Tuesday, 15 July 2025. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.4.3.
Plasma 6.4 was released in June 2025 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds two weeks’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
View full changelogToday we're releasing Krita 5.2.11! This is a bug fix release for Krita 5.2.10, especially for Krita on Android where there were intermittent issues displaying the canvas properly.
If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.
[!NOTE] We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.
Note: from 5.2.11, the minimum supported version of Ubuntu is 22.04.
[!WARNING] 5.2.11 has updated the AppImage runtime, which is known to be incompatible with the old versions of AppImageLauncher. Developers of the AppImage runtime suggest to remove or update AppImageLauncher. See this report: Issue 121 More AppImage troubleshooting info is available here: FUSE
Note: We're not supporting MacOS 10.13 anymore, 10.14 is the minimum supported version.
We consider Krita on ChromeOS as ready for production. Krita on Android is still beta. Krita is not available for Android phones, only for tablets, because the user interface requires a large screen.
For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.11/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.
The Linux AppImage and the source .tar.gz and .tar.xz tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).
This is a bit of a rant; feel free to skip it if you’re here for the KDE content.
This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.
I limit myself to a single computer for simplicity’s sake, so it has to be a laptop. And since I replaced my 2020 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga a year ago, I haven’t succeeded at finding a truly great replacement yet. From a certain point of view, you could say I’m a picky buyer, judging by my list of requirements. But frankly, I think these requirements are not that unreasonable. All I want is a laptop that gets the basics right:
Just the basics; no great world-shattering innovation needed, and that’s before I narrow the search to laptops that lack NVIDIA GPUs and have touch or 2-in-1 capabilities (which I quite like and are highly useful for testing touch support in KDE software). So it has to have great Linux and Plasma compatibility too!
I’ve closely followed the PC laptop market for 9 years, maintaining a giant spreadsheet of every laptop model and how they fare on the above characteristics plus many more:
The multi-year trend is “one step forward, one step back.” Most companies still change their laptops’ keyboard layouts in random negative ways every year; ship with stupid screen resolutions, woefully bad speakers, and disappointing touchpads; and stuff the most powerful processor and GPU in there and don’t focus enough on tuning the cooling, power usage, and fan profiles.
Some examples from my own usage:
My 2016 HP Spectre x360 was slow and had a poor screen DPI and a laggy touchpad. The 2024 model fixed those problems but lost its HDMI ports and text nav keys, and the USB-A port has a fiddly and annoying little hinge that’s hard to use and will eventually break. And then the 14″ version was canceled in 2025.
My 2020 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga was also slow, had miserable battery life and a loud fan, put the Fn and PrintScreen keys in inconvenient places, and its high resolution 4K screen option had too high a DPI, wasting energy. The 2025 model fixed those issues but lost the excellent quad speaker system, garaged pen, and the third key to the right of the spacebar that let you re-bind one of them into being a second Meta key.
None of this would be a problem if you could customize and upgrade laptops like you can with desktops, but you can’t. Even on the Framework 13 laptop which makes this an explicit selling point and has made huge leaps in 4 years, there still aren’t aftermarket speaker modules that sound good or a keyboard deck with text nav keys. And the touch/2-in-1 capabilities are only offered on the 12″ model.
Let’s step back a bit and try to figure out what’s going on here. We have an industry of over a dozen PC manufacturers selling thousands of products, but few truly great ones that are satisfactory in all ways, not just a few.
I feel that a major problem is over-complicated product lines. Let’s look at what the big companies offer.
Here’s Lenovo:
Seven product lines (or is it eight; there’s an extra one in the sidebar not shown in the main view) and 330 distinct models! How can a normal person who isn’t a laptop enthusiast find anything in here? Even my eyes glaze over when I’m trying to distinguish the differences between the models and product lines.
HP further complicates things by having separate sites for consumer laptops and business laptops. First the consumer laptops:
12 product lines with 67 models. Already a lot. But now add in the business laptops:
7 product lines with 352 models! Absurd. HP implicitly acknowledges the problem by advertising a sales advisor you can chat with to help you make heads or tails of this overwhelming mess (and maybe steer you towards more expensive models):
In total, HP offers 19 product lines and 419 models. Madness, I tell you. Sheer madness.
ASUS makes it even harder by dividing their models into micro-targeted audiences, which makes no sense since there’s overlap in all these use cases and only limited differences between what any of them need in a laptop:
Ultimately I found 8 product lines with 289 models on the US site. Yikes!
MSI does similar segmentation but finds a way to make it even worse by putting more models in each high level category and not offering a “See all” page:
Hmm, do I want a Titan gaming laptop, or a Raider? Maybe a Vector ? Perhaps a Cyborg, or is that a Thin? Apparently they can’t even settle on one name for half of them. Ultimately MSI has divided their laptops into no fewer than 16 product lines with 159 models.
How about Dell?
10 product lines, 70 models. A bit better than some of the competition, but 70 total is still an objectively ridiculous level of choice to offer, especially considering that most of these models are going to offer various configurations of CPUs, memory, and storage space.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
You might think that this level of choice should provide anything one could want, but that’s not true. Most of the models differ by like 1% and make all the same mistakes, copy-pasted across the while product line. Maintaining so many product lines at a reasonable level of development and quality is impossible, even for companies of their size with billions of dollars to throw at the problem.
These companies are clearly trying to micro-target specific market segments to match prices to buyers’ budgets, but offering so much choice is foolish. Most buyers — even big commercial buyers — are not informed enough to be able to pick the perfect device from among a massive blob of options presented at the same level, causing choice paralysis and lost sales, disappointing purchases that reduce brand loyalty, and expensive returns.
There has to be a better way!
There are some bright spots in the industry.
The most notable is Apple, which offers two product lines and five total models. The differences between them are 100% comprehensible. No matter what Apple laptop you choose, it has a world-class touchpad, great speakers, an at-least-good keyboard with a sensible layout, a nice high DPI screen, great performance, and mind-blowing battery life. There are no bad models (if you’re a Mac fan, of course).
Razer is up there too, with one product line and three models, and all of them mostly get the basics right.
Framework also does a great job, also with just three models. The Framework 13 is so close to being the perfect do-it-all general purpose device for me. It just needs text nav keys, better speakers, and a touchscreen (ideally in a 2-in-1 form factor like the 12).
The small Linux-specific StarLabs company does an unexpectedly great job too, with the same three models (hmm, perhaps there’s a pattern here). And these aren’t Clevo or Tongfang units, either! They’re really nice custom engineered Linux-first laptops. I’ve come close to buying one on two occasions within the past year.
And notably, these companies’ laptops tend to get better with each revision, rather than oscillating around a specific level of quality but never consistently improving.
It’s not that hard: offer a small number of product lines and models with very clear segmentation (by screen size, presence or absence of a GPU, 2-in-1 vs clamshell laptop, etc) and make all of them good. Don’t sell any bad models that have crappy screens, keyboards, touchpads, speakers, or battery life. Don’t sell any models that are 99% identical to other ones. Don’t do this:
Then make each product better every year. Don’t just put in a new generation of CPUs and ports when they become available; be thoughtful and actually make things better. Reduce power consumption, fan noise, and heat emissions. Tune the speakers to sound better. Increase the screen backlight’s brightness. Put in a nicer, higher-resolution webcam. Increase the number of microphones, and add hardware noise cancellation. Tighten up the ports so they aren’t wobbly. Thicken the case to make it more durable. Beef up the hinges. Use captive screws for the bottom cover. Lighten or roughen the surface a bit to resist fingerprints. Make it easier to remove keys for cleaning without breaking their attachment mechanism. Make the whole keyboard replaceable.
And so on. You know, care about the product! The way we do in KDE for Plasma and our apps. Make it better. Admit and undo your mistakes. Double down on your strengths. And make something great you can be proud of!
A few companies are already there, and I hope someday more follow in their footsteps.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
This week features for Plasma 6.5 started to take shape. Day/night appearance changes and digital art are going to be some of the big areas of improvement, so get ready!
You can now configure what rotatable dials on your drawing tablet do! (Joshua Goins, link 1, link 2, and link 3)
When sharing the current Wi-Fi network, its password is now shown as well, so the person you’re sharing it to can easily connect. (Ivan Tkachenko, link)
Improved the accessibility of the Welcome Center app in multiple ways. (Nicolas Fella, link)
KWin’s Magnifier effect now has a maximum magnification level, since going beyond this just turns it into the Zoom effect. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Improved the display of raw bytes in notifications involving file transfers. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
With the new feature to automatically change wallpapers between their light and dark versions, there’s now more than one feature that makes use of the day/night cycle. Accordingly, the place where you configure your location so the system knows what sunrise and sunset timings to use has been moved out of the Night Light page in System Settings and onto its own page. The cycle you set up here will be used for both Night Light and automatic wallpaper switching, and later for automatic theme or color scheme switching too, once either of those are finalized. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)
Screencasts of specific windows now include their titlebars, borders, and shadows. (David Redondo, link)
Fixed an issue that could cause KWin to crash when you Alt+Tab out of certain games. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed an issue that could cause KWin to crash while using a drawing tablet pen when an internal window closes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a regression that caused window focus to be wrong after switching activities. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a very strange issue that caused apps launched from within Spectacle (for example a video player to view saved screen recordings) to be super duper broken. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Fixed an issue that would prevent Plasma pop-ups from being focusable if a pop-over window from a GTK 4 app was open. (David Edmundson, link)
Using the “Activate and Raise” click setting on Wayland no longer eats clicks while a tooltip is visible. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed an issue that caused window resizing when using a fractional scale factor to be a bit chaotic-looking. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed an issue that caused the Orca screen reader to not work quite right when pressing structural navigation keys repeatedly. (Michael Weghorn, link)
Made the Minimize All Windows widget to work on X11 again. (Marco Martin, link)
The ”Dim Inactive” KWin effect no longer also dims Alt+Tab switchers. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Adapted our code to a Qt change that caused the lock screen to sometimes show the UI and password prompt immediately, rather than only after any interaction. (Marc Payne, link)
Fixed an issue that made it impossible to change the background for the SDDM login screen to a new image with the same file name as the old one. (Amy Rose, link)
Fixed an issue that caused authentication prompts to inappropriately reject any already-entered text even if you hadn’t accepted it yet, but rather just because the underlying PAM system was taking a long time. (Secureblue, link)
Fixed an issue that caused the drag-and-drop menu to sometimes not appear when expected upon dropping files from Dolphin onto the Plasma desktop. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Fixed a memory leak in KWin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
You can now kioclient mkdir to create a directory going through the KIO system. (Bernardo Gomes Negri, link)
Slightly improved performance and efficiency for all QtQuick-based KDE apps — including Plasma apps like System Settings, Discover, and Spectacle. (David Edmundson and Marco Martin, link 1 and link 2)
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.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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 us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Friday, 11 July 2025
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.16.0.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
ngraham.sage extensions. Commit. Fixes bug #506125I have been a long time Plasma Mobile contributor, but I have always had a keen interest in having Linux on my TV! I have noticed that in the past few months, the Plasma Bigscreen project has had some interest from people wanting to contribute, but there have not been any active KDE developers working on the project. Since I have some time off school (having just graduated university), I decided to take a swing at improving the project for a week.
Plasma Bigscreen is a Plasma-based shell (desktop environment) for TVs and other large displays. It is designed to be used with arrow navigation using remotes or controllers.
I have not been involved with the project in the past so its history is a bit murky to me. From what I know, it was originally developed with Mycroft in mind, which was a open source virtual assistant. They had even developed hardware for it, but unfortunately, the company shut down in recent years. The work by the developers at that time appears to have been sponsored by Blue Systems.
Plasma Bigscreen itself emerged around 2020 and was designed as a “Plasma shell”, in a similar way to Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile. Back when development was active, it provided a TV friendly launcher to launch Linux apps, and even had its own “mini-apps”, known as Mycroft Skills. These could be downloaded from the KDE Store. A TV-friendly web browser and media player were also developed for the project. The project itself was released in the Plasma 5 release cycle, but got dropped with Plasma 6 in 2024 because it was not ported in time for the megarelease.
About a year ago, the project was ported to Plasma 6 (and Qt 6), but has not yet received a release since being removed from the Plasma release schedule.
A few months ago, my friend Seshan started doing some work and opened a few merge requests against the Plasma Bigscreen shell repository. I noticed that there had basically been no activity on the repository since the initial Qt6/Plasma6 port, and the matrix channel had no active developers. I sensed an opportunity…
I started with some housekeeping work with the repository. I added a README, and a REUSE license checker to the CI. I then ported the QML library to be a declarative plugin, and removed a bunch of abandoned code folders that were not used anywhere in the codebase.
Merge requests:
At this point prior to my work, the shell UI looked like this:
I was digging around some old Breeze Ocean mockups and stumbled across some Bigscreen mockups by Manuel. It seems the original Bigscreen UI did try to follow it, but did not quite get there. I felt inspired to fully complete implementing them.
I first worked on the homescreen UI. I flattened the layout to reduce visual complexity, removing panel backgrounds and shadows where possible, while adding tooltips for the indicators. I then added an “expanded clock” view for when the user is at the top of application categories (based on the mockups), which shrinks when the user goes down the view. I ported the application lists to use ListView and delegate caching rather than having all elements having their coordinates positioned manually to improve performance. The background now also blurs when it is not the main focus of the UI.
I also added a search view based on KRunner. This allows users to search for the applications they need without needing to manually scroll through the entire application list.
Merge requests:
I redesigned the system settings view to have a sidebar with categories, with a simple two-pane look.
The settings modules (KCMs) had a lot of hardcoded UI elements and layouts. I decided to make a small component library to build TV focused UIs (that still look Breeze like), and ported all of the settings modules to it. I moved away from horizontal layouts to vertical layouts for content, and put a heavier emphasis on sidebars for interacting with individual delegates. I think it looks pretty nice:
I ported settings modules to my controls library, and also fixed some issues:
Merge requests:
The UI feedback for starting an application was broken, so I decided to overhaul it to be something similar to what we have on mobile:
Merge request:
I wrote envmanager as a program in Plasma Mobile that manages shell specific configuration we need in services such as KWin. This avoids the need for distros to ship custom configs to set certain settings that the shell needs. I recently changed Plasma Mobile to use config overlays in order to achieve this, with more details can be found in my other blog post.
Merge requests:
In order to try it out (on a TV for realsies, not just on my workstation), I used a Raspberry Pi 5. I flashed postmarketOS onto it, and then manually compiled and installed the Plasma Bigscreen shell.
Note: If you are trying to build and install on postmarketOS yourself, be sure install the dependencies and pass the build flags in this manifest, as they are required: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/blob/ee4de8c6702a113914d6ed899c88cb9411e75427/packages/plasma-bigscreen/APKBUILD#L57
As a user you can otherwise install plasma-bigscreen from the nightly repo, or use the AUR package on Arch (though I haven’t tried it).
It’s dangling off the HDMI cable, I know
In its heyday, Plasma Bigscreen relied on “Mycroft Skills” to provide some media applications such as YouTube and SoundCloud. We do not have that anymore, so I tried out some other Linux applications.
These are some of the ones I tried from Flathub:
Of course, we also have KDE applications designed for TV:
There is a repository called plasma-remotecontrollers, which contains a daemon that is able to take both game controllers (ex. Xbox) and TV remotes (over CEC on HDMI) and map them to keyboard arrow keys. It also has a settings module to configure the shortcuts.
I was able to successfully test having an Xbox controller connected (with the daemon online), and having it map the arrow buttons to arrow keys on the system. I wasn’t able to however test the CEC support, which would allow buttons on TV remotes (over HDMI) map to arrow keys.
Seshan and User8395 have also been contributing to the project here and there in the past few weeks, here are some highlights:
There is still a lot to work on in the project.
There isn’t a virtual keyboard to input text with that supports arrow navigation. This is something planned for Plasma Keyboard however, please stay tuned!
The plasma-remotecontrollers’s (TV remote/game controller support) settings module is also not yet properly ported and tested on Bigscreen.
So… it is probably best to still use a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for now, or an air remote.
We do not have any framework to design TV-based UIs in KDE. Aura browser and Plank both use Qt Quick Controls and Kirigami, but have a lot of hardcoding and custom controls in order to be usable on a TV. I do have a few TV focused components for building settings modules, but that is a very narrow set of controls.
What are the usecases we want to achieve with a TV focused desktop environment? Do we need to also pursue making frontends for various media services? There isn’t a clear direction for the project at the moment, beyond making it a working desktop environment. In the past, this project was heavily focused on Mycroft but that no longer exists.
Distributions dropped their respective plasma-bigscreen packages when Plasma 6 rolled out, as it is no longer part of the Plasma release. We need to have the project return to the Plasma release cycle, hopefully starting with Plasma 6.5.
I am fairly happy with the work that I was able to produce for Bigscreen last month. I have since returned to working on Plasma Mobile (due to having limited time as a volunteer contributor), but I can still step in and help review merge requests and guide new contributors to the project.
Feel free to join us in the Bigscreen Matrix group #plasma-bigscreen:kde.org!
Today, we released updated versions of the fine-tuned CodeLlama 13B-QML and 7B -QML models. The updated versions include the first skills to complete code for Qt Quick enhancements in Qt 6.9 and Qt 6.10.
As i wrote in the previous post, now the KWallet service has been splitted in a compatibility layer that exposes the old KWallet api, but actually consumes the Secret Service API, provided by default by the old KWallet daemon converted in a secretservice-only provider.
Another pain point is the application used to look inside the wallets, KWalletmanager, which only speaks the KWallet api and looks a bit dated nowdays:
I am working on a new application which goal is strictly to be a client for Secret Service. It can access passwords of any Secret Service provider (being KWallet, Gnome-keyring, KeepassXC, oo7 or whatever else) and should hopefully look a bit more modern and simple, while still being powerful:
Both as a desktop application or a mobile one:
For items imported from KWallet supports editing the values of type “Map” as well:
As well as visualizing “binary” entries (here super censored for obvious reasons 
The application can be tested at https://invent.kde.org/mart/kwallets
But has a fundamental problem, for which i need help… Right now is just called “KWallets” which can be kinda confusing with old KWallet and KWalletManager, so it probably needs a new name, any opinion is welcome 
.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.3 "Far Above the Clouds"!
Amarok 3.3.0 is the first version based on Qt6/KF6, corresponding to a decade-sized update of the technological foundations. Additionally, audio engine has been reworked to use GStreamer for playback. Previously, the availability of various features, e.g. ReplayGain and visualiser, was dependent on the Phonon backend in use, an issue that became even more evident with Qt6 Phonon backends. This has now been remedied: The reworked audio engine provides unified feature set for all users and should provide a solid and future-proof sonic experience for years to come. Notable improvements have also landed to the database system: improved character set support helps with e.g. emojis in podcast descriptions and other very exotic symbols, date handling has been improved ('year 2038 problem'), and various other potential and actual database-related issues have been fixed.
Amarok 3.3 arrives approximately 15 months after the initial Qt5/KF5 version 3.0 and 5 months after the final Qt5/KF5 version 3.2.2. Although there have been a number of major changes, they are mostly technical, and their effect on the user experience is relatively minor. Therefore, the version released now is 3.3.0, with some 3.3.x bugfix releases to be expected in near future. A new major version ('Amarok 4') will be released later, after more extensive work on the user interface and other aspects of the software has been carried out.
The git repository statistics between 3.2.0 and 3.3.0 are as follows:
Tuomas Nurmi: 113 commits, +3681, -3101
l10n daemon script: 92 commits, +85094, -89109
Kunda Ki: 1 commit, +4, -11
Carl Schwan: 1 commit, +1, -1
In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.3.0 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.
You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.
I have released 25.04.3 I have upgraded the QT6 content snap to 6.9! Fixed a bug in kde-neon* extensions with cmake prefix path.
New snaps!
Audex: A CD ripping application.
GCompris – An excellent childrens education application
Labplot – Scientific plotting
Digikam – 8.7.0 with exiftool bug fixed https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501424
Krita – 5.2.11 – Excellent Graphic art platform ( compares to Photoshop )
kgraphviewer – Graphiz .dot file viewer
I am happy to report my arm is mostly functional! Unfortunately, maintaining all these snaps is an enormous amount of work, with time I don’t have! Please consider a donation for the time I should be spending job hunting / getting a website business off the ground. Thank you for your consideration!
@sgmoore:kde.org