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Bug triaging help needed

Nate Graham — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:30:40 +0000

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:

In case you’re worried about the “confirmed” count rising, it includes almost 800 feature requests. The actual number of known and confirmed bugs is about 1,100, and is not consistently rising. Also, the big spike was from a mass move of bug reports into plasmashell to make it easier to centrally track shell bugs over time.

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

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.
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.
Read through and understand https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging.
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.

Week 12 + Week 13: Everything merged, Final GSoC blog

Ojas Maheshwari — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 20:15:05 +0000

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!

SPDX Cryptographic Algorithm List: summer 2026 update

Agustín Benito Bethencourt — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 11:34:25 +0000

This summer the SPDX Cryptography Group agreed on how to describe algorithm parameters, tightened its contribution and release processes, and opened the discussion on post-quantum cryptography. Where this report comes from This is an update of the work we do at the SPDX Cryptography Group. SPDX stands for Software Package Data Exchange. Our group is … Continue reading

Wayland pain points – Dwell Clicker

Sebastian Sauer — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:31:36 +0000

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.

Qt AI Assistant Retires As We Invest in Agentic Development Tools

Qt Dev Loop — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:55:00 +0000

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.

This Month in KDE Linux: August 2026

Nate Graham — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:15:01 +0000

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.

Kdenlive 26.08.0 released

Kdenlive — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:05:00 +0000

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.

Qt Extension 1.16.0 for VS Code Released

Qt Dev Loop — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:24:29 +0000

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

Harmonicon: a rhythm game you play on a real harmonica

Tomaz Canabrava — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

KDE Connect redesign is ready for testing

tintotint — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

And I think it’s pretty nice

This Week in Plasma: QtWidgets Apps Join the Union

Nate Graham — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 21:14:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw the first stirrings of support for QtWidgets-based apps in KDE’s new Union theming system, which is a very exciting milestone.

But that’s not all! This week is also packed with UI improvements, performance improvements, bug fixes, and a few more features, too.

Plasma 6.8 is rapidly shaping up, and all this work reflects it. Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

The new Union theming system has gained initial support for styling QtWidgets apps! (Akseli Lahtinen, union MR #270)

I’m sure you can see numerous visual glitches in the screenshot above. This is a first draft with many known visual bugs, and we’ll work on getting those smashed as quickly as possible. But still, very exciting! The Union theming system is coming together nicely. Read more about it on Akseli’s blog.

Plasma’s built-in RDP server now supports adjusting its quality level to the network’s available bandwidth to keep the frame rate as consistent as possible. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #238)

Plasma’s Strongswan VPN support now allows the use of EAP-TTLS authentication. (Wyllian Bezerra da Silva, plasma-nm MR #636)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.5

Discover now only offers to open and install .deb packages on operating systems natively supporting that package format. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, plasma-desktop MR #3957)

Plasma 6.8

When you copy a password or other piece of text that the app says is a secret, the clipboard history UI now makes this clear rather than hiding it and letting you wonder why nothing appeared there. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #508326)

The indicator that a screen recording is in progress now only appears if it actually is in progress, which handles the case of apps that open screen recording sessions early, but start the recording later. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #597)

KWin’s Overview effect is now a little bit easier to open with a four-finger swipe touchpad gesture. (Remy Farley, kwin MR #9486)

All of the text for calendar events in the Digital Clock widget is now selectable. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #433668)

System Settings’ Drawing Tablet page now has a less awkward design for the dialog window to choose what the buttons on your tablet’s pen do. (Joshua Goins, KDE Bugzilla #524720)

New

Old

The Bluetooth widget now shows its “Configure” button in the same place that all other widgets do, for better functional consistency. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #516134)

Connecting to an enterprise Wi-Fi network for the first time now takes you immediately to the place where you can enter your credentials, instead of making you navigate there manually. (Ramil Nurmanov, plasma-nm MR #635)

Clicking a System Tray icon that opens a widget can no longer make that icon immediately disappear; now, it will always stay visible until the widget’s popup closes, giving you the opportunity to click on it a second time to close the popup. (समीर सिंह Sameer Singh, KDE Bugzilla #521115)

Using the clipboard’s “Keep the selection and clipboard the same” setting no longer unnecessarily disables other settings. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #492840)

If your system is in such a poor state that there are many crashes, your System Tray no longer fills up with dozens of little sad face icons; now only one appears, and clicking on it will show the full list in its own window. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #420443)

Frameworks 6.30

In-window dialogs in Kirigami-based apps are now better highlighted against the rest of the window content when using a dark theme. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #447965)

System Monitor graphs now request “tabular numerals” for the legends when using a font that supports them, improving alignment. (Christoph Wolk, kquickcharts MR #109)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a security issue that made the screen locker fail to lock if you manually configured it to turn off the screen after the “don’t require password to unlock” period. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #523504)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed a pretty bad bug that made Discover get stuck while checking for updates when its Snap backend was present, but there were no upgradeable Snap apps. (Dustin Trumps, KDE Bugzilla #524077)

Fixed a case where non-KDE apps running in Plasma could sometimes crash when you closed a dialog. (Balló György, KDE Bugzilla #523039)

Fixed a recent regression that impaired pointer movement in VMs using non-accelerated graphics drivers. (Base Devel, KDE Bugzilla #524280)

Using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew no longer prevents force-quitting processes or apps in System Monitor. (Jakob Petsovits, KDE Bugzilla #522233)

Fixed a weird little bug that made the panel’s tooltip in edit mode become malformed after right-clicking on the panel. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #488578)

If your system is in a super-duper messed-up state, it can at least no longer cause the DrKonqi crash handler to crash in a loop, feeding itself with crashes that exhaust the system’s memory. (Harald Sitter and Alexander Berg, KDE Bugzilla #524048)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed the second-most-common crash in Plasma, which could happen while logging out. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6973)

On System Settings’ Plasma Search page, the “Defaults” button and non-default settings highlighting now work as expected. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3973)

With multiple Application Launcher (Kickoff) Widgets, all of them are now capable of returning search results for not-yet-installed apps, not just the first one. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #511220)

A logout sound no longer delays the logout process more than it needs to. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #491745)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7.5

Improved the way HDR content looks when using an ICC profile. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #524038)

Plasma 6.8

Improved the performance and power efficiency of many kinds of full-screen content when using an Intel or NVIDIA GPU with HDR, ICC profiles, and/or the Night Light effect. (Naveen Kumar, kwin MR #9640)

KWin now supports HDR content using the HLG transfer function. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #508817)

Reduced screen-casting latency throughout Plasma and KWin (including for the built-in RDP server!) by one frame. (David Edmundson, kpipewire MR #274)

Reduced the resource usage required to show thumbnails in notifications and the Activities sidebar. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6966 and plasma-desktop MR #3967)

Reduced the resource usage required for the Trash widget. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-desktop MR #3965)

Screenshots made with Spectacle that don’t have any transparency no longer include an alpha channel, slightly reducing file sizes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #9798)

Disabling a System Tray widget now frees up its memory immediately, rather than only after Plasma or the system is restarted. (Tomáš Hnyk, plasma-workspace MR #6983)

The showConfigurationInterface() function now works in Plasma scripting. (Remilia S., plasma-workspace MR #6977)

If you’ve broken, misconfigured, or removed all of Plasma’s wallpaper plugins, Plasma will now launch without them and just show a plain background, instead of failing to launch at all. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #524875)

Frameworks 6.30

KWallet no longer spams your log with errors in certain non-default configurations. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #524500)

KDE Gear 26.12.0

System Settings’ Proxy page has been rewritten in QML, which lets it work on Plasma Mobile. The design is nearly identical, so you shouldn’t notice any obvious changes to it. (Tobias Fella, kio-extras MR #536)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

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

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

Initial Release of Union QtWidgets

Akseli Lahtinen (Aks) — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 18:34:45 +0000

It has begun.

After couple months of work, I have now finally managed to cobble together the QtWidgets side of Union.

This means that your QtWidgets apps, such as Dolphin, KMail, Kate etc. can now use the Union CSS files as the source of their styling.

However, temper your expectations, as this is the first initial release!

Do note that there are visual bugs and oddities! I'm still working on things!

So yes, as you can see, some things look off. Not Breeze at all! Some things are just different, some other things have wrong colors.

These are all fixable and I will do my best to get as many things as possible fixed for the Plasma 6.8 release.

But some other oddities are kind of expected: This is the first time ever Breeze QtWidgets and QtQuick style have same shared source-of-truth as an easily editable file! (Excluding colorschemes.) So some of these designs are made with QtQuick in mind, so they can look a bit off in QtWidgets.

I'll go through here what I did and what still needs to be done, but this was a huge undertaking, so I'm having a small celebration for the very first release of this. :)

Hold on, can I try it!?

Yes! It should be released in Plasma 6.8, unless someone tells me no. As of writing this, nobody has said no.

You can make your own CSS files and see them affect QtWidgets apps too. Just expect some breakage and report all the bugs!

Go crazy with the themes. Try everything. Bring back whimsy to computers. Tell us about the theming experience in general.

Have fun. Your computer should be just as cool as you are.

The rest of this blogpost is more a technical rant and ramble as I am venting all the exhaustion over this thing, lol.

QStyle is difficult

QStyle themes, which are the styles that modify the look of QtWidgets applications, are not easy to work on. Most themes I've seen take an existing one, such as Fusion or Breeze and make their changes on top of those.

But for Union, we had to start from scratch. I took the very basic base of QStyle, which is called QCommonStyle (kind of a fallback theme), and began building on top of that.

Then, there was multiple parts:

Figure out a way for the QStyle to paint things using CSS
Build a hierarchy of the style by reading the CSS data and applying it to QStyle world
Create a completely new set of element files we use
- The QStyle themes are very unwieldy and hard to work on otherwise
Go through every single element and ensure they read all data from the CSS correctly
- And ensure the style stays backwards compatible!
- This is still ongoing process, most bugs lurk here. :P
Figure out how to use Union layouting system within QStyle elements
- This is also buggy, as QStyle is more "rigid" with layouting
- Applications expect very specific layouting from QStyles over the years it has existed
- So any application that deviates from those expectations will look broken
Caching so that the style is performant
- Here Arjen helped me a lot, thank you!
And a lot of other stuff I have already forgotten..

Thankfully redstrate had already made the painting part for the very simplified proxystyle (which took Breeze and modified it a bit), so I did not have to modify that too much. I mostly had to poke at it to make it work with my hierarchy system. So thanks! <3

It's hard to put it into words how much work there was involving the actual QStyle itself and creating a sort of "framework within a framework" so that the Union rules would translate better for the QStyle rules.

For example, when a widget, such as a PushButton, wants to be styled, it informs the QStyle about it with something called QStyleOptionButton. This class holds bunch of information about the button, and the style can use that information to decorate it better. But of course, the styleoption does not necessarily need to exist. If there is no styleoption, the style can use the QWidget itself for style information. But even that can be empty! And at that point, you do not know how to style something, since you do not even know what it is.

What made matters even worse was that the documentation just Does Not Exist.

Sure, there is the QStyle documentation, but it is more about "what" and not "why" or "how." I could have used somekind of tutorial for how to make a QStyle from scratch, but I could not really find anything, except super old information from Qt4 times. So very very often I resorted to just reading the raw source code itself, which is also not very easy to read. There is a lot of variables that are just named pw or w. So even the codebase is very undocumented..!

Most of the work had to be done with trial and error! "What happens if I change this value?" "What if I use debugger to follow this variable, where will it lead?" I also used Breeze as my information bank a lot, as it had gone through it all before. That was very helpful.

But the lack of documentation and old codebase nobody seems to really touch anymore, much less document, was the thing that made this all take so long time.

Not to forget the completely misleading names in the API. "PM_MenuPanelWidth" is not the width of the panel, but actually "Border width (applied on all sides) for a QMenu."

The total work was 9000 lines of code. Yes. And all of it is required. Lot's of boilerplate, as QStyle seems to love boilerplate. Pretty much all of it is artisanal, handwritten slop by yours truly.

I had to painstakingly go through all the elements we're drawing and sizes we're calculating, then turning it into an Element that we can easily modify without modifying the whole style.

If you have managed to make a working QStyle theme completely from scratch, going through every little detail, I salute you. This is some of the toughest stuff I've ever worked on.

So in summary: I had to backwards engineer a lot of stuff to figure out what order we even draw some things, or what size affects what in the actual application. Then make it work with Union core and CSS.

DOCUMENT YOUR API PLEASE I BEG YOU

Next steps

Next up is testing and bugfixing.

There's already a lot of bugs being found here: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/union/-/work_items/205 And more will be found. There will be weird edgecases where application expects everything to work like in Fusion style, as it's the default Qt style, but Union does not handle that situation yet well.

So here's what I need from you, dear reader: See what breaks. Document it. Make a bugreport. Let's find these weird things and figure them out, so that the QtWidgets side can finally be themed without so much pain.

Of course, there's also the design side: Like I mentioned earlier, the Breeze CSS we have now is very QtQuick oriented, so QtWidgets applications can look and feel odd.

Something to keep in mind though is that QtQuick and QtWidgets applications will likely never look the exact same, due to the way how they work and are drawn. But we can try to make the QtWidgets style work reliably first and then try to make it look as close to QtQuick side as possible.

My todo list is pretty much following:

Fix as many bugs as I can before 6.8 release
Figure out a layouting system for the QStyle that is robust
- Even if it can't do all the tricks QtQuick can
Make sure the QStyle is backwards compatible with as many applications as possible

So, more work. A lot of work.

But at least we can now properly start that work, which is what this first release is about. Getting the tedium out of the way, so the interesting parts can begin.

And boy how much tedium that was. I would never do it again, but honestly.. It was fun at times. Super interesting to figure out. Like a very tough puzzle game. I'm happy with what I've achieved here, even if it's not perfect yet. And I hope all this work is useful for you too, dear users. I really want to see the crazy things you all will come up with.

Thanks for reading!

ps. Again sorry if this reads all over the place, I just needed to get it out of my system. I don't like writing drafts much, so I just write a braindump and go.

Tickets in Transitous

Jonah Brüchert — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:35:10 +0000

As you might already know, Transitous is a project that runs a public transport routing service that aims to work wold-wide. To make Transitous results more useful, there needs to be a simple way to book the individual sections of a multi-modal route. It is important to mention that Transitous can not legally sell tickets itself, and there are no plans to change that, so booking in this case means directing users to a ticket shop that can sell tickets for the route.

Ticketing Extension

Transitous is primarily based around the GTFS format for its transport schedules, although NeTEx is increasingly being used as well. The first step naturally was to implement reading ticketing information from the schedule files. Although ticketing is not a core part of GTFS, there is the Google Transit ticketing extension.

Its most important feature is specifying booking urls and a way to pass the stop ids, trip ids and times to the ticket shops. The extension also allows to define ids for stops and trips that the ticket shop can understand. This is important because often the ticket shop software is different from the piece of software that writes the GTFS files. These don’t necessarily have to agree on the identifier they use.

If each trip had it’s own booking deeplink, the size of the schedule would increase massively, as well as the size of the data we’d need to store on the Transitous servers. To solve this, the ticketing extension only stores the base url, and assembles the parameters for each deep link only if needed.

However, this requires a separate shop-specific server side step to convert the standardized parameters to something that the ticket shop understands.

My work

Transitous is mostly just an instance of the MOTIS routing engine, so much of the work happened there.

This work has partially been funded by NLnet through the NGI0 Commons Fund with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet programme.

Unfortunately that did not magically give us booking links everywhere. The ticketing extension does not (yet) play such a big role in the open-data / open-source GTFS ecosystem. However since Google Maps supports it, many feeds made for it already contain ticketing_deeplinks.txt. Maybe you can get your local transit operators to add support for it as well :)

To do my part in improving the situation, I added support for it in some of my own GTFS feeds and the library I use for creating them.

Since the problem of needing to translate the url parameters for the ticket shops comes up in every inofficial feed, I also wrote a generic server for doing the redirecting. Adding support for a new ticket shop there is very easy. Since I already host it, it also removes the burden of needing to run a server side component for each feed one publishes.

You can see the results on Transitous: Route from Nikšić to Podgorica.

It also already works in KDE Itinerary.

Adding Ticketing

Adding ticketing to your own feeds is fortunately quite straightforward in many cases. These examples are based on my gtfs-generator rust crate, but it would be very similar in other language ecosystems.

Assuming there is one shop for all trips in the feed, you only need to add one ticketing link:

generator
.add_ticketing_deep_link(TicketingDeepLink {
ticketing_deep_link_id: "tickets-zpcg".to_string(),
web_url: Some("https://jbb.ghsq.de/ticket-redirect/zpcg/".to_string()),
android_intent_url: Some("https://jbb.ghsq.de/ticket-redirect/zpcg/".to_string()),
ios_universal_link_url: Some("https://jbb.ghsq.de/ticket-redirect/zpcg/".to_string()),
}).unwrap();

If the IDs the ticket shop and the feed use are already the same, you already know the IDs and just need to copy them over:

generator.add_ticketing_identifier(TicketingIdentifier {
ticketing_stop_id: stop.stop_id.to_string(),
stop_id: stop.stop_id.to_string(),
agency_id: "zpcg".to_string(),
})?;

Then all that’s left is editing the agency entry to reference the new ticketing link. For more complicated cases, you can also reference a different ticcketing link per route.

If the IDs don’t match, chances are this is still relatively easy. Often the ticket shops’ autocompletion allows to retrieve a full list of stops, ideally including coordinates as well. Then matching these to your stops is relatively straightforward.

If you import your feed into MOTIS with these changes, you should already get a clickable “Tickets”-button. To make it redirect somewhere useful, the redirect server needs to be tought how the url scheme of the ticket shop works by adding a little function like this:

func redirectZpcg(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, from []string, to []string, date []time.Time, trip []string, departure []time.Time, arrival []time.Time) {
baseUrl, _ := url.Parse("https://www.tickets-zpcg.me/en/rezultati.php")
q := baseUrl.Query()
q.Set("from", from[0])
q.Set("to", to[len(to)-1])
q.Set("date", date[0].Format("2006-01-02"))
baseUrl.RawQuery = q.Encode()
http.Redirect(w, r, baseUrl.String(), http.StatusSeeOther)
}

The parameters are arrays, since in the ticket links allow to buy multiple tickets via one link. This feature might not be possible to support with every ticket shop.

Maybe this motivated you to add support for this in some new corner of the world :)

Din ordkvot denna månad är slut

Frans Englich — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 08:55:33 +0000

Svenska språket uppfinns.

“Hej! Här kommer en uppdatering av våra villkor! Du kan nu använda upp till två tusen ord i månaden med vår gratistjänst, sedan måste du uppgradera till Basic Plan för 129 kr/månaden. Ska du använda svenskan i jobbet kostar det som innan 1299 kr/månaden. Behöver du läsglasögon? Våra enbart godkända leverantörer finner du här. Vi påminner om att pensionärsutgåvan finns inte mer. Vi hörs!”

Wow. Vilken teknologi. Vilken innovation. Vi alla köper.

År 2026, och så har det varit ett tag, så är det så här uttrycksfrihet fungerar på nätet. Vill du skriva till någon som är på Facebook men du är inte? Går inte. Vill du ta del av samhällsaktörers meddelanden och debatt utan annonser och material från den vinstdrivande aktören X? Sorry. Vill du chatta med dina kompisar på SnapChat med en app som är designad på ett helt annat sätt? Det får du inte. Välja leverantör av din feed på TikTok? Nope. Och så vidare.

Grunden i Internet, så som e-post och webbsidor, som byggs upp av specifikationer och organisationer, var designad runt att vara öppen. Du kan välja e-postprogram, webbläsare och vem som helst kan skapa en webbsida. Syftet med dess design var att hålla Internet neutralt, utan så kallade proprietära teknologier och nedlåsning med vinstdrivande intressen. Detta bidrog till stor del till dess succé, och varför det är bra. (Och gammal teknologi, uttrycksfrihet och demokrati har också sina utmaningar.)

De lager och applikationer som vi alla använder i nuläget är långt i från det. Det hela kännetecknas av vad ekonomer kallar marknadssvikt: de sociala medier-apparna tjänar oss konsumenter dåligt.

De samhällsproblem så som psykisk ohälsa och en systemisk sänkning av vår förmåga är ett resultat av hur teknologin och juridiken ser ut. Vi vill digitalt kommunicera och ta del av media, men kan i nuläget inte välja hur eller faktiskt vilket innehåll. Att hålla vinstdrivande aktörer samhällsmässigt ansvariga fungerar inte, men de respekterar marknadens spelregler. Ändra dem.

Så här finns det utrymme för innovation. Dra ihop jurister, samhällsvetare, teknologer och uppfinn de moment i form av teknologi (tänk API:er, referensimplementationer, specifikationer), lämplig juridik och de (supranationella) samarbeten som behövs för att göra den korrektion som är nödvändig. Teknisk separation mellan den app som visar och konton med material? Obligatoriska standarder? En EU-motsvarighet till Finansinspektionen? Här är några utmaningar med det: dåligt betalt, folk fattar inte riktigt poängen, och klurigt.

Kanske det är viktigt nog. Vad är första steg?

@ FOSSY 2026

Jaiden Riordan — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 05:00:00 +0000

Last week, I went to FOSSY 2026 to participate in Camp KDE!

Dolphin 26.08 and KIO, part two: what got faster and smaller

Méven Car — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

This is the second half of what changed in Dolphin 26.08. The first half is what you can see: the features, the behaviour changes, the bugs. This one is what you can measure.

Dolphin does very little file work itself. It asks KIO, so the numbers below are mostly KIO numbers: 6.25 is the version that shipped alongside Dolphin 26.04, 6.29 is the one that ships alongside 26.08, four framework releases and 294 commits apart. The last section is 6.30, the release still to come, since several of its changes are large enough to be worth showing early.

Every figure here was measured on the same machine, with the two versions built the same way and run one after another, round by round. Where a number is not solid I say so rather than rounding it up.

Memory and object lifetimes

The 26.04 post ended by saying the next thing was to point LeakSanitizer at Dolphin. It turned into a lot of fixes, and into a CI job: KIO now runs its tests under LeakSanitizer on every merge request, which is what stops the list below from growing back.

Sebastian Englbrecht was the busiest contributor to Dolphin this cycle by commit count, and most of that work was lifetime and ownership: killing in-flight KIO jobs in destructors, deleting the Konsole part, destroying owned objects before the KIO cache tears down and fixing unowned allocations. He also added a smoke test, eight places-panel unit tests, and a rule forbidding bare QTest::qWait() with the existing waits replaced by signal-based ones, which is the sort of thing that makes the rest of the CI trustworthy. Wendi Gan fixed an occasional use-after-free crash in KConfig::sync() during exit, closing two reports, 516481 and 518433.

My own share was in both projects. In Dolphin: aborting the folder stat job when the Information Panel is destroyed, a use-after-free of the current version-control plugin, a leaked submenu in the folder-icon action and a leak in the trash settings page on exit. In KIO, besides turning the sanitiser on in CI and teaching the tests to wait for what they allocate to be deleted, three fixes are ones a user could have met: the "Move Into New Folder" drop action had done nothing at all since 6.25, because the menu was parented to a plugin destroyed the moment the action fires while the folder creation it starts runs asynchronously; FilePreviewJob armed a repeating timeout timer it never stopped, so with a context menu held open the orphaned timer could fire on a finished job and re-enter emitResult(); and KDirModel dereferenced the node of a directory that had already left the model when an earlier listing completed late.

Performance improvements in KIO between 6.25 and 6.29

The big one is the in-process worker transport. For local files KIO has for some time run the file worker in a thread of the application rather than a separate process. Even in that thread it still talked to the application over a socket, serialising every command and every block of file content through a QLocalSocket pair. In 6.29 that channel is a new ThreadConnectionBackend, an in-memory queue, and kio_file hands over owned byte arrays instead of copying them, which makes in-process reads zero-copy. This is the first half of the improvements described in the copy post from July.

Second, CopyJob no longer re-probes the destination filesystem type for every file. It called KFileSystemType::fileSystemType() per file for the FAT and NTFS checks, and on libmount builds each of those calls parses the entire mount table. Copying N files parsed /proc/self/mountinfo N times. It is determined once now. Each parse is about 57 microseconds on a host with 39 mounts, and it scales with the number of mounts.

Third, and this is the memory one, the directory lister cache got much smaller. A directory that no lister was showing any more went into a cache of ten and stayed there until nine others had displaced it. For a picture folder of 50000 files that is a lot of KFileItem and UDSEntry retained for nothing. The cache now holds three directories, which is what going back a level or two actually needs, and drops anything no lister has asked for in three minutes.

Fourth, UDSEntry got smaller, which saves memory. An entry now keeps its numbers and its strings in two separate vectors, which buys a byte for every field an entry holds. And loading now sizes each vector from what the entry actually holds: both vectors used to be sized from the count of fields alone, a third of it for the strings and two thirds for the numbers. A stat of a local file gives one string, the name, and eight numbers, so the numbers grew past their room while the strings kept more than they needed. That sizing change on its own takes a listing of 200000 local files from 528 bytes an entry to 400, which is 105.6 MB down to 80 MB, 25.6 MB saved. Loading also stopped hunting for a shared value on the fields where values cannot repeat: no two entries of a listing carry the same name, url or local path, so comparing them with the entry before never found anything to share. Reading one entry of a local folder off the wire went from 530 to 488 nanoseconds.

Smaller ones worth naming: KFileItem no longer reads .directory on slow filesystems when working out an icon name (6.28, closing bug 519189), Sebastian Englbrecht fixed QPluginLoader, QLibraryPrivate and thread lifecycle leaks in the worker machinery (6.28).

Nineteen reports were closed by fixes in KIO across those four releases. Most of them are filed against the applications rather than against KIO, since that is where a user meets the problem: Dolphin, Plasma, Konsole, KWin.

Benchmarks

Methodology

I built KIO 6.25.0 and 6.29.0 from their tags, Release on gcc 16.2.1 and Qt 6.11.1, and ran the same harness against each. The arms are interleaved one round at a time, so a CPU frequency or load excursion hits both equally, and the best of N rounds is reported.

Everything ran on one 13th Gen Core i7-1365U with 30 GB of RAM, kernel 7.1.4, on ext4, with the benchmark processes pinned to the same two cores.

Copying

KIO::copy() of N files into an empty directory, timed from job start to the result signal. Source files are created untimed, the destination is cleared untimed. cp -r is there as a raw-tool floor, not as a target.

Copying many small files is more than twice as fast as it was in April. The gain falls off as files get larger, which is what you would expect: the fix is to the per-file overhead, and once each file carries a megabyte of actual I/O the overhead stops being what you are waiting for.

There is still a gap with cp, discussed at length in the July post. KIO is doing more than cp does, but not five times more, and the batching work that closes most of the rest of that gap is still in progress.

Deleting

KIO::del() over a freshly created tree, best of three rounds. rm -rf is the raw-tool floor here, as cp -r is above, and it is handed the same list of paths the job is given rather than the folder that holds them.

Deletion improves less than copying, as expected: a delete carries no file content, so the zero-copy half of the transport work does nothing for it. What is left is the cheaper per-command round trip, 1.23x on the smaller tree and 1.25x on the larger one.

rm -rf is six times quicker than 6.29 on both trees, a wider gap than copying shows against cp. That fits: a copy at least spends real time moving bytes, where a delete is almost nothing but the per-file round trip, so what KIO adds is most of what there is to measure.

How the job is asked matters as much as the count. These runs hand KIO::del() the 5000 files one by one, the way a select-all in a file manager does. Handing it the one folder instead takes about a fifth of that on the same filesystem, because the worker then walks the tree itself instead of taking a command per file. rm given the folder rather than the 5000 paths goes from 69.4 ms to 66.8, which is the difference the filesystem charges for the two shapes. The rest of it is KIO's. That second path is the one the 6.30 section below measures.

Listing

One KCoreDirLister over an existing directory. The cold number is the first listing in a fresh process. The warm number is a later listing of the same directory, which KCoreDirListerCache answers without going to disk. The second chart is the resident growth while the lister is still showing the folder, which is what a file manager displaying that folder actually costs.

Listing is about 9 percent quicker on the 5000-file folder and 15 percent on the 50000-file one, and holds about 14 percent less memory in both cases. The memory part is the UDSEntry work described above. The warm listing is unchanged either way, 2.6 ms against 2.8 ms on the 5000-file folder and 37 ms on the 50000-file one, which is the cache answering rather than the disk.

Memory kept for folders you have left

Of everything measured here, this is what a long-running Dolphin notices most. Walk twelve directories one after another, the way you do going down and back up a tree, and then look at how much memory the process is still holding. Nothing is on screen in either case, so all of it is held for folders nobody is looking at any more.

In 6.25 a directory nothing was showing any more sat in a cache of ten and stayed until nine others displaced it. Browse through a few large folders and you are holding all of them. The cache now keeps three, and drops anything no lister has wanted for three minutes. Repeat listings do not suffer for it, which is what the warm listing above shows: re-opening a folder you just left still finds it. What the eleventh slot bought was going eleven folders back, and every user of a large folder paid for it.

6.30 improvements

None of this has shipped, so treat it as a preview rather than a result. 6.30 has several commits that touch exactly what this post measures, so I built it as a third arm and ran the same harness.

Most of what 6.30 gains comes from one change: handing over what a message carries as it is when the worker runs in the application's own process. kio_file runs in a thread of the application, but used to write its data down with QDataStream the way a process-based worker has to. Except it does not need to. Avoiding that serialisation is where the fewer allocations come from, and the entries cost less memory besides, since one no longer reserves room for fields most files never carry. Nothing changes for a worker in another process, which still has a socket between it and the application.

The other major improvement was a dormant issue. It had been there for years, and benchmarking made it visible: 50000 files listed in 1233 ms while 5000 listed in 36, 10 times the files taking 34 times as long, where listing should be close to linear.

A profile of the large case revealed 42 percent of the whole listing is KFileItem copy construction and destruction, all of it under KCoreDirListerCache::DirItem::insertSortedItems calling QList::reserve once per batch of entries. Except reserve has no relocatable fast path: on the growth path it allocates exactly the size asked for and copy-appends every element already there, even for a type declared Q_RELOCATABLE_TYPE as KFileItem. Since the previous call had sized the buffer exactly, every batch reallocated and copied the whole list. Heaptrack counted 239 such calls for 50000 files, so about six million copy constructions for fifty thousand items.

Deleting the reserve call and letting the list grow geometrically takes that listing from 1233 ms to 531 ms, over 2x quicker. What cost the time was inside those reallocations, copy-constructing every KFileItem already in the list, and a KFileItem copy is a refcount bump that allocates nothing at all. So none of it showed up in an allocation count, which is why it took a cycles profile to find.

Deleting a folder gained from af3d9e0e7, which removes a tree with the system's own calls instead of walking it, and how much depends on the shape of the tree. openat and unlinkat work from a descriptor for the directory an entry was read from, so they stop resolving a whole path for every entry, and the deeper the tree the more that is worth. Fifteen thousand files on tmpfs, deleted as one folder, with rm -rf over the same tree as the floor:

6.29 costs more the deeper the tree, four times as much at 800 levels as at ten. 6.30 does not care how deep it is, and stays within a third of rm -rf at every depth, which is about as close as a job that reports progress and can be cancelled is going to get to a tool that does neither.

Closing

The copy path still has more in it than 6.29 ships: the batching that closes most of the remaining gap to cp is written and measured in Making KIO copy many files fast and is not finished yet. The listing path has an open question of its own, which is that an entry could carry its fields more cheaply again; a branch that does it trades about two percent of listing time for eleven percent of the memory an entry holds, and which of the two is the better trade depends on how many entries you are holding.

Enjoy the speed.

Re-Introducing KQuickImageEditor: New Features and Design Philosophy

Noah Davis — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 19:06:00 +0000

KQuickImageEditor is an image editing library for Qt Quick applications. It was created by fellow KDE developer Carl Schwan. It can crop/mirror/resize/rotate images, it has undo/redo history, and it comes with QML components that make it easy to set up a basic image editor. NeoChat and Photos (aka Koko) have used it since 2020 and 2021.

Screenshot of KQuickImageEditor’s original UI and capabilities in NeoChat

In version 0.6, I added a new image editing system from Spectacle. On top of the existing features, the new system can draw shapes, write text, blur and pixelate. It will also be able to do a wide range of color adjustments soon (likely 0.7). Spectacle and Koko have been using the new image editing system since 2025. It was Spectacle’s to begin with, so you could say Spectacle has been using it since 2023. NeoChat and others might use the new system once the number of GUI components have expanded. The old image editing system will remain available for the foreseeable future so that apps using it will not break.

Screenshot of KQuickImageEditor’s annotation capabilities in Spectacle. There isn’t just one UI anymore.

My design philosophy for the new system is based on the idea that APIs should be minimal, but highly flexible by reusing existing components. It’s supposed to be like how you can buy a LEGO set and make many different things with the same pieces. For example, the upcoming color adjustment API takes a QMatrix4x4 to apply linear adjustments to RGB channels with the top 3 rows and non-linear/perspective adjustments with the 4th row. It’s just like using a QMatrix4x4 or mat4 (GLSL) for 3D graphics, except your dimensions are red, green and blue. I could have made the API just for brightness and contrast effects (to be used by Koko), but the choice to use a QMatrix4x4 means you can do a lot of things just with Qt’s existing APIs. From there, I can still add APIs to create 4×4 matrices for specific effects, but apps don’t need to wait for KQuickImageEditor to have an API for the color adjustment they need. They can make their own 4×4 matrices by applying general mathematical concepts.

The core components of the new system are AnnotationDocument and AnnotationViewport. AnnotationDocument has all of the APIs for manipulating QImage objects and undo/redo history. AnnotationViewport is a custom QQuickItem subclass that can render images, update in response to changes from AnnotationDocument and provides QPainterPath/SVG path data for outlining annotations when using the selection tool. There are also a few QML components for features that most viewport implementations can be expected to implement the same way, such as outlines for annotations that are selected or hovered over. The only truly necessary part is AnnotationDocument. Although KQuickImageEditor is for Qt Quick apps, you could connect AnnotationDocument to a custom viewport made with Qt Widgets.

At the moment, there aren’t many GUI components in the API because apps may have different needs and I don’t want to force the use of a particular UI. I might add standard action components for each tool type in the future to make setting up toolbars, floating toolbars or toolboxes easier, but there are still a lot of things to decide on before adding more visual GUI components to the API. There is a documentation website, but the documentation needs quite a lot of work, so reading the header files and looking at how Koko and Spectacle have used the system are currently the best ways to understand it.

The API of the new annotation system is considered unstable. As an example, AnnotationDocument and AnnotationViewport have names that no longer match the scope of what they are for, so they might change before stabilizing the API. However, I don’t break apps on a whim. If the API or ABI has to have a breaking change, it will be communicated and there will be a path to prevent KDE apps on the Gear and Plasma release schedules from breaking in between their releases.

Just so it’s clear, even the new image editing system is not supposed to compete with advanced image editing systems like what Krita and GIMP have. The exact scope is not firmly defined, but it’s pretty likely that certain features like layers or a wide variety of brushes will not be implemented.

I intend to make more posts about the new image editing system and its history within Spectacle in the future.

Week 10 + Week 11: Subsetting for freetext annotations is merged

Ojas Maheshwari — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 09:39:55 +0000

Hello fellow KDE contributors and users!

The Font Subsetting for FreeText annotations merge request got merged today and this means Poppler now supports font subsetting for FreeText annotations.

You can try it out by using Poppler from the master branch or wait for the next release. You can enable/disable it by passing -DENABLE_HARFBUZZ=ON/OFF when running CMake although it is enabled by default.

We worked on the following in the past 2 weeks,

Re-generating the CIDToGIDMap after subsetting.
Re-generating the width array after subsetting.
Working on code reviews on the MR.
Regression testing and fixing bugs.
Some small architectural code changes.

What's remaining:

The Font Subsetting for Form Fields merge request is under review and is currently being regression tested for bugs. After this is merged, font subsetting shall be fully supported in Poppler.

Watch out for a demo video/blog showcasing the results after doing font subsetting soon!

Thank you,
Ojas

Dolphin 26.08, and KIO perf improvements

Méven Car — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Dolphin 26.08 has been released. Here is more of what changed in it, and in the KIO framework underneath it.

The version of KIO that shipped alongside Dolphin 26.04 was 6.25. The one that ships alongside 26.08 is 6.29, four framework releases and 294 commits later. A fair part of this post is about that, because the largest performance change of this cycle is not in Dolphin at all. If you only read one thing, read Making KIO copy many files fast, which is the story behind why copying a folder of small files in 26.08 takes less than half the time it did in 26.04.

New features

Grouping is no longer tied to sorting. Ramil Nurmanov added an explicit group role, so grouping by type no longer forces you to sort by type as well. The old "Show in Groups" toggle is replaced by a "Group By" menu, which lets you turn grouping off, keep the old "Same as Sort" behaviour, or pick a criterion outright. Inside each group the normal sort role is still used as a secondary key. (989c0f4f0)

The filter bar tells you what it is doing. Alessio Bonfiglio replaced the hidden auto-detecting regex behaviour with an explicit mode selector offering Plain Text, Glob and Regular Expression, plus a case-sensitivity toggle. The old behaviour tried to guess: typing a name containing *, ? or [ silently switched the bar to a regular expression, which made a file genuinely named [draft].txt impossible to filter for. An invalid expression now turns the bar red instead of quietly doing something else. (3084a4e11)

A "Folder Name" column in the details view, by Jussi Räsänen, closing a request from 2021. It is most useful when a search or an expanded tree puts files from several folders on screen at once. (4a7be9f25)

Per-folder zoom, by Wagner Soares. When you are not using global view properties, the zoom level is now remembered per folder like the other view properties are. (0f7a9c681)

"Focus Other View", by Felix Ernst. The "Switch between views with Tab key" setting is gone, replaced by a real action you can bind to whatever you like. It moves focus to the inactive split view, and opens a split if there is not one yet. (12b4a8a91)

Close tabs to the left or right, by Ramil Nurmanov. (91e7c0c1e)

A button to restore view properties to their defaults, which I added for the per-folder view properties case. It enables and disables itself depending on whether the current folder already matches the defaults. (70f34211c)

Type-ahead feedback in the status bar, by Felix Ernst. As you type, the status bar shows the keys you have typed and which file name they selected, so a type-ahead that lands somewhere unexpected is no longer silent. (1e13c6abb)

The terminal panel can be resynchronised with F5, by Antti Savolainen, closing bug 510557. When a foreground program is running in the panel, the terminal and the view can drift apart. Konsole does not signal when that program exits, so responding to F5 is the practical answer. (07baa7bb6)

KDE Connect integration, by Kai Uwe Broulik: an "Open KDE Connect" button when browsing the kdeconnect scheme (d5903bd81), and a proper placeholder for a KDE Connect folder (dfef28748).

Session restore for the first instance, by Sergey Katunin, closing bug 464693. If Dolphin is not already running and something launches it with --new-window, as browsers and Kate do, the session is restored rather than discarded. (173794ce1)

Behaviour changes

These are the changes most likely to surprise you, so they are worth naming explicitly.

Create New Folder is now two actions. Ctrl+Shift+N and the context menu entry shared one action, so the menu advertised a shortcut that did something subtly different: the shortcut creates in the viewed directory, the menu entry in the folder you clicked. They are separate actions now, and the context menu one has no default shortcut. (705e366aa)
"Empty Trash" moved in the context menu, by Antti Savolainen, closing bug 518713. It now sits with the other destructive actions rather than next to harmless ones. The reporter had been emptying the trash while reaching for something else. (7d81e3092)
"Open Terminal Here" only appears for folders, not for files, by Brijesh krishna. (8a9f7d9d4)
The play arrow over video previews in the Information Panel is gone, by Ryan Nosurname. There is already a play button and a seek bar directly beneath it. (71f8db089)
Icon overlays are drawn at a fixed size rather than composited into the thumbnail and rescaled with it (bug 498211). Emblem size was previously inconsistent from file to file, because each thumbnail was rescaled by its own factor, and slightly cropped at fractional display scaling. (63f21036e)
Special folders keep their saved view properties even with global view properties enabled, by Pan Zhang (bug 520089, 2e665e1b5).
Names like file.2.txt sort naturally, by Pan Zhang (bug 411707, 0d10eff37).

Who wrote it

Counting commits that are new in 26.08 and not already in a 26.04.x release, and leaving the translation robot out of it:


commits	207, of which 97 code changes
lines	3822 added, 772 removed, net +3050
contributors	22
first time in Dolphin	13 of those 22
returning	9

The busiest by a wide margin:

Contributor	commits	added	removed
Sebastian Englbrecht	31	1145	87
Méven Car	29	706	236
Pan Zhang	6	424	58
Felix Ernst	5	250	165
Ramil Nurmanov	2	428	54
Alessio Bonfiglio	2	406	22
Kai Uwe Broulik	2	58	4
Akseli Lahtinen	2	49	42
Antti Savolainen	2	37	12
Filip Fila	2	13	5
Oleksandr Bondar	2	11	6
Sergey Katunin	2	11	5

Commit counts and line counts do not rank people the same way. Ramil Nurmanov and Alessio Bonfiglio wrote two commits each and still added more lines than anyone except the top two, because grouping by a separate criterion and the filter bar modes each arrived whole. Ryan Nosurname's single commit is the opposite shape: removing the video preview play arrow takes away 43 lines and adds none.

Thirteen people landed their first Dolphin commit this cycle: Antti Savolainen, Areeb Faisal, Brijesh krishna, Evgeniy Harchenko, Filip Fila, Florian RICHER, Jussi Räsänen, Ketal Wang, Oleksandr Bondar, Ramil Nurmanov, Ryan Nosurname, Sebastian Englbrecht and Wagner Soares. Kudos to them! Several are long-standing KDE contributors who had simply not touched this repository before, so read it as new to Dolphin rather than new to KDE.

The other 110 commits were mainly translation commits. Thank you, translators!

Bugs fixed

Nineteen bugs are fixed in 26.08 that were not already fixed in a 26.04.x point release. Ten of them are the changes described above, so here are the other nine:

Bug	What	Who	Commit
492298	Menubar visibility applied after the UI has loaded	Oleksandr Bondar	`c3ef613f`
506884	Inline rename preserved when the item scrolls out of view	Pan Zhang	`5e35194b`
508465	Item widgets use style primitives instead of custom painting	Akseli Lahtinen	`61b6e173`
509150	Wrong item count in the Size column for folders of 200+ entries	Pan Zhang	`914cd901`
510469	Animated-height widgets no longer scroll the viewport	Pan Zhang	`cde91dd7`
514401	Re-triggering an inline rename made robust	Méven Car	`7ca6daea`
515236	No spurious history entry when leaving search results	Pan Zhang	`35b309aa`
518285	Non-Breeze styles may style the non-toolbar navigation bar	Filip Fila	`76f6eb07`
523348	Delete action shown in selection mode in the trash	Méven Car	`d392e6b5`

Two regressions worth knowing about

Icons could be missing entirely. On a freshly opened view every item drew a blank where its icon should be, and it stayed that way until the view mode was switched or the zoom slider moved (bug 523228). A regression from per-folder zoom, fixed in 9c652faca. That fix brought one of its own, turning previews off in icons view rendering at 16 pixels rather than the 32 that mode is set to (bug 524606), fixed in 57c6b10e1. Both are on the release/26.08 branch and ship in Dolphin 26.08.1, due in the first half of September 2026.

Service submenus disappeared from the context menu. Entries that a service menu file groups into a submenu were missing from the context menu, in any application that builds one with KFileItemActions, Dolphin included (bug 524239). A regression from 148b9253d in 6.29, fixed by Luis Bocanegra in 774defb94, which ships in KDE Frameworks 6.30, due in the first week of September 2026.

Neither was found by a test, and both have one now: dolphinitemlistviewtest, which is new, and three cases in dolphinviewtest for the per-folder cache, and testServiceMenuSubmenuActions with a submenu.desktop fixture in KIO.

Closing

If you want to help, the leak and lifetime work above is a good way in, and so is picking a bug from the list. The KIO copy path still has more in it than 6.29 ships: the batching that closes most of the remaining gap to cp is written and measured in Making KIO copy many files fast but not yet finished.

That's all, folks.

What’s Happening In KDE Remote Desktop – Improved Unattended Mode and More

David Edmundson — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 06:29:21 +0000

Remote desktop has been one of the weaker areas of the transition to Wayland. There's a lot of software written exclusively for X that has a direct Wayland equivalent. Within KDE, we already have a Plasma-native RDP and VNC solution for Wayland, but we're aware that it hasn't yet reached the level we want it to.

Throughout the path to Plasma 6.8 it has been an area of focus, with contributions from me, Shouvik Kar, Nick Haghiri, Oliver Beard and Wensheng Tang.

Improved Unattended mode

There are a few different use cases for remote desktop:

Support Mode

This is the typical remote session. You see exactly the same thing on the remote client as on the host, with the contents matching the size of the monitors on the host machine.

This is great when there's someone at the host machine and someone else remoting in, and you want to work together while both seeing the same content.

Unattended mode

The above mode isn't so great when there's just you. If I'm connecting to my home PC from a tiny laptop, it's very unergonomic to have the remote screen be larger than my laptop display and have to scroll around it.

Additionally if my remote PC is in an office, I don't want my colleagues to see my cursor moving around clicking on windows when I'm not there.

We have a new UX that solves all of these issues:

On connection, the remote machine shows the login screen.
For the sesssion you log into, the host machine's screens are removed, ensuring privacy and security.
The remote screens are resized to match the size and layout of the client's screen setup.
When streaming in a window, the remote screen dynamically resizes to match the window size.
Best of all, after the remote session is closed and the user logs back into the host machine, all their windows return to where they were last positioned on the host setup.

The underlying work also sets us up nicely for the full headless case.

Clipboard

Clipboard support has been massively improved with bi-directional text snippets and upcoming work for file transfers, including support in KRDC.

Performance

We've been cutting down latency throughout the system. A new timing mechanism tracks every frame throughout the entire process, letting us see where delays build up, from receiving the raw frame and encoding it, through transmission over the network, to rendering on the client and finally receiving the acknowledgement.

We now coalesce frames that are still waiting to be sent to the client. A new algorithm determines the optimal number of frames to keep in flight, while improved backpressure handling keeps latency lower during network dropouts.

There's also work happening to send multiple streams or even areas of the same desktop at once.

A graph taken midway through optimising

KRDC will also benefit from improved performance in 26.12 as an extra source of latency compared to the xfreerdp3's model performance has been addressed.

Better compatibility

One of the core reasons we have an RDP server is that there's a huge range of existing clients out there. That only helps if we actually support those clients, which isn't trivial given how much variation there is between them.

We now support both RemoteFX Progressive encoding as well as full hardware accelerated H264 encoding with improved fallback for when H264 encoding fails. We also fixed NLA authentication for Windows clients.

libei port

Another large refactor is the port to libei: a library/protocol for sending emulated input to the compositor that's a lot more fleshed-out than the basic 'move mouse' 'send keysym' that existed directly in the XDG Portal specification. libei is far more robust: it can support any number of devices at once and provides the infrastructure for us to also support remote tablet and touch.

We also have massively improved support throughout the stack for sending any keysym that isn't in the current keymap. i.e even if the host keyboard is set to US, you can still input on the remote side characters like ẞ, to even fully composed UTF-8 strings like "안녕 ".

What's next

Multi-user headless

Whilst I am confident that we will have a great single-user story in time for Plasma 6.8 even for truly headless setups, it is unlikely we will deliver a remote server that handles multiple concurrent users at this time. It is far from trivial, and feature freeze for Plasma 6.8 is upon us.

Standardisation

Ultimately, it's frustrating that we're in a situation where we have to maintain this entire service at the KDE level, when much of it should be a solved and shared problem.

Having our own implementation has been useful to work out how to provide tight integration with Plasma, but there are many competing remote-desktop services that should be able to benefit from the same underlying infrastructure.

Others feel the same way, and there is some effort to start standardising the work for headless setups. I hope to have more news on that front shortly.

Call to action

As this remains a critical path for X11 holdouts, we need people to test and contribute. If you can, please run master builds and report any bugs you find. The final merge-requests for the parts mentioned above should be landing soon. Bug reports help; patches even more so!

Redesigning Lokalize's Translation Memory Tab - GSoC Week 9

Navya Sai Sadu — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After working on the UI of TM Tab in Lokalize during the first phase of GSoC, I got back to work on the backend. Currently, only a single TM can be searched in TM Tab. My changes enable querying across multiple selected TMs as per translators' feature request.

A little about threads and mutexes before I share week-wise updates. The GUI runs on the main thread, while TM operations (querying, opening/closing databases, removing files) run as jobs on a separate worker thread pool, TM::threadPool(). This pool is explicitly capped to a single worker thread at startup- setMaxThreadCount(1). This means TM jobs never actually run concurrently with each other, they queue and execute strictly one at a time (this can be changed given my new changes but will have to be careful).

QSqlDatabase connections can only be used on the thread that created them, which is why each job looks up or clones a connection specific to the current thread before querying.

A queued connection is what lets a signal emitted on the worker thread safely invoke a slot on the GUI thread: rather than running the slot's code immediately on the emitting thread.

A mutex protects shared or concurrently-accessed data.

Week 7

I spent week 7 exploring other approaches for quering multiple DBs and merging the results. QSqlQueryModel is only useful to get query results from a single db. It just enabled std::move(*job->query) and there was no way to append results from other TMs.

I felt that my proposed approach, to fire N ExecQueryJobs, merge them in an in-memory SQLite db, and then pass it on to the view, was making things unnecessarily complex and somewhat redundant. I'm sharing the discarded ideas as well in case it helps someone in the future.

Use ATTACH to add other db(s) and perform UNION on the search query. There were some concerns over the complexity of ATTACH and also Lokalize supports remote TMs (PostgreSQL) which doesn't have the provision of ATTACH.
Then, I looked into QConcatenateTablesProxyModel which some KDE apps already use, but there is some bug with its working with QSortFilterProxyModel. I could have had "N TMDBModel instances" (which doesn't seem like a good idea) for each TM and later join them.

Week 8

I decided upon QAbstractTableModel. Unlike QSqlQueryModel (which is a subclass of it), it's more flexible and I had to refactor some of the code. This also meant lazy fetch couldn't be preserved and the results would be stored in QSqlRecords (to preserve all the existing usage on results).

Manually tested against a single TM. Rewrote the TMJob Test too. I find it strange that we always write a test for it to pass. Also from one of the articles I read: "Use test driven development. When you write the test just before the production code, you would never write a monster test, would you?"

Week 9

setFilter() is modified such that ExecQueryJob is fired for each TM. slotQueryExecuted() accumulates each job's rows into the model as they arrive, and only fires resultsFetched() once every selected TM's job has reported back. Row count is also reported directly at the end.

Well, contrary to what I wrote in the last blog, I did end up with an approach quite similar to what TMView does. Are mentors always right?

The part on which I spent a lot of time was what happens if someone retypes their query, or checks/unchecks a TM, while the previous search's jobs are still mid-flight. Stale results shouldn't be allowed to land on top of a newer search's rows. The fix is a generation counter to keep track.

After a lot of coding and debugging, seeing the resuts from multiple TMs made the entire hard work finally pay off.

While testing, the bug mentioned in the previous blog kept pestering me so I fixed it too. I was so fixated on empty/short string that I did not think that the place it was being used could be a problem. It's nice to see the Art of Debugging materialize out of pages of Roger S. Pressman's textbook.

I'll begin to work on TM View once these changes are reviewed and merged.

Sovereign Tech Fellowship for Freedesktop Tasks

Matthias Klumpp — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:00:40 +0000

In 2025 I was honored to be selected for the first cohort of Sovereign Tech Fellows, a program by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency to improve the resilience of the open source ecosystem by supporting maintainers directly (complementing their existing support for larger FOSS organizations). Back in 2025, I was only working very limited hours – however, this has changed in 2026.

For the second half of 2026, I am working again as a Sovereign Tech Fellow, but this time with significantly increased hours. After finishing my PhD, I do have time now for new tasks (and new jobs!), and the fellowship presents an amazing opportunity to really advance projects that I maintain or am part of. This also has a very nice effect on contributors and bug reporters, as their feedback gets addressed a lot faster. With some luck, this ultimately will help finding new (co)maintainers for projects as well (although in the age of AI, a lot of how open source used to work is much more uncertain, but that is a matter for a different blog post).

The fellowship is time-limited, so I am intending to make the time I currently have count!

So, what’s planned?

I am involved in many projects, but three of them will be getting attention as part of the fellowship. I know I am notoriously slow at blogging, but expect more details on each of them very soon. Here’s an overview:

Freedesktop.org, Specifications and Organization

I maintain the Freedesktop Specifications, which is an area of Freedesktop that has traditionally been a bit chaotic. This “worked” in the past, because Freedesktop was never intended to be a formal standards body, but more a shared space where people could throw a lot of code and ideas over the wall and see what sticks and what people can collaborate on.

While I very much love the spirit of this and want to keep it in some form, we definitely would benefit not just from more formalization and better procedures, but also from better organization of the specifications in general. A lot of conflicts can be avoided by that. I will work on improving procedures, crunching through the (lots!) of pending bug reports and MRs, and to make the specifications site better searchable and accessible (similar to how Mozilla’s MDN presents information, but I am not sure if we will get quite that far). I also intent to add a compatibility matrix for specifications, so if a desktop opts out of any one of them (or does not implement them yet) that fact is documented and authors of applications know what they can expect. This will allow us to move a lot faster and avoid a lot of conflict, because there is no implicit assumption that “everybody will implement everything” anymore (which has never been quite true anyway).

Hopefully, this will ultimately result in a Freedesktop that is both a lot more useful for application authors who want to bring their project to Linux, as well as developers of desktop environments who need to see which specifications are available and which ones are current.

In addition to that, I have also worked on a Freedesktop.org website refresh, which is pretty much done in its first iteration (pending sysadmin action). The aim there is to have a more official website, separate from user-contributed wiki content, that showcases what Freedesktop is and which projects are using it for hosting. Once the new website is live, I will also review every page again, archive dead projects in their own section and reorganize the software and specifications directory. Those sections are severely outdated and are missing recent efforts from the community, while still containing long-dead old projects (remember HAL? ).

AppStream

A lot of extra maintenance work will be (has been!) done on it. This includes things such as JPEG-XL support (blog post soon), sandboxed media processing, support for newer specification additions, better OARS integration (and potentially migrating it to fd.o infrastructure), improvements and API stabilization for libappstream-compose and a lot of bugfixing and resolution of issues found by AI code review.

AppStream was originally designed to parse only trusted data from vetted Linux distribution sources – this is no longer the case in today’s world and in the way Flatpak uses it, so we need to increase resilience of the project.

I am also exploring a project that could vastly improve search accuracy for AppStream. Stay tuned for that.

PackageKit & System Upgrades

Many years ago, people thought we would all migrate to atomic Linux distributions and slowly not need PackageKit anymore. This has not turned out to be the case, and there are still plenty of reasons to use a package-based OS, especially in development environments. At the same time, PackageKit has been basically the same for years, and its older architecture is beginning to show. It being a daemon who’s literal job it is to modify the entire system also makes it one of the most security-sensitive components that a Linux system can have, while simultaneously making it near-impossible to sandbox.

My plan is to create PackageKit 2.0 by building on the great foundation of PackageKit 1.0, but modernizing it. This will include simplifying its code and removing a bunch of features that have no more use in modern desktops, while also adding some features that PackageKit never had but that would be useful to expose to frontends (still no to interactivity an terminal-progress forwarding though!). PK 2.0 will also allow me to solve a few design issues that have been worked around in the past, by replacing them with better solutions. This will be a painful transition, as PackageKit 2.0 will break all interfaces PackageKit has – and those interfaces have been frozen for more than a decade. However, I do fully expect this change to be worth the effort.

In addition to that, I intend to look into the offline-update procedure again and improve it. The current multi-reboot operation comes with downsides, that newer systemd features such as soft-reboot can alleviate. The end result should be a much smoother, less annoying offline-update experience for users (I especially want to get rid of updates running on system startup, which I consider quite bad from a usability perspective). The new behavior is in the early drafting stages and may need direct support from systemd. I will share more about it once I can.

That’s a lot of tasks!

Yes! I will see how far I get. I am moving project-by-project though, to allow me to focus on one project at a time, rather than scattering my attention continuously. Amazingly, this means that the major tasks for AppStream are already almost done, and we are nearing the 1.2.0 release. AppStream got priority, because the new Freedesktop Flatpak runtime will be released soon, and because I want FlatHub/Flatpak to have access to the new AppStream release sooner. Freedesktop and PackageKit are next on the task list.

Either way, a lot of progress is coming – if you have any feedback or want to help out, please don’t hesitate to reach out! All work is happening fully in the open, so you can also chime in on the respective GitHub/GitLab tasks .

You can also expect blog posts about key features or interesting changes, so stay tuned!

Tellico 4.2.2 Released

Tellico Blog — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:29:13 +0000

Tellico 4.2.2 is available, with some improvements and bug fixes.

Improvements:

Updated to automatically add default file extension (.tc) to save files with no extension.
Removed gradient image files for entry templates, in favor of data URLs.
Added option to disable ISBN validation in entry editor (Bug 514622).
Improved ISBN formatting for all country regions (path from Alex Oio).
Updated ISBN validation to apply to multiple values (Bug 521157).
Updated UPCItemDb to accept multiple search values.
Improved caching of entry images for the icon view.
Improved Title search for arXiv and OpenLibrary sources.
Improved entry updating from iTunes source.
Added drag-and-drop text importing for RIS.
Removed defunct DVDFr data source.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed crashing bug when exporting HTML for entries with no title (Bug 523140).
Fixed bug with updating UI after checking-in entries.
Fixed bug with updating UI for updating entries (Bug 522673).

This Week in Plasma: UI and Performance Improvements

Nate Graham — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week was heavy on improvements for both the user interface and also performance, helping Plasma 6.8 to shape up quite nicely:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

When using the system in a language other than English, you can now search for and find System Settings pages using keywords in English as well as the current language. (Sergey Katunin, systemsettings MR #418)

You can now disable entries on System Settings’ Autostart page without having to fully delete them. (Ramil Nurmanov, plasma-workspace MR #6951)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

You can now select on the lock screen which authentication type you want to use when multiple types are available, and each one gets a nicer UI. This is an experimental change that just landed, and there’s no GUI yet to set up all the authentication types. We’re working on documenting it, for a start! (Harald Sitter, plasma-desktop MR #3689, plasma-workspace MR #6542, and kscreenlocker MR #318)

You can no longer set the resolution to a value so low that you’ll probably break your system and be unable to recover without the intervention of an expert. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9765)

Improved the alignment of the buttons on the lock screen, which is especially visible in some languages. (Ramil Nurmanov, plasma-dsktop MR #3951)

New

Old

Discover now remembers which reviews you’ve rated as useful or useless and doesn’t let you submit new ratings for them later, because the reviews server doesn’t support this, and it would emit an ugly error code in response to you trying. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #521866)

Auto-hide panels now hide themselves only 50 milliseconds after the pointer leaves them — reduced from the previous value of 500 milliseconds. This makes them feel much more responsive. (Seb Jo, plasma-workspace MR #6885)

The automatic brightness feature now adjusts in a smarter way to any manual brightness changes you make, so the system does a better job of learning your screen brightness preferences in various lighting conditions over time. (Matt Whitlock, kwin MR #9237)

When an Audio Volume widget is placed on a panel in standalone form, its popup now starts out large enough to accommodate everything in it without scrolling. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #522654)

New

Old

Improved the way error messages from the audio subsystem are communicated to the user while using the microphone tester feature. (Nate Graham, plasma-pa MR #419)

Implemented highlighting for non-default settings on System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (Tobias Ozór, krdp MR #232)

Cursor feedback effects now dodge screen edges, so they are always fully visible. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #498068)

KWin’s notifications about GPU resets now trigger for all GPUs, not just the primary one. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9768)

Improved the Breeze styling for GTK 4 apps’ menus and window borders. (Rocket Aaron, breeze-gtk MR #104)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed multiple issues relating to Discover failing to terminate all of its processes after quitting, which would lead to it being unable to launch properly later. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1393)

Fixed multiple issues relating to System Settings not switching its sub-category sidebar view when expected during various less-common modes of interaction. (Mradul Pal, systemsettings MR #415)

The Digital Clock widget’s tooltip no longer lets really long text overflow; instead it expands to make room. (Luis Bocanegra, plasma-workspace MR #6950)

The Weather Widget no longer shows info buttons for alerts that do nothing when clicked; now they only appear if they’ll do something. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519676)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed multiple cases where the “KDE daemon” background process could crash while reading to or writing from the system’s password storage system when network conditions changed in various ways. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #624)

Fixed an issue where Task Manager window thumbnails could sometimes go missing. (Vlad Zahorodnii, plasma-desktop MR #3959)

The Calendar widget no longer oddly changes the date it’s showing when dragged from one screen to another. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #472360)

Plasma 6.8

Screen readers can now read all of the UI elements on the Activities sidebar. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519306)

Using the clipboard’s “Keep the selection and clipboard the same” setting no longer breaks the ability to copy multi-cell data between sheets of a spreadsheet in LibreOffice Calc. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #505209)

When a remote desktop connection is unexpectedly severed, the System Tray icon notifying you about it now disappears as expected, instead of sticking around until the system is restarted. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #234)

Fixed two issues where the Audio Volume widget would show the wrong panel icon under some unusual conditions. (Seth Morris, plasma-pa MR #422)

Frameworks 6.30

The “Do you really want to permanently delete this item?” dialog for items on the desktop no longer percent-encodes special characters in file names, because it looked ugly. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #522470)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

Discover’s background notifier process now uses much less memory when it checks for updates. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #509180)

Improved Plasma’s startup speed a bit by doing less unnecessary work when loading wallpapers. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6898)

Further improved the speed and efficiency of KWin’s “take a screenshot” functionality. (Zhora Zmeykin, kwin MR #9756)

Improved the smoothness of screen recordings made on high-refresh-rate screens. (Fililip, KDE Bugzilla #524129)

The microphone tester feature now records audio at the system’s current sample rate rather than forcing a 44.1kHz sample rate, which could have ramifications elsewhere on the system if you’re doing audio production. (Dan Fi, KDE Bugzilla #523693)

Frameworks 6.30

Improved the way SVG images are cached, which slightly increases speed and reduces video memory usage. (Méven Car, ksvg MR #115)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

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

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

GSoC 2026: Building Join.Kde.Org

Ansh Singhal — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Intro

Helloooooo,
it’s me again, Ansh! , the mentee who has been working on the Join.kde.org
This is the final update within the official timeline of GSoC 2026 for my project: Building Join.KDE.org.

A quick summary:
Over the past 12 weeks, I have worked on creating, designing and implementing the join.kde site into a platform that can answer most of the basic questions a new contributor has. In this post, I’ll mainly focus on the progress from Week 6 to Week 12 along with my final thoughts.

For a short summary, checkout this status report.

Week 6: Contribute/suggest

This week I worked on the ADD section which got renamed to contribute, it includes several sub sections which allows people to contribute based on their interests.

Routed the explore section to KDE.org for you section so people can explore and find their own use for KDE softwares.

Created the suggest section which contains the information on how to report bugs/request for features.

This week was more about improvements on the navbar, I noticed with all the text the nav-bar looked way too cluttered, and simply overwhelming so with the advice from Anish and how he changed the navbar for the mentorship website, I worked up something similar and made dropdowns for the navbar so it can still have more content when clicked.

Week 8: Work on Projects

For this week I worked on the work on projects section which allows people to find groups of projects in invent based on skillset or the programming languages one knows.

I added all the groups available in KDE invent in this section which little tags of skillset.

Week 9: Incubate projects

Worked on designing Incubate projects section: which basically explains what kind of projects fit in KDE and what are the benifits of it. Linked it through a call-to-action button to the relevant resources to incubate project into KDE.

Week 10: read page/ suggest page improvement

Designed the read page with 3 main blog sites

planet
contributor blogs
mentorship blogs

This week was something new, the cards for the read page were simple but the new design of dropdown in suggest page took some time figuring out. added konqi images to the cards because duh it's konqi (but hey we can change them eventually).

Week 11: Divulge Page

Created the Divulge page which is more for people who want to create content for kde whether it be promo material, tutorials or whether help in promotion itself.

It's kind of a copy of the read page but it can always be changed.

Week 12: Events Page

Created the Events page, which included akademy as the main event and then a section for event's KDE hosts which had some sprints and conf.in and then added the section for the events KDE participates in which will likely be expanded eventually.

Fixed some tiny typos and dead link issues.

My Own Development

I learned a lot from this project, both in coding and beyond. Here are the things I remember right now, though the list could go longer:

Now I am very comfortable with Hugo, semantic maps, and YAML files
Finally learned how to deal with SVGs (was my first time working with them)
My frontend skills improved, I think I can design better pages now
I now want to create more stuff that helps people!

Conclusion

Overall, GSoC 2026 has been a great experience for me. Over these 12 weeks I got the chance to work on issues that i faced myself and fix them in a way that helps everyone joining KDE.

Along the way I learned some technical skills, learned how to work across different timezones, to communicate better, and most importantly realized that long discussions are often more necessary than jumping straight into implementation, especially in open source communities.

Big thanks to my mentors Anish and umm Conulting mentor Paul

This wraps up my GSoC journey, but I will be sticking around KDE and plan to explore other projects, especially in the mentorship side of things. See you around in the community.