For many years now, I and others have been working on getting plasmashell’s open bug reports as accurate and actionable as possible.

We’ve made tremendous progress, driving down the number of unconfirmed bug reports to its lowest levels in over a decade, and mostly keeping it there:

Right now we’re at a point where we’re down to about 160 unconfirmed reports, and we need your help to get that down as close to 0 as possible.

Why do we need your help?

Because most of the remaining unconfirmed bugs are really hard to reproduce and confirm. They can only be understood or reproduced by someone with specialized hardware, uncommon software, specialized configurations, specific VPN setups, domain-specific knowledge, and so on. Others were reported in a state where the author doesn’t know how to reproduce the issue and none of us has been able to, either.

The addition of your valuable eyeballs and brains can help figure out what the heck is going on in these reports!

How to help

Go to https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&list_id=3586535&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cdupecount%20DESC%2Cshort_desc%2Cproduct%2Clongdescs.count%20DESC%2Cbug_id%20DESC&product=plasmashell&query_format=advanced, and…

• Figure out the pattern for issues that are reported to happen “randomly” or “sometimes”.
• If you have the hardware, configuration, or specialized software necessary to try to reproduce an issue described as specific to it, try.
• If you’re familiar with upstream software like the Qt, PipeWire, Bluez, graphics drivers or the Linux kernel, help identify bug reports whose issue is upstream of KDE.

What it takes

1. Use the latest released version of Plasma. that’s 6.7.4 as of the time of writing. A distro that uses git master versions of things is even better.
2. Use a distro that ships KDE software as “vanilla” as possible, with a minimum of distro-specific customizations. Either as your daily driver, or in a VM. Arch Linux and KDE Linux are good options here, and Fedora KDE is okay too. Highly opinionated distros can still work, but are not as ideal for bug triage.
3. Read through and understand https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging.
4. Be nice. You’ll be a part of KDE’s public face!

And that’s it! Bug triaging help is really appreciated here.

I would absolutely love it if we could get the number of UNCONFIRMED plasmashell bugs down to 0, and then keep them that way by pouncing on every single new one as it comes in.

You can help make that possible! Thanks, everyone.

Hello everyone!

My Google Summer of Code project Font Subsetting in Poppler has technically been completed with this MR getting merged.

Poppler now supports Font Subsetting and a new release is going to be out soon. Although the work has been rigorously tested for regressions on a lot of PDF files, I am still quite nervous :D

Here's a demo video I made for font subsetting:

Experience

Overall, GSoC was a very enriching experience. I learnt many things I didn't know before such as PDF internals, some C++ and CMake features and sharpened my debugging skills using GDB.
But it was also a very tough experience, there were a lot of times when I thought I was going to fail.

I'll also be attending Akademy in Graz so I hope to meet and learn from a lot of contributors from there!

Gratitude

I am grateful to god for providing me with such an opportunity.

I would like to thank my mentor Albert Astals Cid for mentoring me throughout GSoC.
Huge thanks to the people from the Poppler community, Sune Vuorela, Lucas Baudin and everyone for helping me with my technical doubts in the Matrix IRC.
Thanks to the KDE mentorship team and the board members for managing the GSoC program!

One known significant issue when going from X11 to Wayland was our KMouseTool being X11 only.

KMouseTool implements a Dwell Clicker that is an assistive technology designed for individuals who find traditional mouse clicking difficult, painful, or impossible due to conditions like paralysis, mobility issues, or repetitive strain injury (RSI). It allows users to perform left-clicks, right-clicks, double-clicks, and dragging entirely without pressing physical buttons by simply pausing the cursor on the screen for a specified duration.

In KDE Plasma 6.8 we will ship the just merged brand new Dwell Clicker implementation that works also on Wayland.

Here is how it looks in action:

Have feedback or questions? Head over to the KDE Discuss forum to share your thoughts with the team.

The Way Developers Use AI Has Changed

When Qt AI Assistant was introduced, the state of the art in AI-powered software development was the single-turn prompt: select a block of code, ask for a test case, an explanation, or some boilerplate QML, and review the result.

Welcome to this edition of This Month in KDE Linux, dedicated to KDE’s next-generation operating system.

Here’s how KDE Linux evolved in August:

Data safety

A major data safety project reached a state of usability!

First, Hadi Chokr transformed users’ home folders into Btrfs sub-volumes and turned on automatic Btrfs snapshots for all user files.

Then, Bharadwaj Raju integrated the new kio-snapshot system he’s been working on and added support in Dolphin.

Now you can easily view and roll back to older versions of your files, even without an off-device backup:

This doesn’t replace a backup, of course! But it does amount to a sort of homedir-level undo feature that can keep your data safe from accidental deletions, or other destructive changes that are less catastrophic than a disk failure or having the device lost or stolen. And these snapshots will be useful to use as backup sources, so you’re not trying to back up a moving target.

Another few layers in the data safety onion, shall we say!

CJKV input support by default

Nate Graham finished the project to make Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese text input work out of the box. Now everything needed to type in these languages is pre-installed, and all you have to do is turn it on.

QA & testing

Thomas Duckworth and Bhushan Shah continued to develop, refine, and maintain KDE Linux’s automatic QA system, which continued to pay dividends this month. The system caught multiple complex integration issues introduced accidentally in commits made to KDE software — all of which are now fixed, so users of other operating systems will never have to experience them.

Security

Yago Raña Gayoso removed an unnecessary override that gave everyone in the wheel group default access to the Docker daemon’s socket.

Nate Graham fixed an oversight that let blacklisted kernel modules into the unified kernel images.

Bugs fixed

Harald Sitter fixed an issue that could make updates fail right after the update was published, or when run on machines with weak CPUs or slow network connections.

Hadi Chokr fixed an issue with user-visible version numbers of KDE Linux builds not including the intended level of precision.

Documentation

Nate Graham added quick links to KDE Linux’s official documentation right there in the launcher menu’s “Help” section.

Nate Graham also documented how to free up disk space, added a dedicated “Help & Support” page to the website, and added a link to the project’s news feed.

Philip Grant refined and documented a way to integrate KeePassXC with the Flatpak packaging of Firefox and Chromium (and their derivative browsers).

Julius Künzel fixed the styling of the standard Hugo alert bubbles, and Nate Graham ported the docs to use them.

Grab bag

Paul Brown added a neat feature to the set-up-systemd-extension tool that lets you create new extensions at different locations and with different names.

Hadi made the installer report its progress in a more granular way, so there’s less waiting around and wondering if the installation process got stuck.

Bhushan Shah removed the “UEFI shell” entry from the bootloader menu, since it was useless for practically everyone, and now the menu is less cluttered.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and is now 85% of the way there.

There’s lots to do! If you’re a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

• User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
• Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
• Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
• Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
• OS development: help build KDE Linux! There’s plenty to do.

We are happy to announce the summer release of Kdenlive 26.08. Continuing the efforts from the last version, the core team has been focusing mostly on stability - fixing bugs and crashes while also doing lot's under the hood improvements.

This release comes with 11 crash fixes as well as improvements to the undo/redo stack for compositions and sequence creation. Work has also been done to modernize the codebase in the Qml loader for Clips and Compositions.

The majority of the new, nifty and shiny additions and enhancements in this release were made by new contributors! This seems to have become a tradition in 2026, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

Highlights

Timeline

Automatic Track Creation

Added functionality to automatically create audio tracks when adding a clip to the timeline in case there are not enough. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Reorder Tracks

Added a long awaited ability to reorder tracks. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Markers At Gaps

Added option to add markers at gaps between timeline clips. Implemented by Yash Bavadiya.

Playhead Snapping When Dragging

ALT + drag the time cursor (playhead) in the timeline ruler, it now snaps to nearby snap points like clip edges, guides, markers, and zone in/out. Implemented by Yash Bavadiya.

Copy Selection To New Sequence

It works similarly to "Create sequence from selection" except that it does not remove the clips from the original sequence and replace them with the new sequence clip. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Clip Color Configuration

Added an option to configure colors for video, audio, title, image, and slideshow clip types.

Playhead/Mouse Zoom

Added a button in the Status Bar to toggle between zooming to the mouse cursor position or the playhead position. Implemented by the mrfantastic.

Multi-Clip Speed Changes

Added the ability to change the playback speed of multiple clips at once either by directly Ctrl + dragging in the timeline or by using the Clip Speed tool. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Title Editor

Snapping

Added snapping in the Title Editor. Implemented by chocolateimage.

Rounded Corners

Rectangles now can have rounded corners. Also notice the draggable spinbox ability to change the radius. Implemented by chocolateimage.

Copy/Paste

Added the ability to copy and paste elements in the Titler. Implemented by chocolateimage.

Automatic Clip Replacement

Added option to automatically replace a title clip in the timeline with the new title clip being edited. Implemented by Eduardo Guedes.

Miscellaneous

Additive Soloing

Added the ability to do additive soloing in the audio mixer by shift clicking. Implemented by Patrick Williamson.

Adjustable Rotation Anchor

Added the ability to set the rotation anchor in the Transform effect. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.

Other Noteworthy Changes

• Updated effects with text (GPS Text, Dynamic Text, Timer) to allow for more font properties. Implemented by Bernd Jordan.
• Rectangular alpha mask is now animatable. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.
• Added ability to use math expressions in effects values. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.
• Drawbox and Delogo effects use the newly implemented feature to draw a rectangle directly on monitor. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.
• Added the frei0r Color Enhance effect. Implemented by Bernd Jordan.
• Added option to add rendered video to project bin in the Render Widget. Implemented by Jaimukund Bhan.
• Multi-cam Editing: Added functionality to insert clips to timeline using the clip's timecode from their metadata (if they contain it). Implemented by Jaimukund Bhan.
• Ability to open video, audio, image files from file managers or CLI environments with Kdenlive. Implemented by Yash Bavadiya.
• Added webp support for image sequences. Implemented by Farid Abdelnour.

Give back to Kdenlive

Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community. Donate now!

Need help ?

As usual, you will find very useful tips in our documentation website. You can also get help and exchange your ideas in our Kdenlive users Matrix chat room.

Get involved

Kdenlive relies on its community, your help is always welcome. You can contribute by :

• Helping to identify and triage bugs
• Contribute to translating Kdenlive in your language
• Promote Kdenlive in your local community

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

We're excited to announce the release of version 1.16.0 of the Qt Extension for Visual Studio Code! This release brings:

• QML Profiler and Trace Viewer to profile your QML applications directly from VS Code
• A new Welcome page with browsers for Qt examples and Qt Academy courses
• Better PySide support with QML Live Preview and uv virtual environments

For once, something on this blog that isn’t C++.

Harmonicon is a rhythm game for blues harmonica. Notes scroll toward a hit line and you play on an actual harmonica, into your microphone, and the game listens.

The idea

The harmonica is cheap, fits in a pocket, and it hides everything: the reeds are inside, your tongue and throat do most of the work, and nothing about the instrument tells you whether the note that just came out is the note you meant. You can practise a bend wrong for a month quite happily.

Let the instrument be the input. Harmonicon captures the microphone, runs pitch detection on it in real time, and scores what you actually played against the chart. Every note you score is a note you genuinely hit.

Playing a song

The default view is one lane per hole: ten for a diatonic, twelve for a chromatic, taken from whatever the chart was written for. Blue notes are blows, orange are draws, and the number on each is the hole you need. Above the lanes there’s the phrase in standard notation and as harmonica tab, because those are the two ways harmonica players actually read music, and the panel on the right tells you which harp to pick up and which position you’re playing in.

There’s also a 3D view, which is the same game rendered around a harmonica model that moves with the beat.

Getting away from charts

Charts are good for learning a song and bad for learning to play. The Jam Session mode drops the scoring entirely and gives you a rolling 12-bar blues to improvise over.

The useful part is the hole map on the right. As the backing moves through the bars, each hole recolours: gold if it’s a chord tone of the bar sounding right now, green if it’s elsewhere in the blues scale, dim if it’s going to sound wrong. You follow the colour instead of trying to recall theory at tempo, and the theory arrives later, on its own.

Lessons

There’s a curriculum underneath all of this, grouped into units and gated by prerequisites — from getting one clean single note out of the thing, through bends and articulation, up to improvising over a blues. Some lessons are scored drills. A few aren’t scoreable at all: tongue blocking sounds identical to puckering from the microphone’s point of view, so that one is instruction you mark as done and the game trusts you.

Under the hood

Rust, with Bevy for the engine and cpal for audio capture. The interesting problem is the pitch detection, which is why there are five algorithms to chose from: FFT, YIN, pYIN, MPM and NMF.

Status

There’s a lot in it — a bending trainer, an in-game song editor with MIDI import, adaptive difficulty, A–B looping, latency calibration, a spectrogram — but “early/experimental” is an honest label rather than modesty.

It’s MIT licensed and the code is at github.com/tcanabrava/harmonicon. If you own a harmonica and a microphone, that’s the entire hardware requirement.