old way”.

https://www.modernescpp.com/index.php/cpp-and-memory-safety-part-2/

Pele · Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG

Tags: tech, diagrams, tools

Looks like a very nice alternative to Mermaid.

https://pele.run/

Using maths to balance your heading styles

Tags: tech, typography, text, fonts, web, css

Interesting scale for headers in text content. The approach gives clearly good results.

https://www.craigabbott.co.uk/blog/2026/using-maths-to-balance-your-heading-styles/

The Polyglot’s Dilemma: Conformance Testing a Dozen Specs in as Many Languages

Tags: tech, tests, databases

Interesting approach used for MongoDB drivers. I’m not sure I’d have banked on YAML but having conformance tests in a single language is clearly a good bet.

https://emptysqua.re/blog/polyglots-dilemma/

Simple ways to prepare before facilitating a meeting

Tags: meetings, facilitation

Definitely looks like good advice if you need to facilitate a meeting.

https://www.improvesomething.today/simple-ways-to-prepare-before-facilitating-a-meeting/

The Real Kevin Bacon

Tags: tech, data-visualization, movie

Very nice exploration of the Hollywood movies social graph. It was believed Kevin Bacon was the centre of it all. The story is way more nuanced.

https://pudding.cool/2026/10/kevin-bacon/

How I Survived Late-Stage Cancer (A Fun Story)

Tags: health, medecine, science

Wondering how chemotherapy works? Here is one example.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Fayfx2NUM

Bye for now!

Kirigami Addons 1.16.1 is out! Kirigami Addons is a growing collection of nice components you can use in your Kirigami and QML applications.

This release mainly includes small bugfixes and two visual chances.

AboutPage

The about page provided by Kirigami Addons now display the release information more prominently (if any is available).

Time Picker

The time picker was completely redesigned. If you belonged to the minority who liked the tumbler timer picker, well bad news, it’s not that anymore.

The new design is directly inspired by the one from android.

Packager section

The actualy tarbal might take up to 24 hours to be published as it need to be processed by sysadmin, I just announced this before going in vacation.

You can find the package on download.kde.org (kirigami addons) as soon as it is available and it has been signed with my GPG key.

Renovate is a helpful tool that updates your dependencies automatically. This is cool, because it means you don’t have to track updates to your dependencies manually, which let’s be honest never really work. Renovate will just create a new merge request as soon as it detects an update.

This is particularly relevant now, with more and more vulnerabilities being detected in our software supply chain every day.

Setting things up

Renovate is super easy to set up by using its CLI in a GitLab pipeline.

The only particular point is that this needs to run in a repo that not everyone has access to, as it uses a GitLab access token to create MRs, so it is now in the sysadmin/renovate-bot in invent.

Rust

Renovate supports Cargo as a package manager by default, so the configuration is extremely short and the repos with Rust just need to be listed in kde-renovate.

If you maintain a Rust project, feel free to open a merge request to list your project there.

Craft

Craft is the most interesting project to benefit from this, as it is used to build our binaries for Android, Windows, macOS and more. It is also the most complex, as Renovate doesn’t natively support Craft, nor does it have a way to retrieve updates from Anitya, only from GitLab, GitHub, pip and other sources.

Adding Anitya support was easy with a custom data source:

 "customDatasources": {
 "release-monitoring": {
 "defaultRegistryUrlTemplate": "https://release-monitoring.org/api/v2/versions/?project_id={{{packageName}}}",
 "format": "json",
 "transformTemplates": [
 "{\"releases\": [stable_versions.{\"version\": $}]}"
 ]
 }
 },

This uses the releaseManagerId from the blueprints to match each blueprint to a project on Anitya.

Updating the blueprints is trickier, as they are written in Python, so I had to write a small script using Python’s ast module to modify them. It is a bit cursed, but it works as long as the blueprints follow the common structure with for ver in ["x.x.x", "y.y.y"]:.

The next step is to make sure all Craft blueprints contain a releaseManagerId, and this is where help would be much appreciated also checking that the PRs created by Renovate are correct and the new updated package build on every of our platforms.

Huge thanks to Ben and Hannah for setting this up and happy hacking!

Has it really been just one week? The public announcement of Kwi last weekend has resulted in a flurry of activity both inside and outside the project!

First of all, thank you all very much! There's been a lot of positive and kind feedback, a lot of excitement, and very useful bug reports from so many of you.

Let's take stock together of what's been happening. The rough plan is to do this once week from now on, unless life/travel get in the way. Usually towards or on the weekends.

Getting Noticed

Kwi was the talk of KDE town for the week!

• Reactions and lively discussion on r/kde, r/linux, lobste.rs and Hacker News
• Articles and comments on Phoronix, 9to5 Linux, XDA Developers, Linux News (German) and many others
• A YouTube video by well-known YouTuber Brodie

Additionally, Kwi is seeing early interest by packagers active in the Fedora, Arch Linux, NixOS and other communities. Packaging uptake of course will require an actual, versioned release! More on our plans for that further below.

Progress

Kwi's users have been busy putting our brand-new app through its paces. A decent smattering of papercuts and teething issues has surfaced, along with a thankfully small number of more serious defects.

We've been able to keep up with the reports quite well so far. At the time of publication, Kwi has no open defect tickets.

Tickets: Implemented Feature Requests This Week

• Option to create a new tab after the current one
• Go back to a previous tab on tab closure
• Option to configure initial terminal size

Tickets: Closed Defects This Week

• Fallback glyphs are not rendered
• Dragging tabs to re-arrange them requires precision
• Retain selection on tab switch
• Option to not show URL at the bottom on mouse hover
• Major issue with character rendering
• Double-click drag select breaks on empty lines
• Right clicking while context menu is open closes both context menus
• Navigation on the nav/numpad layer on a Neo2 keyboard layout does not work
• Ctrl modifier is not forwarded to zellij
• 'Close All Terminals' dialogue isn't shown and focused
• alt+arrow-left and alt+arrow-right key-presses are not sent to a program
• Ctrl+click-to-open for file paths doesn't work with the default permissions specified in the Flatpak manifest
• About Kwi should attribute Ghostty as a library
• Allow Alt+n to pass through when there's only one tab
• Ctrl+Q is closing the terminal, even when not set the as the keybind in settings
• Search runs every time when switching tabs

This is not all! Alongside your reports, regular development of Kwi proceeds at pace, and many of the largest items in this week's changelog happened outside the ticket process.

Important Changes This Week:

• Terminal:
  • Hover decorations for links
  • Improvements to geometric and powerline symbols, both adding more of them and making them look more pleasing, and fixing a few bugs in double-line corners
  • Better support for placing complex underlines and other text decorations, including rendering underlines behind descenders
  • Improved appearance for text decorations
  • Not showing one blank terminal frame during window closing
• UI:
  • Revamping the search experience
    • A better location for the search bar
    • Colored feedback in the search field background for match/miss
    • A more stable, flicker-free search UI
  • Improved support for screen readers
  • Adding support for switching tabs by using the mouse wheel
  • Adding more keyboard shortcuts, aligning some shortcuts with familiar Konsole ones, and fixing other minor bugs in keyboard shortcut handling
  • Various other small UI refinements and consistency improvements, e.g. in the hamburger menu and other toolbar buttons
  • Coalescing terminal updates during window resize (this improves performance, but also happens to work around a newer bug on width/height-only resizes in newer bash versions)
  • Fixing a small visual glitch at the bottom of the tab bar when using fractional scaling
• Support for running each tab's processes in a systemd scope (unlike in Konsole, in a way that's free of races and works from within Flatpak)
• Making Kwi show up in GNOME's Notification Center
• Project bits:
  • Landing API documentation for Kwi's public QML API
  • Landing Kwi's test suite and enabling it on CI
  • Enabling additional quality checks on CI

Additionally, because Kwi is built on KDE's latest technologies, we sometimes get to find and fix bugs upstream of the project, or contribute new features needed by Kwi.

Upstream This Week - by Kwi, for everyone:

• We contributed support for theming the backgrounds of text fields to KDE's new work-in-progress Union theming system, used for visual feedback in our new search experience (Qt Quick MR, QWidget MR).
• We fixed icon placement at fractional scale in Kirigami apps (visible on our tab bar).

Road to Release

All of this progress, and yet Kwi remains officially unreleased! Hopefully not for much longer.

Kwi is presently undergoing KDE Review, a quality gate in the KDE community that graduates new projects from being experiments into official KDE projects. This is well underway; we have already completed the required checklist. Subsequently, KDE's awesome community of translators will start contributing translations to the project. The project will then also gain access to KDE's release infrastructure. An official, tagged and tarball'd Kwi v0.1 release is planned to follow soon after.

Together with the v0.1 release, will also send our Flatpak package out into the wider world via publication on Flathub.

In the weeks and months after, we plan to stay on top of your bug reports, as well as begin to address some feature requests.

Looking further out, our very important upstream the Ghostty project is gearing up to make independent releases of libghostty-vt, which serves as our terminal emulation backend. An ABI/API-stable v1.0 is planned within the next couple of months. (Well, that was faster than expected - shoutout to the ever-busy mitchellh!) This is also the timeline we roughly have in mind for a Kwi v1.0 release. There will be several interim releases to deliver improvements to you at a faster pace.

What's Next

Kwi development will continue to focus mainly on staying on top of early defect reports in the next few weeks. However, we do also have two bigger irons in the fire!

Making it easy to switch classic KDE apps to embed Kwi

Many users enjoy using a terminal not just via the traditional standalone apps like Kwi, but also via alternative UIs like Yakuake, or embedded into apps like Dolphin and Kate. All of these currently exclusively depend on Konsole, via a public plugin that is installed alongside it.

Indeed, How can I use this in Yakuake? was the most-often-heard feedback item we received this past week!

It arguably flew a bit under the radar in our announcement last week, but Kwi already provides a drop-in replacement for the Konsole plugin these apps could load instead. Which is the snag: They need a one-line code change to do so, or need the user to get crafty with a symlink, overriding Konsole's plugin manually.

That's not a great user experience at all. Landing an elegant mechanism in Plasma that lets users manage their preferred embedding terminal is therefore a high priority for Kwi. We have a plan there that we think can work, and will run it by the maintainers of the components involved soon.

Split Panes

The other high-in-demand missing feature in Kwi is that it currently does not yet have any support for split panes. We're happy to announce that we do plan to support them!

However, we want to take our time to get it right, and ultimately offer the pragmatic mix of familiar functionality, KDE HIG-adherence and state of the art in this space that we want Kwi to be generally known for. Rest assured, Kwi will gain this functionality before v1.0.

Thank you for reading, and see you in a week!

Over 180 individual applications plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

• akonadi: Do not crash with a unknown tracer (Commit, fixes bug #528012)
• audiocd-kio: Don't indicate unsaved changes after reset/apply (Commit, fixes bug #502029)
• krfb: Fix VNC listener startup for desktop sharing (Commit, fixes bug #524610)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 26.08 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 26.08.3 source info page
• 26.08.3 full changelog

Here comes Kaidan 0.17.0! This release allows to report spam and retract messages. In addition, it automatically reconnects based on your internet connection. As always, it includes several smaller improvements and fixes.

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Zero Commons Fund with public money provided by the European Commission.

Spam Reports

Spam and abusive messages can be reported now. You can either report the sender or specific messages. The sender is automatically blocked in either case. The spam or abuse is reported to your XMPP provider. Your XMPP Provider is allowed to forward the report to the sender’s XMPP provider or external services such as blocklist providers.

That way, a community-based spam protection can evolve. You flag spam for other people and their reports protect you from receiving spam.

To report a sender of spam or abusive messages, you can do that via the details dialog.

To report a specific message, there is a context menu entry for it.

Once you pressed the context menu entry, a dialog is opened to send the report.

Message Retraction

Since Kaidan 0.10 it is capable of removing messages locally (i.e., from your device). It is now also able to retract own messages resulting in removing them globally (i.e., from your device and all devices that received it).

You can even retract a message while not being connected. Kaidan retracts the message automatically once you are connected again. To keep it simple, removing a message globally is the default and performed via the context menu entry Remove. If that is not possible, e.g., because the message is too old, it can still be removed locally via the context menu entry Remove from Kaidan.

Note: If you retract a message, Kaidan instructs all of your and your contacts’ devices to remove that message too. A device receiving such a request can deny or simply not support it. Thus, it is possible that a message you retracted is not removed from all devices that received the request.

Automatic Reconnecting

In Kaidan, you can enable or disable accounts. If an account is disabled, it stays offline. If it is enabled, it automatically tries to connect to your XMPP provider. In case of connection problems, Kaidan displays an error message. But it was not able to automatically try to reconnect after recovering from them.

The user had to manually disable and enable the account again. Kaidan is now able to detect the connection’s status and reconnect on its own once the connection is reestablished. You do not need to take care of being connected anymore. Instead, you can focus on chatting! In combination with Kaidan’s support for composing messages while being offline, messages are sent in the background as soon as you are connected again.

Changelog

There are several other improvements. Have a look at the following changelog for more details.

Features:

• Go back to chat list to forward message and keep it open on narrow window (@melvo)
• Add efficient retrieval of latest chat list from server (@lnj)
• Add support for reporting spam/abusive senders/messages (XEP-0377: Blocking Command Reports) (@lnj, @melvo)
• Mark button for filtering chats while filtering is active (@melvo)
• Add support for retracting messages (XEP-0424: Message Retraction) (@lnj, @melvo)
• Automatically reconnect to server based on network changes (@lnj)
• Clear all ongoing actions of the message input field on pressing Escape button (@melvo)
• Ensure that current default input device is always used for recording (@melvo, @lnj)
• Hide button for recording voice messages if no input device is available (@melvo)
• Inform user about problems with voice message recording (@melvo)
• Delete recorded temporary file on error occurring while recording (@lnj)

Bugfixes:

• Fix opening chat with existing contact on attempt to add that contact (@melvo)
• Fix focusing message input field after opening chat or pressing on opened chat again (@melvo)
• Fix hiding password if corresponding setting is enabled (@melvo)
• Fix displaying duplicated blocked chat addresses (@lnj)
• Fix duplicated notifications for blocking/unblocking chat addresses (@lnj)
• Fix reactions to own messages (@lnj)
• Fix encrypting non-pending read markers (@melvo)
• Fix showing hints for invalid field input (@melvo)
• Fix wrapping long date sections in chat (@melvo)
• Fix only removing message reactions of removed chat instead of reactions of all chats of account (@lnj)
• Fix sending pending data on reconnection to servers without media sharing support (@lnj)
• Fix cut off details in media viewer (@melvo)
• Fix playing after positioning slider while media is paused in media viewer (@melvo)
• Fix resetting draft message on switching chats (@melvo)
• Fix width of voice messages (@melvo)
• Fix thumbnail generation with faulty plugin (@melvo)
• Fix size of media overview’s tab bar items (@melvo)
• Fix thumbnails flickering in media overview while window is resized (@melvo)
• Fix encryption initialization for groups and disabled accounts (@melvo)
• Fix changing encryption of notes chats (@melvo)
• Fix displaying account name initials for notes chats (@melvo)
• Fix hanging account migration (@lnj)
• Fix replacing XMPP URI with its chat address for contact addition and group joining (@lnj, @melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.17.1 now

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution: