This is the release schedule the release team agreed on
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.08_Schedule
Dependency freeze is in around 7 weeks (July 2) and feature freeze two weeks
after that. Get your stuff ready!
Here are the new modules available in the Plasma 6.7 beta:
Some important features and changes included in 6.7 beta are highlighted on KDE community wiki page.
This releases marks the first public tech preview of the new Union theming system! In the beta, it is used to style all apps using QML and Kirigami when the union package is installed.
The intention is for these apps to look as similar as possible to how they look without Union.
To help the dev team ensure that’s the case, look for visual issues in apps using QML and Kirigami (for example: System Settings, System Monitor, Discover, Spectacle, NeoChat, Haruna, Plasma widget config dialogs).
If you find any issues, make sure they’re Union-specific by running the app with the QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_STYLE=org.kde.desktop variable set; this uses the old styling system so you can compare the two.
If you’ve found a Union-specific issue, report it here.
I just realized it has been a full year since I blogged last. Time flies and I will try to do (much much) better this year.
My last entry was about foss-north 2025 and now foss-north 2026 has just passed. It was a successful event and Tobias really helps bringing new energy to the event – including a whole crew of volunteers.
During the foss-north events all talks are recorded. These are then made available on YouTube and on a peertube instance. Historically this has been conf.tube which was provided by a kind supporter to the cause. However, now the costs has exceeded what is reasonable, so it was migration time.
We’ve looked at taking over the full peertube instance, but quickly realized the costs were too high for us as well. Instead we took over the domain (thank you!) and one of our speakers offered to host us on his instance. Thus, all past foss-north videos, and the new ones for 2026, have been migrated to https://peertube.anduin.net/c/fossnorth/videos .
So, what about migration? The intra peertube transfer failed – much because the aging conf.tube setup did not want to produce the 360GB export. So we had to take another path.
What path you ask? Python scripts! (of course)
So first, we created a Python script storing all URLs from conf.tube. Both for playlists and videos. Then we created a script collecting the corresponding links from YouTube.
Since the new peertube instance does not have direct import from YouTube enabled, the script downloads the video file, metadata and cover picture from YouTube, and then uploads the video to the peertube instance with the metadata and cover picture. As this is a fully automated flow, it is very convenient.
(for 2026 I adapted the script to sync a YouTube playlist, which is very convenient)
The final output from the migration scripts was a set of redirection statements for nginx which is now deployed to the conf.tube server. This means that all old links to foss-north material at conf.tube should redirect to the corresponding video at peertube.anduin.net, so hopefully no links are dead.
The release fixes switching to English as the UI language in Qt Creator on systems with a non-English locale as well as a few other issues.
Qt Design Studio 4.8.2 ships a major upgrade to the AI assistant, transforming it into a fully agentic AI and taking AI-assisted design to the next level. It now has access to your entire QML project and can autonomously read, write, and refactor your files to complete tasks end to end.
Big Tech’s disregard for privacy laws and individuals’ personal data has become a matter of national security. As news of willful mismanagement fill the headlines on an almost daily basis, the world is beginning to turn away from expensive and insecure spyware-riddled software imposed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, et al.
KDE offers the world a better way.
For 30 years, KDE has been providing the free and open-source software essential for digital sovereignty in personal, corporate, and public infrastructures: operating systems, desktop environments, document viewers, image and video editors, software development libraries, and much more.
KDE’s software is competitive, publicly auditable, and freely available. It can be maintained, adapted, and improved in-house or by local software companies. And modifications (along with their source code) can be freely distributed to all users and departments within an organization.
As a non-profit, KDE has no shareholders to serve, no quarterly earnings to grow. KDE charges nothing for its software or its licensing. There are no subscriptions, no spying on users, no disclosure or resale of data that users choose to voluntarily share with KDE, and no secret training of AI models with said data.
KDE will use Sovereign Tech Fund’s investment to push its essential software products to the next level, providing every individual, business, and public administration with the opportunity to regain their privacy, security, and control over their digital sovereignty.
“We have long invested in desktop technologies for a reason: they are the primary way people access and use digital services in everyday life” says Fiona Krakenbürger, Technical Director at the Sovereign Tech Agency. “The desktop holds personal data and mediates nearly every service we depend on, from booking the next medical appointment, to education, to the way we work. We are investing in KDE because it is one of the two major desktop environments used across Linux and plays a key role in how millions of people experience open technology. Strengthening KDE's testing infrastructure, security architecture, and communication frameworks is how we invest in the resilience and reliability of the core digital infrastructure that modern society depends on.”
Every time an AI agent searches the web for Qt documentation today, it receives full HTML pages loaded with navigation chrome, cookie banners, related-article sidebars, and search-engine snippets that have nothing to do with the answer - burning thousands of LLM tokens before a single line of useful content appears. Qt's new official Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool for Qt documentation solves this directly.
Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.5.
Plasma 6.6 was released in February 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a month’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
View full changelogRecently I went on the Linux User Space show to talk about KDE Linux, business, and everyone’s favorite topic: AI. It was a pretty interesting conversation; check it out:
So… while doing some work on Oxygen I noticed there was no camera-video icon.
No Oxygen one.
Wille there was already a recently done symbolic one.
Which honestly felt a bit odd considering cameras are one of those objects designers historically cant resist over designing heee… (but then again i got a bit 2 distracted about the future and forgot to look behind me at what was still pretty good)
So I ended up making both versions almost back to back.
Now… I already knew exactly what was going to happen.
I have been doing Oxygen style icons for long enough to know the amount of work involved. Big reflections, materials, shadows, details nobody consciously notices just to change how the icon feels. And to hide my incompetence as a simple designer
It was not just “camera” and realy not a video one but….. It was trying to be a camera. A object. Somthing with texture and personality. Still …. Probably 3 days of work.
The symbolic one on the other hand took minutes.
And honestly… I like symbolic icons. This is not one of those “flat design killed civilization” posts
But it did make me think again about something I keep repeating over and over:
“Less is a bore.” as Robert Venturi said.
People usually read that as a attack on minimalism. But I don’t.
Reduction is useful. Clarity is useful. Symbolic icons are useful. You also cant hide your design failures as easily, and they can work really well.
The problem for me starts when simplification becomes emotionally neutral. Copy of a copy of a copy of a nothing.
Because thats the thing I care about the most when designing anything. Not beauty exactly… beauty is subjective and honestly kinda impossible to define in any meaningful way.
What interests me more is emotional impact.
How does it make you feel?
Not stricly rationally. But mostly Emotionally.
The Oxygen/old\new/skeo\etc icon is probably excessive and maybe even a little ridiculous. Tiny fake reflections, fake materials, dramatic shadows… but then again thats also what gives it character I think??. It tries to create an “atmosphere” instead of just identifying a function.
And to me atmosphere matters.
Humans are not rationalist grid systems no matter how much “modern” design sometimes pretends we are. We remember things emotionally first. Movies, music, old game menus, interfaces…
Nowdays many interfaces and design languages just feel efficient. Functional. Fast. But also weirdly interchangeable.
And I think thats why so many modern interfaces evaporate from memory so quickly. Perfectly boring floating in UI space. Visually correct but emotionally silent.
Which to me always felt ironic because modernism originally was full of emotion. Optimism. Utopianism. The future as a aesthetic project. Somewhere along the way people kept the reduction but forgot the passion behind it.
Anyway… making these two icons back to back ended up being more interesting than I expected.
They will both be available in PlasmaShell near you….
P.S. welcome to my new home, I’m still alive 
I’m probably gona make a video with some crazy ideas for a over the top theme in QML, kinda as a exercise on the sort of things that should be possible in theme engines. Because even with QML giving us allot more creative freedom people still somehow end up making mostly the same thing over and over again.
TSDgeos
