Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma. And it’s going to be a big one, folks!

This week, a familiar pattern played out: people upgraded to Plasma 6.8 and found all the bugs that nobody reported during the beta period, and the Plasma team worked incredibly hard to fix them! You’ll see the result below: tons of bug fixes.

It’s clear that not enough people are testing Plasma’s beta releases to uncover and report all regressions. We’re open for ideas on how to improve this.

In addition to the bug fixes, this week also saw a number of nice new features, UI improvements, and performance enhancements. Consequential stuff! Check it out below:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

After extended testing, KWin’s support for the Wayland picture-in-picture (PiP) protocol has been deemed stable enough, and turned on by default! (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #10175)

Window sizes and positions are now remembered on a per-screen-arrangement basis!

This means if you arrange your open windows across two screens, then disconnect one, then rearrange the windows to suit the now-single-screen arrangement… then when you reconnect the second screen, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they last had on the two-screen arrangement. And when you disconnect a screen again, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they had on the single-screen setup.

Note that this only takes effect within a running session for open windows; it does not affect the positioning of windows that are closed and then reopened. That’s still being worked on. (Jakob Petsovits, kwin MR #10198)

You can now permanently deny XWayland-using apps from asking to control the pointer and keyboard, and also see which apps have been denied and revoke their denials. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521576)

In-progress downloads in Firefox that produce a nice native Plasma notification via Plasma Browser Integration can now be paused and resumed from that notification. (Simon Hürlimann, plasma-browser-integration MR #207)

Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Brave browser. (Geevarghese ST, plasma-browser-integration MR #179)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8.2

The Activity Switcher sidebar no longer stretches wallpaper images for screens without a 16:9 aspect ratio; now the wallpaper is shown faithfully, but cropped if needed. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #478784)

When you use a plain color as your wallpaper in conjunction with the “accent color from wallpaper” feature, the accent color is now set to the exact color of your wallpaper, not a generated shade of it. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #513851)

Holding down a key that plays or pauses media now plays or pauses it once, rather than repeatedly. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #521448)

When using the zoom feature with “Push” pointer tracking, zooming in or out some more will now center the zoom on the pointer’s current location. (Maxim Stomphorst, KDE Bugzilla #508098)

Plasma 6.9

If you hold down the Shift or Ctrl keys to select multiple items on System Monitor’s Applications or Processes pages, the items in the list views temporarily stop rearranging themselves so you can actually select items properly! (Vladimir Pahomchik, plasma-systemmonitor MR #479)

System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now uses the more familiar “forget” terminology for removing networks. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #525844)

On System Settings’ Task Switcher page, the feature to preview a new Alt+Tab window switcher style now simply triggers it to appear rather than using a simulation, which ensures that it always looks right. This also fixes a bug that made certain visualizations un-preview-able. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #10154 and KDE Bugzilla #508088)

Frameworks 6.32

When your operating system hasn’t set up PAM and KWallet properly, the wizard that prompts you to create a new wallet now steers you in the direction of a Blowfish wallet, and instructs you in how to use GPG if you choose that option but no GPG keys are found. (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #353960)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.8.1

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while screens were being connected, disconnected, or rearranged. (Marco Martin, plasma-workspace MR #7249)

Fixed an edge case that broke the lock screen for people doing an in-place upgrade from Plasma 6.7’s X11 session to Plasma 6.8’s Wayland session. In-place upgrades are not recommended because they can and will unearth similarly unpleasant issues, but this one is fixed now. (David Edmundson, kscreenlocker MR #383)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could save an image to the wrong location after it had previously been saved to a different location. (Mohanraj Velayutham, KDE Bugzilla #526111)

Fixed an issue in the color scheme editor window that would make its preview area show the wrong colors much of the time when it was opened while using a dark system color scheme. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527382)

Fixed a visual glitch in System Monitor’s column configuration window. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527190)

The Meta+V clipboard popup now gets focused as expected when the system is using a higher than normal focus stealing prevention mode. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527326)

Remote desktop clients connecting to Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now see pointers with the correct colors when the server uses a colorful pointer. (Zhongli Wu, KDE Bugzilla #524148)

Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that would make it only accept the first connection made by the Mac remote desktop app currently named “Windows App for Mac” (formerly named “Microsoft Remote Desktop”), and fail for subsequent attempts until the server was restarted. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #527202)

Plasma 6.8.2

Hardened KWin against crashing when given invalid global keyboard shortcut keys. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #4097)

Fixed a regression that could sometimes make files and folders on the desktop become temporarily invisible on the primary screen of a multi-screen setup. (Brodi Elwood, KDE Bugzilla #527226)

Fixed two regressions with pinned tasks on the Task Manager widget: one that made them fail to open in the correct positions when using certain settings, and another that made them briefly disappear when their window was moved to another screen while using the feature to only show tasks on the current screen. (Marco Martin and Samuel Collins, KDE Bugzilla #527189 and KDE Bugzilla #527507)

Fixed a regression that broke notifications using the sliding effect for people who had old non-default animation duration values in their config files. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #527478)

Fixed a regression that sometimes reset the wallpaper on certain screens in multi-screen setups. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527150)

Fixed a regression that made the lock screen stop blurring the wallpaper on the primary screen of a multi-screen arrangement while the interactive controls were shown. I think we managed to miss this one because Plasma 6.8’s default wallpaper is already kind of blurry! (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527569)

Fixed a regression that made the Activity Switcher sidebar slightly overflow off the bottom of the screen when there are any horizontal panels. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527158)

Fixed a regression that made the Fcitx5 CJK input method’s “candidates panel” force a floating panel to un-float. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #527067)

Fixed a regression that made the Activity Pager widget show two underlines for the active Activity, rather than just one. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527235)

Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that showed a blank screen for client apps lacking support for hardware-accelerated H.264 video. (Matteo Beretta, KDE Bugzilla #526931)

Fixed a long-standing issue that could make desktop widgets change their size on login when using a multi-screen setup. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #490687)

Fixed an issue in the Sticky Keys feature that made it sometimes not work quite right. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #509714)

Fixed multiple issues relating to the names and orders of virtual desktops getting out of sync between the Overview effect and the Pager widget. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #501660, KDE Bugzilla #501808, KDE Bugzilla #506247, and KDE Bugzilla #522322)

Fixed an issue with Plasma’s on-screen keyboard that could make it unexpectedly appear and get stuck there in Fedora KDE’s installer. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #524506)

Fixed an issue with the wrong window in a group getting highlighted when hovering over its Task Manager tooltip thumbnail. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527229)

Panel Spacer widgets now work correctly on vertical panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #518799)

The Media Player widget now correctly displays the name of media that includes non-ASCII characters. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #503405)

Scrolling on the Kickoff Application Launcher’s “All Applications” page now works properly with a touchpad when the page is configured to show apps in a grid, rather than in a list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #526911)

Discover no longer appears five times in the “Choose Application” window. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511886)

Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now tracks the pointer more accurately for scaled virtual screens, and resizes accurately when virtual screens are changed in size. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #273, krdp MR #277, and krdp MR #298)

Plasma 6.9

Disabling a critical notification no longer makes it appear anyway while Do Not Disturb mode is active. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #519592)

Frameworks 6.32

Did you know that you can scroll horizontally with a traditional scroll wheel mouse by holding down Alt while scrolling? Or at least you could before Qt 6.12, but we’ve adapted to a change made in that Qt release that broke this functionality in the custom scroll handler used by Plasma and KDE’s QtQuick apps, and now it works again. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526317)

KRunner no longer incorrectly tries to pluralize the word “Hertz”. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #527386)

Qt 6.12.1

Fixed a Qt bug that made Plasma hang on logout while any System Monitor widgets were present. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #527240)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8.1

When Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server automatically generates a TLS certificate, it lasts for ten years, not one day. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #265)

Plasma 6.8.2

Plasma’s system monitoring widgets no longer let you configure line charts to show so much history that their data collection would make Plasma lag and freeze. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #527627)

Buttons to copy text to the clipboard on websites displayed in the Web Browser widget now work as expected. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #523381)

The volume feedback sound now unconditionally uses the relevant sound from the active sound theme, fixing a few edge cases where it would sometimes use the system’s fallback sound theme instead. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #525954)

Plasma 6.9

If you let the Plasma Login Manager sit there without logging anyone in, it will now eventually let the monitors enter power saving mode. (Raphael Erard, KDE Bugzilla #484015)

Frameworks 6.32

Improved the performance of the common SVG-reading code used throughout Plasma and many apps. (Mátyás Nyilas, ksvg MR #120)

All KDE software should no longer hang when a network share that was manually mounted and added to the Places panel becomes unavailable! (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #272361)

How you can help

This week there are a number of new ways to help KDE!

Ask the KDE Goals champions

The champions of the new KDE Goals for the 2026-2028 cycle will be answering your questions live on YouTube and PeerTube on October 29 at at 17:00 UTC. Leave them your questions at the KDE Forum post! As a reminder, the new goals are:

• KDE for Enterprise and Deployments: Ask David Edmundson, Kevin Ottens, Neal Gompa, and Kai Uwe Broulik about how they plan to make KDE the best choice for businesses and public institutions.
• Better documentation: Check in with Nate Graham, Thiago Masato Costa Sueto, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss about improving KDE’s documentation.
• Next Generation Styling for KDE: Find out how Arjen Hiemstra, Akseli Lahtinen, and Andy Betts are working to implement a unified styling system.

Donate to the fundraiser

KDE’s annual end-of-year fundraiser has started, and making a donation is a hugely impactful way to keep KDE financially solvent. Due to… world events… costs for travel, computer hardware, and server infrastructure are higher than ever. KDE needs your help to keep the lights on, so donate today if you can!

Take the desktop icons survey

Help us figure out how desktop icons should behave in various tricky situations by taking a survey on the topic.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma. And it’s going to be a big one, folks!

This week, a familiar pattern played out: people upgraded to Plasma 6.8 and found all the bugs that nobody reported during the beta period, and the Plasma team worked incredibly hard to fix them! You’ll see the result below: tons of bug fixes.

It’s clear that not enough people are testing Plasma’s beta releases to uncover and report all regressions. We’re open for ideas on how to improve this.

In addition to the bug fixes, this week also saw a number of nice new features, UI improvements, and performance enhancements. Consequential stuff! Check it out below:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

After extended testing, KWin’s support for the Wayland picture-in-picture (PiP) protocol has been deemed stable enough, and turned on by default! (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #10175)

Window sizes and positions are now remembered on a per-screen-arrangement basis!

This means if you arrange your open windows across two screens, then disconnect one, then rearrange the windows to suit the now-single-screen arrangement… then when you reconnect the second screen, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they last had on the two-screen arrangement. And when you disconnect a screen again, open windows will jump to the sizes and positions they had on the single-screen setup.

Note that this only takes effect within a running session for open windows; it does not affect the positioning of windows that are closed and then reopened. That’s still being worked on. (Jakob Petsovits, kwin MR #10198)

You can now permanently deny XWayland-using apps from asking to control the pointer and keyboard, and also see which apps have been denied and revoke their denials. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #521576)

In-progress downloads in Firefox that produce a nice native Plasma notification via Plasma Browser Integration can now be paused and resumed from that notification. (Simon Hürlimann, plasma-browser-integration MR #207)

Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Brave browser. (Geevarghese ST, plasma-browser-integration MR #179)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8.2

The Activity Switcher sidebar no longer stretches wallpaper images for screens without a 16:9 aspect ratio; now the wallpaper is shown faithfully, but cropped if needed. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #478784)

When you use a plain color as your wallpaper in conjunction with the “accent color from wallpaper” feature, the accent color is now set to the exact color of your wallpaper, not a generated shade of it. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #513851)

Holding down a key that plays or pauses media now plays or pauses it once, rather than repeatedly. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #521448)

When using the zoom feature with “Push” pointer tracking, zooming in or out some more will now center the zoom on the pointer’s current location. (Maxim Stomphorst, KDE Bugzilla #508098)

Plasma 6.9

If you hold down the Shift or Ctrl keys to select multiple items on System Monitor’s Applications or Processes pages, the items in the list views temporarily stop rearranging themselves so you can actually select items properly! (Vladimir Pahomchik, plasma-systemmonitor MR #479)

System Settings’ Wi-Fi & Networking page now uses the more familiar “forget” terminology for removing networks. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #525844)

On System Settings’ Task Switcher page, the feature to preview a new Alt+Tab window switcher style now simply triggers it to appear rather than using a simulation, which ensures that it always looks right. This also fixes a bug that made certain visualizations un-preview-able. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #10154 and KDE Bugzilla #508088)

Frameworks 6.32

When your operating system hasn’t set up PAM and KWallet properly, the wizard that prompts you to create a new wallet now steers you in the direction of a Blowfish wallet, and instructs you in how to use GPG if you choose that option but no GPG keys are found. (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #353960)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.8.1

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while screens were being connected, disconnected, or rearranged. (Marco Martin, plasma-workspace MR #7249)

Fixed an edge case that broke the lock screen for people doing an in-place upgrade from Plasma 6.7’s X11 session to Plasma 6.8’s Wayland session. In-place upgrades are not recommended because they can and will unearth similarly unpleasant issues, but this one is fixed now. (David Edmundson, kscreenlocker MR #383)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could save an image to the wrong location after it had previously been saved to a different location. (Mohanraj Velayutham, KDE Bugzilla #526111)

Fixed an issue in the color scheme editor window that would make its preview area show the wrong colors much of the time when it was opened while using a dark system color scheme. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527382)

Fixed a visual glitch in System Monitor’s column configuration window. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #527190)

The Meta+V clipboard popup now gets focused as expected when the system is using a higher than normal focus stealing prevention mode. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527326)

Remote desktop clients connecting to Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now see pointers with the correct colors when the server uses a colorful pointer. (Zhongli Wu, KDE Bugzilla #524148)

Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that would make it only accept the first connection made by the Mac remote desktop app currently named “Windows App for Mac” (formerly named “Microsoft Remote Desktop”), and fail for subsequent attempts until the server was restarted. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #527202)

Plasma 6.8.2

Hardened KWin against crashing when given invalid global keyboard shortcut keys. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #4097)

Fixed a regression that could sometimes make files and folders on the desktop become temporarily invisible on the primary screen of a multi-screen setup. (Brodi Elwood, KDE Bugzilla #527226)

Fixed two regressions with pinned tasks on the Task Manager widget: one that made them fail to open in the correct positions when using certain settings, and another that made them briefly disappear when their window was moved to another screen while using the feature to only show tasks on the current screen. (Marco Martin and Samuel Collins, KDE Bugzilla #527189 and KDE Bugzilla #527507)

Fixed a regression that broke notifications using the sliding effect for people who had old non-default animation duration values in their config files. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #527478)

Fixed a regression that sometimes reset the wallpaper on certain screens in multi-screen setups. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527150)

Fixed a regression that made the lock screen stop blurring the wallpaper on the primary screen of a multi-screen arrangement while the interactive controls were shown. I think we managed to miss this one because Plasma 6.8’s default wallpaper is already kind of blurry! (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527569)

Fixed a regression that made the Activity Switcher sidebar slightly overflow off the bottom of the screen when there are any horizontal panels. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #527158)

Fixed a regression that made the Fcitx5 CJK input method’s “candidates panel” force a floating panel to un-float. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #527067)

Fixed a regression that made the Activity Pager widget show two underlines for the active Activity, rather than just one. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527235)

Fixed an issue in Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server that showed a blank screen for client apps lacking support for hardware-accelerated H.264 video. (Matteo Beretta, KDE Bugzilla #526931)

Fixed a long-standing issue that could make desktop widgets change their size on login when using a multi-screen setup. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #490687)

Fixed an issue in the Sticky Keys feature that made it sometimes not work quite right. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #509714)

Fixed multiple issues relating to the names and orders of virtual desktops getting out of sync between the Overview effect and the Pager widget. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #501660, KDE Bugzilla #501808, KDE Bugzilla #506247, and KDE Bugzilla #522322)

Fixed an issue with Plasma’s on-screen keyboard that could make it unexpectedly appear and get stuck there in Fedora KDE’s installer. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, KDE Bugzilla #524506)

Fixed an issue with the wrong window in a group getting highlighted when hovering over its Task Manager tooltip thumbnail. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #527229)

Panel Spacer widgets now work correctly on vertical panels. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #518799)

The Media Player widget now correctly displays the name of media that includes non-ASCII characters. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #503405)

Scrolling on the Kickoff Application Launcher’s “All Applications” page now works properly with a touchpad when the page is configured to show apps in a grid, rather than in a list. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #526911)

Discover no longer appears five times in the “Choose Application” window. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511886)

Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server now tracks the pointer more accurately for scaled virtual screens, and resizes accurately when virtual screens are changed in size. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #273, krdp MR #277, and krdp MR #298)

Plasma 6.9

Disabling a critical notification no longer makes it appear anyway while Do Not Disturb mode is active. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #519592)

Frameworks 6.32

Did you know that you can scroll horizontally with a traditional scroll wheel mouse by holding down Alt while scrolling? Or at least you could before Qt 6.12, but we’ve adapted to a change made in that Qt release that broke this functionality in the custom scroll handler used by Plasma and KDE’s QtQuick apps, and now it works again. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526317)

KRunner no longer incorrectly tries to pluralize the word “Hertz”. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #527386)

Qt 6.12.1

Fixed a Qt bug that made Plasma hang on logout while any System Monitor widgets were present. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #527240)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8.1

When Plasma’s built-in remote desktop (RDP) server automatically generates a TLS certificate, it lasts for ten years, not one day. (Zhongli Wu, krdp MR #265)

Plasma 6.8.2

Plasma’s system monitoring widgets no longer let you configure line charts to show so much history that their data collection would make Plasma lag and freeze. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #527627)

Buttons to copy text to the clipboard on websites displayed in the Web Browser widget now work as expected. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #523381)

The volume feedback sound now unconditionally uses the relevant sound from the active sound theme, fixing a few edge cases where it would sometimes use the system’s fallback sound theme instead. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #525954)

Plasma 6.9

If you let the Plasma Login Manager sit there without logging anyone in, it will now eventually let the monitors enter power saving mode. (Raphael Erard, KDE Bugzilla #484015)

Frameworks 6.32

Improved the performance of the common SVG-reading code used throughout Plasma and many apps. (Mátyás Nyilas, ksvg MR #120)

All KDE software should no longer hang when a network share that was manually mounted and added to the Places panel becomes unavailable! (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #272361)

How you can help

This week there are a number of new ways to help KDE!

Ask the KDE Goals champions

The champions of the new KDE Goals for the 2026-2028 cycle will be answering your questions live on YouTube and PeerTube on October 29 at at 17:00 UTC. Leave them your questions at the KDE Forum post! As a reminder, the new goals are:

• KDE for Enterprise and Deployments: Ask David Edmundson, Kevin Ottens, Neal Gompa, and Kai Uwe Broulik about how they plan to make KDE the best choice for businesses and public institutions.
• Better documentation: Check in with Nate Graham, Thiago Masato Costa Sueto, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss about improving KDE’s documentation.
• Next Generation Styling for KDE: Find out how Arjen Hiemstra, Akseli Lahtinen, and Andy Betts are working to implement a unified styling system.

Donate to the fundraiser

KDE’s annual end-of-year fundraiser has started, and making a donation is a hugely impactful way to keep KDE financially solvent. Due to… world events… costs for travel, computer hardware, and server infrastructure are higher than ever. KDE needs your help to keep the lights on, so donate today if you can!

Take the desktop icons survey

Help us figure out how desktop icons should behave in various tricky situations by taking a survey on the topic.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

I am very late to write this but anyways. But please do the survey.

KDE Plasma desktop icons (the actual system that holds the icons, not the .desktop files) is a bit crusty, due to many years of people fixing bugs there. This now causes new bugs in return.

So, at Akademy this year I had my own very first BoF around this topic. It was bit of a mess as I have never done a BoF before, but we had a good brainstorm session and I got good feedback.

One of the good feedback was that hey, let's ask our users! Thus I made a survey, where I ask questions such as:

• You have icons on another screen but it gets disconnected
• Your screen resolution changes

Link to the survey: https://survey.kde.org/355778

We want to know what is your opinion on this, so we can get this done better for future. And when there is enough data, I will make some graphs. :D

We also discussed the history of the desktop icons. The original system was made in a bit of a rush and it was early times for QtQuick, so there was new things to learn too. This worked "well enough" for many years, until we began to get more features.. And that sneakily introduced bugs. This is typical thing to happen to software, so it's not surprising.

I have already done one refactor to them previously: https://akselmo.dev/posts/plasma-desktop-icons-positioning-refactor/. However I was way less experienced back then, so I tried my best to not break anything.. Thus the refactoring turned out to be bit less intensive as was needed: Instead of doing a deep cleaning in a room, I just dusted the shelves.

Second time is the charm, this time I'll go in with a proper plan. And for that I need your help!! So please.. Fill the survey! https://survey.kde.org/355778

Hopefully this time we can finally get rid of the randomly moving icons and disappearances and whatnot. I also aim that there will be more code removal than code addition.

Thanks for reading! And do the survey!! Even if you don't use KDE Plasma!

KDE Plasma has robust support for desktop icons, just like Windows and macOS do. And it’s not going anywhere, either!

But over the years, the codebase has gotten a bit crusty. You know how these things happen: conventions change but the old code isn’t updated; features are added that cut against the original design without a corresponding refactor; implementation details that were relevant in the past but aren’t anymore; and so on. This internal messiness is a source of bugs, and we’d like to correct that!

So for a while now, various folks in KDE have wanted to overhaul the technical implementation and bring Plasma’s desktop icons up to modern standards. But in the process, it’s also necessary to know how we want the system to behave!

It turns out there’s a lot of hidden complexity embedded in the core feature to allow manually moving icons around, and the current system doesn’t always handle it in the best way. Consider what should happen to manually-arranged icons in cases like these:

• You rotate a screen with icons on it
• You disconnect a screen with icons on it
• The resolution or scale factor of a screen with icons on it grows or shrinks
• The screen fills up with icons and then you add more

This is not simple stuff! So we’d like your input.

Akseli Lahtinen has put together a survey where you can share your views on how the system should handle various complex situations. You can access it here: https://survey.kde.org/355778.

Responses will be used to guide future development. So if you’d like to help shape that future, make your opinions known here! Feel free to share this survey far and wide; we want as many responses as possible.

Thanks, everyone!

KDE Craft 26.10 was just released, and yes, we just pick whatever month we currently have.

This is one of the biggest releases we ever had, as it prepares the way to proper cross compilation. With a real implementation for target and host: architecture, platform and compiler. If you squint right you might already spot traces of Windows ARM and iOS.

The update is already available for KDE's CD, CI (Windows/Android) will follow in the next days.

Changes (highlights)

General

The refactoring of CraftCompiler for the cross compilation mentioned above introduced a few breaking changes that require adjustments in blueprints.

If you maintain your own blueprints repository you should run https://invent.kde.org/packaging/craft/-/blob/dev/update.ps1 It will not port everything, but it will give you a good base to finalize your changes.

Initial support for MSVC 2026 has been finished and a MSVC 2026 cache is available now.

Note that Craft 26.10 is also the last release to support MSVC 2022!

Blueprints

• Qt 6.12
• Gettext 1.0
• Perl 5.44
• Python 3.12.13

About KDE Craft

KDE Craft is an open source meta-build system and package manager. It manages dependencies and builds libraries and applications from source on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD and Android.

Learn more on https://community.kde.org/Craft or join the Matrix room #kde-craft:kde.org

I’ll take a short break, so no web review next week. Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-43. Enjoy it as it’ll be the last one of October!

The Slow Formation of Durable Software

Tags: tech, foss, history

Interesting account of Zotero history. Another venerable software which passed a nice milestone.

https://newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-slow-formation-of-durable-software/

Men in tech #YesAllMen

Tags: tech, diversity, equality, work, bias

An important talk. I wish we’d do better as an industry… and as a society. It’s just not acceptable to witness this kind of issues and do nothing about them.

https://media.ccc.de/v/emf2026-240-1-men-in-tech-yesallmen

Apertus 1.5

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, apertus, gpt, research, foss

Very exciting release. It’s nice to see that with care it’s possible to build a LLM which is also a common. The production of such models is fully documented and auditable. As far as I can tell the result is free of the usual negative externalities that the industrial complex tends to ignore.

Of course I advise reading the full technical report. It’s so refreshing to see where they have good solutions or where they struggle. I can’t suffer the “marketing disguised as research” coming from the big companies anymore.

Now looking forward to their 2.0 release, the roadmap is interesting.

https://www.apertus-ai.org/articles/2026-07-apertus-1-5/

There isn’t an easy exploit for this PHP vulnerability

Tags: tech, security, php

It’s clearly one of the two (4?) security topics of the week. Maybe there’s been some overreaction though? Yes, it needed to be patched. Yes, the disclosure could have been handled better. But no… there’s no working exploit in the wild.

https://eliastaylor.com/noexploit/

Hit by a Bus? How to Keep Your Family’s Digital Life Running

Tags: tech, self-hosting, life

A good list of the things to keep in mind and prepare in case everything goes wrong and someone else need to take over the services you self host.

https://www.jamesleighton.com/2026/10/how-to-keep-the-familys-digital-life-running/

Microsoft Teams is a red flag

Tags: tech, microsoft, messaging, vendor-lockin

This is unfortunately a common default choice indeed. I wish it wasn’t though. People using it are locking themselves in a sub par offer for a financially driven convenience… If they’d account for the impacts they’d realise it costs them way more than they think.

https://blog.raed.dev/posts/microsoft-teams-red-flag/

VC isn’t VC anymore — understanding the rise of Cancer Capital

Tags: tech, business, politics

An important piece in my opinion. Obviously with my political leaning it all feels to me like it was just a question of time before we got there. Still it’s valuable to read this kind of insider views.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/09/02/cancer-capital/?ref=DenseDiscovery-411

Why are we even doing all this?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mathematics, business, ethics, life

This has a satirical undertone but it has a very good point. Those companies are just sucking the life out of very human activities.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/10/15/why-are-we-even-doing-all-this/

Study explores how AI use affects performance on math and reasoning tasks

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, cognition, research

Go read the full paper of course, but in case you won’t this is a quick summary which kind of does the job. There are obvious limitations to the study: most notably time as it’s only a few minutes use each time. And yet that raises clear questions on longer term use… There is clear recovery after a few minutes but does it still exist after weeks or months of prolonged use? How fast would it be? Clearly we don’t know yet.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2026/10/09/using-ai-for-just-10-minutes-erodes-your-ability-to-persist-at-hard-things/

I forced a speech model onto the GPU for months. The CPU was faster.

Tags: tech, cpu, gpu, hardware, performance, speech

In a way it’s a friendly reminder that for some workloads, when latency matters, the GPU might be wrong for the job.

https://altunenes.github.io/posts/reuse/

Composite objects and C++26 the std::polymorphic type

Tags: tech, c++

Another interesting type introduced C++26. This should make it easier to deal with owning polymorphic types at runtime.

https://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2026/10/18/composite-objects-and-cpp26-the-stdpolymorphic-type/

The Future of CSS ✨

Tags: tech, web, css

Nice stuff might be coming if they make it into Interop 2027. I’m not excited about all of them but there are a few I’d like to see supported earlier rather than later.

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interop-2027/

The Decoherence Trap

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, design, architecture, complexity, maintenance

Interesting essay even though I don’t like the whole part about singularity. I found this section was a distraction to the more interesting arguments. Indeed, I liked a lot the concept of decoherence and its ties to complexity.

The essay also makes a good job of showing how it’s something we have to deal with and likely the worst kind of technical debt. I also shows how it impacts productivity obviously. It’s all valuable and things I encounter on a regular basis.

And of course, since everything has to talk about LLM these days, it builds an interesting case on how and why using those tools especially with harnesses to pump out more code is actually increasing decoherence. Exactly what we don’t want.

https://maevyn.codes/decoherence

How Strategy Stopped Intimidating Me

Tags: tech, strategy, decision-making

It doesn’t have to be something mysterious indeed. It’s a skill one can learn.

https://ryangreenhall1.substack.com/p/how-strategy-stopped-intimidating

The British Etiquette Rules Nobody Will Ever Actually Tell You You’re Breaking

Tags: english, culture

It’s just impolite to point your flaws. Of course it makes etiquette harder to learn as you don’t notice. This is a small list of things to pay attention to. Liked the writing as well.

https://englishmanmike.substack.com/p/the-british-etiquette-rules-nobody

Bye for now!

and Happy Birthday KDE 💙

It is a pleasure to announce the new Kraft version 2.1.0 today.

Kraft is an free software app for effective invoicing and business document management on Linux desktops. It is specifically targetted to small business needs and ensures data privacy.

The new version is the second release of the Kraft 2 generation.

It continues to deliver on the goals we set at beginning of the year with Kraft 2: More formally correct documents to better match legal requirements. Moreover the file based storage backend for simplicity and privacy aware cloud support was continued. With that Kraft will be the perfect solutions for work teams.

This release brings a lot of detail improvements for users, such as:

• With a special markout of certain document types as invoice-type lets Kraft provide invoice-specific features such as the benefit period or XRechnung generation that other doc types like offers do not need
• Draft documents can be deleted now which was not possible before
• The creation of custom formatted document templates for PDF generation of the docs is way easier now: Kraft can display a list of all variables that can be referenced in the template, along with their meaning and an example value based on the selected document

Also, XRechnung support for electronic invoicing on Linux is continously improved.

Under the hood, a lot of bug fixes and improvements make Kraft even better, mainly by saving more data as files in the filesystem to enable cloud sync. The UI got enhanced by a bunch of efficiency raising improvements. That supports all users who have better ideas of spending their days than fiddling on the computer to get an invoice out even better.

This release comes with codename Happy Birthday KDE 💙!

That means that we want to congratulate KDE which turned 30 this year! Many thanks to the great KDE community and what it did to the open source eco system. Kraft also would not exist without KDE and the lovely community.

As usual, Kraft is very open for contributions via Github. Thanks to all the contributors.

A patch-set that removes more code than it adds is always much appreciated. Code that doesn’t exist cannot have bugs after all! KWin, our fantastic Wayland compositor and window manager, like many others, has an Alt+Tab switcher (“tabbox”) for quickly cycling between windows. Of course having been created by KDE, there’s plenty of options for how it should behave and what it should look like.

A while ago I noticed that the preview feature in System Settings stopped working for full-screen effects like “Flip Switch” (a Windows Vista-like pseudo-3D diagonal list of windows) and “Cover Switch“ (like the good old iTunes Cover Flow). The reason was that they set their Window type to “Popup” which normally makes sense but when loaded into the previewer helper program it had no parent window, so it refused to open. The previews also became increasingly outdated as they included various screenshots of applications.

What if we just made KWin do the preview?

This way it would also use the user’s current desktop wallpaper and whatever open windows there are, removing the need for a fake list and the infrastructure around it. Since you can actually configure a screen edge to trigger the window switcher, there clearly was already a way to bring it up programmatically without the user pressing Alt+Tab. All we needed to add was an interface for the settings module to show the switcher temporarily with the theme to be previewed.

As a result, I was able to remove around 700 lines of code from KWin’s vast code base as well as a Megabyte worth of screenshots. They will of course live on in git’s history but no longer have to be installed to the user’s hard drive.

Whether you are reviewing Qt Quick or Qt Widget code with Qt’s agentic skills, you can reduce your token consumption significantly by upgrading to the latest versions while getting the same review quality.

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.8.1.

Plasma 6.8 was released in October 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds a week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include: