In the past two months since the last post, KDE Itinerary’s journey search UI got simplified, you got more control over deleting individual entries and altitude information is shown on the live status page when available, among many other things.

New Features

Improved journey search page

The interface for manual public transport searches as been simplified. Filters for specific modes of transportation are now on a secondary page, and you don’t have to specify a trip to add the results to in the first step anymore. Instead, that’s now queried when actually saving a result.

Fine-grained deletion control

For multi-ticket or multi-traveler reservations, it’s now possible to delete just individual tickets or travelers rather than the entire entry.

Altitude information in live status view

The live map on services with the corresponding onboard API now also shows the current altitude information when available.

Infrastructure Work

Automatic geocoding for reservation data

For many of Itinerary’s features to work properly we need to know geo locations of the involved places, such as departure and arrival stops of a train trip. In many cases we get those from being able to recognize stop identifiers found in e.g. ticket barcodes. There’s a bunch of heuristics as fallback (such as knowing in which areas a train company operates), but that’s also not covering all cases.

To address this properly, Itinerary can now resolve those remaining locations by using OSM’s geocoder Nominatim. As this involves querying an online service, this is conditional on having online data sources enabled in the settings, same as for querying for delay information.

Transitous upgrade to MOTIS v2.7

Upgrading MOTIS, the software behind Transitous brought us a number of new features, with the following ones particularly relevant for Itinerary:

• State and positions of currently available rental vehicles such as bikes and scooters can now be queried.
• Support for GBFS station booking URLs.
• Support for multiple language preferences. That means that secondary languages are now also considered when picking the best option for multi-lingual content such as disruption notes.
• Location searches include the modes of transportation served at stops now.

Android platform support

KDE’s Android build infrastructure (which Itinerary relies on) has been updated to Android’s NDK r28, which enabled compliance with the 16kB page size requirement enforced by the Google Play Store since November 1st.

While this is something that went mostly unnoticed by users, the next required update (to Qt 6.10) is unfortunately going to have some more side-effects. For the first time in many years this will require a higher minimum Android version, going from currently 21 (Android 5, from 2014, 99.8% cumulative use) to then 28 (Android 9, from 2018, 91.7% cumulative use).

This means any newer build of any KDE Android app would no longer run on anything older than Android 9. It’s unclear how many of our users would be affected by this, but it unfortunately does look like we have very little choice here beyond delaying this a bit.

If you have thoughts or feedback on this, feel free to join the KDE Android Matrix channel.

Events

There also were several events with Itinerary-adjacent topics in the past two months:

• The Open Transport Community Conference in Vienna.
• Two OSM Hack Weekends in Berlin and Karlsruhe.

Itinerary also got mentioned in the whirlwind tour through the land of Wikidata-powered_apps at Wikimania in Nairobi.

And more is coming up, members of the Itinerary and Transitous teams will be at 39C3 end of December in Hamburg, Germany as well as FOSDEM at the beginning of February in Brussels, Belgium.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Added or improved travel document extractors for Booking.com, CFR, citycity.se, Comboios de Portugal, Eurostar, Flixbus, FooEvents, GlobalTicket, Inviton, MÁV, NH Hotels, Predpredaj, Prioticket, Ryanair, TicketCounter, United, Ventra, Wiener Linien and ZSSK.
• Consider bus stations and try harder to discard freight terminals when locating airport entrances.
• Ignore seat qualifiers (“window”, “aisle”, etc) when comparing seat numbers.
• Merge common parts of all elements of the same incidence such as a multi-ticket booking.
• Consider names with swapped given/family name as equivalent as well

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Add a vehicle feature flag for night trains (supported with MOTIS and Hafas backends).
• Add support for agency/operator URLs (supported with MOTIS and OTP backends). This can be useful as this is the most widely available way towards actually booking something at this point.
• Improved onboard API support for Frecciarossa and RailJet trains.
• Improved performance of the location search page.

All of this also directly benefits KTrip.

Itinerary app

• Editing now affects the currently selected reservation in a multi-ticket or multi-traveler batch.
• Only load reservation data for the current trip group.
• Re-add the top-level import action.
• Fix performance issues and hangs when displaying journey search results.
• Fix online updates for standalone Apple Wallet pass tickets such as Zügli D-Tickets.
• Fix timer overflow in transfer monitoring with Qt 6.10.
• Adding a journey search result when there’s no existing trip will now directly ask to create a new trip.
• Fix updating platform information from scheduled online data in case the platform in the original ticket was wrong.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

The Kdenlive 25.12 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We made several changes to the user interface to improve your workflow, including a new widget docking system that makes rearranging panels much easier and more powerful, an enhanced audio display in the clip monitor with a waveform overview for faster navigation and zooming, and a new Startup and Welcome screen allowing to easily select a few options when launching the program.

Other highlights:

• Added an editing layout and safe areas for vertical formats
• Reordering of the menus to make them more logical
• Introduction of markers with a time span (GSoC 2025)

Feedback Needed

Now is your chance to test it and let us know if you encounter any bugs or have suggestions to help us polish the final release. Share your feedback either in the comments below or directly with the team during our online Café, where we’ll be discussing this upcoming release. Join us next Wednesday, 3rd of December at 21:00 CET, on meet.kde.org

Download the binaries from below and give it a spin!

Pre-release binaries can be downloaded here.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw quite a lot of feature work and user interface polish for Plasma 6.6! Have a look:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

There are now global actions for seeking forwards or backwards 5 or 30 seconds in the currently playing media. These work as long as the current media player supports letting other apps control seeking via MPRIS. The actions don’t have keyboard shortcuts assigned by default, but you can set them yourself. (Christoph Wolk, link)

You can now configure the Window List widget to show its menu on hover, or to hide the icon and only show the name of the active window. (Shubham Arora, link 1 and link 2)

You can now configure the order of the icons shown in the Lock/Logout widget. (Shubham Arora, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

Continued to polish up the XDG portal dialogs. This time the screen & window chooser dialog has been simplified and improved some more. (Harald Sitter, link)

Canceling a paste of some files onto Plasma’s desktop no longer produces a pointless error notification. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Added pin buttons to the Web Browser and Audio Volume widgets so that if you have either them in standalone form on a panel, you can keep their popups open while you’re still using them. (Alexander Lohnau and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the usability of searching using the Kickoff Application Launcher widget in several ways: now you can use the arrow keys to navigate from the search results view back to the search field, and new search results that come in late don’t cause the selection highlight to jump around. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the appearance and usability of the disks shown in Info Center’s S.M.A.R.T. Status page. (Joshua Goins, link)

Clearing the clipboard while it happens to be showing a QR code for one of the now-cleared items now dismisses the QR code, too. (Fushan Wen, link)

The Kicker Application Menu widget no longer very briefly flashes a message saying “No matches found” right after you search for things. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Improved the experience of rapidly moving the pointer over top-level menu items in the Kicker Application widget; now the sub-menus appear in the same way they do for other menus in apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)

When using the Kicker Application Menu widget on a right screen-edge panel, sub-sub-menus now open to the left of their parent, rather than on the right where they cover up the main menu. This also now works properly with an RTL language and a left screen-edge panel. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2)

Frameworks 6.21, with the full effect arriving in Plasma 6.6.0

The headers of Kirigami-based apps are now the same height as those of QtWidgets-based apps. In the process of improving this, we also managed to equalize the padding on all four sides of highlighted list items, and make them consistent with the outer padding of header items, too. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

The Fifteen Puzzle widget now has a nice new icon, and also uses a symbolic icon when placed on a panel. (Martin Sh, link 1 and link 2)

Frameworks 6.21

Reverted a change made a few months ago that hid .desktop files with NoDisplay=true set on them from apps’ “Open with” menus. While the original change seemed technically correct, it had negative side effects outweighing its advantages. (Nate Graham, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a random Plasma crash. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a case where turning on automatic updates in Discover would just make Discover crash in the background rather than running the updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed an issue that broke pasting images from the clipboard into Dolphin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where drawing using certain oddly-behaving drawing tablets would draw outside of the screen area. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where re-mapping drawing tablet stylus buttons didn‘t work. (Joshua Goins, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that mangled the desktop icon arrangement when dragging something to the desktop while it was using one of the automatic sorting modes. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that made certain GPUs get displayed as “llvmpipe” in Info Center. (Oleg Gorobets and Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some issues that made Plasma’s desktop sometimes fail to notice newly-created, -deleted, or -changed files. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that prevented re-opening the virtual keyboard immediately after closing it, but before clicking or re-focusing anything else. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that mangled the display of devices whose names contain Unicode characters in USB plug/unplug notifications. (Nicolas Fella, link)

When you drag and drop an item from a Dolphin window that’s accessing a network location that requires Kerberos authentication, dropping it on the desktop now successfully downloads the file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for XRandr emulation in KWin, which allows it to behave sensibly when running XWayland-using apps that make use of X11 APIs to change the screen resolution in a way that requires letterboxing or pillarboxing. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Improved the performance of the rectangular box you can drag on the desktop to select items. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Implemented support for the standard “reduced motion” setting that lets apps know that you’d like animations minimized. Now it’s toggled on automatically when you disable animations in System Settings. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’re up to almost €90,000 raised in a month and a half. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. 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.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-48.

Open Source Power

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, business, economics, politics, commons, criticism

This debate around licensing, politics and making our FOSS efforts sustainable need to happen. It looks like for now to some people the path forward is defensive licensing? I wish at least we’d first attempt to have more strong copyleft use…

https://blog.muni.town/open-source-power/

Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships

Tags: tech, foss, maintenance, sustainability, supply-chain, commons

Indeed, if you benefit from Free Software you’d better engage with it. Maintainers should stop bending backwards to please free loaders.

https://pivotnine.com/blog/open-source-has-too-many-parasocial-relationships/

What They Don’t Tell You About Maintaining an Open Source Project

Tags: tech, foss, maintenance

Want to start a new project? Here is what you’re signing for.

https://andrej.sh/blog/maintaining-open-source-project/

A Message to the Computing Community About ACM’s Transition to Full Open Access

Tags: tech, science, research, open-access

Excellent news! It is long overdue that such organisations switch to open access.

https://cacm.acm.org/news/a-message-to-the-computing-community-about-acms-transition-to-full-open-access/

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Tags: tech, blog, web, culture

This would probably be a good thing indeed. We’ll see of the web culture will evolve next.

https://disassociated.com/personal-blogs-back-niche-blogs-next/

Zig: Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

Tags: tech, git, forgejo, foss, community, vendor-lockin

Very good move on their part. It’s time more people do so. Beside, Forgejo (powering Codeberg) looks very interesting. I plan to play with it more next year.

https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/

s&box is a modern game engine, built on Valve’s Source 2 and the latest .NET technology

Tags: tech, 3d, game, foss

Nice to see another game engine go the Free Software route. This one is particularly feature packed.

https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public

libfive

Tags: tech, framework, geometry, 3d

Looks like a neat software library for procedural geometry.

https://libfive.com/

How Cloudflare uses Rust to serve (and break) millions of websites at 50+ millions requests per second

Tags: tech, cloudflare, rust, reliability, failure

A bit of a shameless plug toward the end. That said the explanations of why Cloudflare is banking on Rust so much or how the recent downtime could have been avoided are spot on.

https://kerkour.com/how-cloudflare-uses-rust

Rust unit testing: file reading

Tags: tech, rust, tests

Nice approach to stub standard types in Rust. The article is a bit confusing the different types of test doubles though.

https://jorgeortiz.dev/posts/rust_unit_testing_file_reading/

Linux Kernel Explorer

Tags: tech, linux, kernel

Looks like a neat code explorer for the kernel. It’s nice that it comes with a guide to point you to the right places per topic.

https://reverser.dev/linux-kernel-explorer

The Input Stack on Linux — An End-To-End Architecture Overview

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, system, input

A long article which seems to be a good reference document on the Linux input stack. There’s a lot to cover as it’s quite fragmented.

https://venam.net/blog/unix/2025/11/27/input_devices_linux.html

Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics, funny

Ever wondered if we could solve the Fizz Buzz with a Fourier series? Trigonometry is magic.

https://susam.net/fizz-buzz-with-cosines.html

Fifty Shades of OOP

Tags: tech, object-oriented, type-systems

Another post which reminds everyone what object oriented programming is about. And yes, there’s indeed a variety of different tools in there, not all object oriented languages are equivalent.

https://lesleylai.info/en/fifty_shades_of_oop/

What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems

Tags: tech, reliability, failure, complexity

Error handling is not easy. Having simple rules to apply for complex systems is a good thing. Of course the difficulty is to apply them consistently.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/11/20/what-now.html

10 Years of thinking about Pair Programming

Tags: tech, pairing, programming

Gives an idea of what pair programming looks like when practiced properly.

https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/10-years-of-thinking-about-pair-programming/

We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs

Tags: tech, programming, quality, craftsmanship, engineering

I’m not really a fan of the leaderboard part of their approach. That said, if the maturity of the organisation allows it, having such bug squashing sessions is a good idea.

https://lalitm.com/fixits-are-good-for-the-soul/

“Good engineering management” is a fad

Tags: tech, engineering, management

Interesting thinking, indeed expectations are changing quite a bit for engineering managers over time. Thus the proposed list of core and growth skills is interesting. It is likely a good framing for the job, then the art is finding the right balance for your organisation.

https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/

Solve problems with experiments

Tags: tech, team, organization, agile, problem-solving

You can also have experiments on your organisation. This is actually a good thing and probably should be done when something keeps popping up as a problem.

https://www.viktorcessan.com/solve-problems-with-experiments/

Invert, always invert

Tags: tech, planning, risk, project-management

Interesting approach I didn’t know about. Definitely worth trying. I like how it seems to bake risk management in.

https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/invert-always-invert/

Bye for now!

Its been quite a while since I attended the IndiaFOSS 25 event late September. I have been meaning to write the blog post for a while but didn’t get time. A lot has happened since then, I have moved continents and am now in Germany pursuing my masters at Philipps University of Marburg. I’ll write lot more about my new experiences in Germany in upcoming blog posts but for now back to IndiaFOSS 25. This was a very exciting event for me since this was the first time I was representing KDE booth at a conference. This event occurs yearly in the city of Bangalore which is also known as the Silicon Valley of India. I discovered IndiaFOSS after watching a talk by Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre and Kitty - two programs I have used heavily in my day to day life so regardless to say I was excited about the conference.

Day 0

I arrived a day before the conference in Bangalore and met with Bhushan at the airport as we continued our journey towards the city. The Kempegowda International Airport is located outside the city about 40km north of Bangalore’s city center. It took us around 2 hours to reach the airbnb I was sharing with the my friends who were also attending the event. After encountering the much dreaded city traffic jam I took a much needed rest and spent my rest of the day exploring the area of Jayanagar and Indiranagar.

Day 1

I spent most of my time at the booth and met a lot of people who were already using KDE software, specifically from the state of Kerala. It was made popular through the ICT initiative. I have to be honest here, I did hear about this initiative from Subin earlier this year at cki25 but didn’t know it was this widespread.

There was general amazement among the booth visitors when we showed them KDE powered Laptops, mobile phones, steamdeck and even a rasberry pi powering the giant tv screen at our booth. The steamdeck was the most popular device at the booth since its still not officially available in India. Some people already knew about the steamdeck while others who didn’t were amazed to find out that gaming on handheld that too on a linux powered device had come such a long way.

Some of the people who we met at the booth were also interested in helping us spread the word and gave us testomonials which I have forwarded to Aniqa. Additionally we were able to help few people with creating their invent profiles and there were others who showed interest in helping out with code contributions and translation support. Few also asked about India specific KDE events and we were happy to tell them about Conf KDE India (cki 25).

We also connected with James Reilly from AlmaLinux (can be reached on Matrix), who is looking for a KDE Community member to create a KDE bootc-image built on CentOS base and has also offered to mentor a new contributor in tackling this project.

Our booth was also located right next to Inkscape’s booth and seeing Rishi make Konqi on Krita led them to battle it out to see who can make a Konqi faster. It was a friendly battle ofcourse and all of us enjoyed the drawing contest complete with cheer and laughter. It was a pretty eventful day and we met a lot of users of KDE software at our booth.

Day 2

The second day of the conference saw the attendance dwindle a bit but this also gave me a chance to checkout the other booths. Some of the most interesting ones that I found were (in no particular order):-

Mecha Comet

It is a handheld modular Linux computer. It has a magnetic snap interface powered by a standard GPIO serial port which allows hardware extensibility. Additionally Its made up of repairable and recyclable parts. The particular distro that it runs is called Mechanix OS, which is based on Debian. It packs in a PCIe 3.0 M.2 B-Key, Wifi 6, a dedicated Secure Element (CC EAL 6+) for security with a 3.92 inch screen. The project is still in Kickstarter phase but its definitely one of the most exciting projects I found at the conference. You can find more about the project here.

SFLC India

Software Freedom Law Center, India is a donor supported legal services organization that promotes Open access to knowledge, Free Speech, Online Privacy, Innovation and Equality. It was because of them, I became aware of the dubious practices surrounding DigiYatra’s mandatory biometric data collection in India. Unfortunately, at the time I had already surrendered my data as I was forced to comply, otherwise the airport staff denied me entry. SFLC India at the time had started a huge social media campaign against this and had even gathered huge media attention to bring a change against this. Sadly, the DigiYatra gates still exist but are atleast no longer mandatory. If you wanna know more about them, you can visit them here.

Absurd Shop

I found their CoryDora DIY Kit to be an interesting project, a fully opensourced 3x3 macropad with hotswappable switches. You can use it to control media, set-up scripts and write macros. A nice project if your just starting with soldering and still getting the hang of things. You can find the CoryDora DIY kit here.

PCB CUPID

They provide opensource pcb and sensors at affordable prices and also have guides and tools for you to test and play with. Growing up I always wanted to tinker with pcb boards and build with them but always found the boards out of budget so seeing them change this, is definitely for the positive.

OpenstreetMap India

I was happy to see a thriving presence of openstreetmap indian community, I have volunteered in two of their Delhi meetups previously where I got to know how to map data and mapped areas around lesser known of parts of Delhi so it was nice to see some familiar faces.

and there were many more… unfortunately I can’t cover all the interesting booths that were there at the conference but regardless to say there were plenty!

Final Thoughts

All in all, I enjoyed my stay at Bangalore and was happy to meet the oss enthusiasts from all over India. I was lucky to get a chance to represent KDE at IndiaFOSS and meet with its diverse users and hopefully future contributors. I would also like to thank KDE for making this possible by sponsoring my travel for the event.

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session, it’s the default on most distributions, and some of them have already dropped — or are planning to drop — the Plasma X11 session independently of what we decide.

In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.

Because we’re certain that many people will have questions about this change, the Plasma team has prepared the following FAQ:

Plasma 6.8 means the X11 session will be supported by KDE until…?

The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.

We cannot provide a specific date, as we’re exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.

What if I still really need X11?

This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.

Will X11 applications still work?

Outside of rare special cases, yes, they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer. It does a great job of providing compatibility for most X11 applications, and we provide several additional compatibility features on top, namely improved support for fractional scaling and (opt-in) backwards compatibility with X11 global shortcuts and input emulation.

In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots or screencasting need to be adjusted to work as expected on Wayland. Most have already done so, and the remaining ones are making progress all the time.

Does X11 forwarding still work?

Yes, Xwayland supports it. Waypipe exists for similar functionality in Wayland native applications as well.

Can I still run KDE applications on X11 in another desktop environment?

Yes. There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.

This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.

What about gaming?

Games run better than ever on the Wayland session! Adaptive sync, optional tearing, and high-refresh-rate multi-monitor setups are all supported out of the box. HDR gaming works with some additional setup, too!

What about NVIDIA GPUs?

While Wayland support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver was quite rocky a few years ago, it has matured tremendously. Graphics cards still supported by the manufacturer work just fine nowadays, and for very old NVIDIA GPUs, the open source Nouveau driver can be used instead.

What about accessibility?

Accessibility is a very broad topic, so it’s hard to make any definite statements, but we’re generally on par with the X11 session. All the basics already work as expected, including screen readers, sticky & bounce keys, zooming in, and so on.

Some things are better, like touchpad gestures for adjusting the zoom level, and applying systemwide color filters to correct for colorblindness. And even more improvements are expected by the time Plasma 6.8 rolls around.

However, accessibility features provided by third-party applications may be worse in some aspects. Please open a bug report if you have any special requirements that we don’t cover yet! This is an active topic we’re very interested in improving.

What about automation?

Many tools can be used for automation in the Wayland session; for example wl-copy/wl-paste, ydotool, kdotool, kscreen-doctor, and the plasma-apply-* tools. Generally Plasma is extensible enough that you can add what’s still missing yourself, for example through KWin scripts or plugins.

What about the Significant Known Issues?

While we can’t promise all problems will be completely gone (some depend on application support), we’re actively working on addressing the last stragglers on that Wiki page.

Some of them are really close to being fixed; for example, the issues around output mirroring will be gone in Plasma 6.6. Session restore and remembering window positions are also being actively worked on.

What about Plasma on the BSDs?

FreeBSD is already shipping a working Wayland session, so there should be no upstream problems on that front. If there are any remaining issues we can help with upstream, please reach out to us!

What about the kwin_wayland and kwin_x11 split?

In Plasma 6.4, we split KWin into separate X11 and Wayland versions. This allowed KWin to go all-in on Wayland earlier, without being held up so much with legacy support for X11. For users with remaining edge-case requirements for X11, we put in the extra effort to keep X11 support for the rest of the desktop since then.

While the split helped a lot, KWin is only one piece of the puzzle. The Plasma desktop as a whole has many places where development is held back by the need to support the lowest common denominator of the two window systems.

The bottom line

This is happening because we believe that eventually dropping the Plasma X11 session will allow us to move faster to improve stability and functionality for the majority of our users — who are already using Wayland.

If we want to keep producing the best free desktop out there, we have to be nimble enough to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with many opportunities, without the need to drag forward legacy support that holds back a great deal of work.

The Wayland transition has been long, and at times painful. But we’re very close to the finish line. Passing it will unlock a lot of positive changes over the next few years that we think folks are going to appreciate!

We're happy to announce the release of version 1.10.0 of the Qt Extension for Visual Studio Code! This release introduces plenty of quality-of-life improvements to developing Qt solutions on Visual Studio Code.

When comparing Qt for MCUs vs LVGL, our independent study with Spyrosoft shows that Qt for MCUs reduces development time for microcontroller GUI by 30% compared to LVGL. The efficiency improvement comes from Qt’s integrated toolchain, which facilitates better collaboration among designers (Figma to Qt), developers (Qt Creator or Visual Studio Code), and QA engineers (Squish for MCUs), making Qt for MCUs ideal for complex projects with cross-functional teams. Additionally, Qt for MCUs offers comprehensive safety certification packages for safety-critical industries such as automotive, two-wheelers, and medical applications, positioning it as a superior LVGL alternative when functional safety and regulatory compliance are essential.

There have been a few discussions about what Flathub should do to push developers to maintain their apps on the latest versions of the published runtimes. But most of those lack important details around how this would actually happen. I will not discuss in this post the technical means that are already in place to help developers keep their dependencies up to date. See the Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User blog post instead.

The main thing to have in mind is that Flathub is not a commercial entity like other app stores. Right now, developers that put their apps on Flathub are (in the vast majority) not paid to do so and most apps are under an open source license.

So any discussion that starts with “developers should update to the latest runtime or have their apps removed” directly contradicts the social contract here (which is also in the terms of most open source licenses): You get something for free so don’t go around making demands unless you want to look like a jerk. We are not going to persuade overworked and generally volunteer developers to update their apps by putting pressure on them to do more work. It’s counter productive.

With that out of the way, how do we gently push developers to keep their apps up to date and using the latest runtime? Well, we can pay them. Flathub wants to setup a way to offer payments for applications but unfortunately it’s not ready yet. So in the meantime, the best option is to donate to the projects or developers working on those applications.

And make it very easy for users to do so.

Now we are in luck, this is exactly what some folks have been working on recently. Bazaar is a Flathub first app store that makes it really easy to donate to the apps that you have installed.

But we also need to make sure that the developers actually have something set up to get donations.

And this is were the flatpak-tracker project comes in. This project looks for the donation links in a collection of Flatpaks and checks if there is one and if the website is still up. If it’s not, it opens issues in the repo for tracking and fixing. It also checks if those apps are using the latest runtimes and open issues for that as well (FreeDesktop, GNOME, KDE).

If you want to help, you can take a look at this repo for apps that you use and see if things needs to be fixed. Then engage and suggest fixes upstream. Some of this work does not require complex technical skills so it’s a really good way to start contributing. This is probably one of the most direct way to enable developers to receive money from their users, via donations.

Updating the runtime used by an app usually requires more work and more testing, but it’s a great way to get started and to contribute to your favorite apps. And this is not just about Flathub: updating a Qt5 app to run with Qt6, or a GNOME 48 app to 49, will help everyone using the app.

We want to build an App Store that is respectful of the time developers put into developing, submitting, publishing, testing and maintaining their apps.

We don’t want to replicate the predatory model of other app stores.

Will some apps be out of date sometimes? Probably, but I would rather have a sustainable community than an exploiting one.