Planet KDE | English

QML Quick Editor: my QtCreator extension has been integrated

Renaud Guezennec — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Great news for the community! The integration of QML Quick Editor into Qt Creator is now 100% complete. The plugin is officially available, bringing native workflow integration directly to your development environment. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Features:

Designed as an all-in-one QML code editor, this extension allows you to quickly prototype and test QML snippets without the overhead of creating a full project. Simply edit your code and preview the visual output instantly inside Qt Creator—speeding up your UI experimentation and debugging workflow.

This Week in Plasma: Finishing Touches on 6.8

Nate Graham — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week, Plasma contributors put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.8, which is due to be released early next week, on October 14th.

A lot of the work was behind the scenes, and that’s why this week’s update may look a bit light. But nevertheless, here’s the bigger stuff that we thought was worth reporting on specifically:

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

When the Weather Report widget isn’t able to fetch any weather data, its tooltip now explains this, rather than being a tiny empty square. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1154)

Improved keyboard navigation using arrow keys in KRunner. (Christoph Wolk, milou MR #110)

Plasma 6.9

You can now disable the notification that Spectacle shows when it begins recording the screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, spectacle MR #596)

System Settings’ Printers page now asks you to check your firewall when it can’t find any network printers. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #526465)

The virtual desktop thumbnails in KWin’s Overview effect are now more harmonious and visually pleasing. (Abdallah Hammad, kwin MR #10036)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Plasma’s on-screen keyboard now correctly dodges floating panels. (Devin Lin, plasma-desktop MR #4056)

Plasma 6.7.6

When using upower-1.91.4 or later, if your keyboard doesn’t have a backlight or doesn’t support controlling its backlight via software, the Brightness & Color widget will no longer show a spurious control for it anyway. (Tristyn Russelo, KDE Bugzilla #525916)

Plasma 6.8

Discover’s feature to automatically apply updates now always works for Flatpak apps. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519082)

Fixed key repeat with the Slow Keys accessibility feature. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #523419)

Fixed an issue that could cause lags and stutters when tiling windows while using certain NVIDIA GPUs with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522424)

Fixed Tab key navigation in KRunner. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #387951)

Frameworks 6.32

Fixed a case where Qt-based apps using blur could crash when a tooltip disappeared while you were typing. (Anton Karasev, KDE Bugzilla #522547)

Country flags used to distinguish keyboard layouts now look better when using a scale factor over 100%. (Zhora Zmeykin, kguiaddons MR #235)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.9

You can now control the brightness level of backlit keyboards that are connected after login. (Tristyn Russelo, powerdevil MR #691)

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.

Web Review, Week 2026-41

Kevin Ottens — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 11:31:52 +0000

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-41.

Wherein the slopbros won’t stop

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, web, commons, ethics

This is a rant yes but well deserved. Those companies selling giant LLMs are just DDoSing everyone…

https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/06.html

That Time I Worked With a Laptop Thief

Tags: tech, theft, law, hardware

Or why you should have a proper inventory. Also shows how having a proper MDM in place can help.

https://blog.pipetogrep.org/2025/07/27/that-time-i-worked-with-a-laptop-thief/

Tags: tech, dependencies, tools, foss

It’s really a strong option for dependency updates indeed.

https://www.jvt.me/posts/2024/04/12/use-renovate/

montray: A tray icon and desktop alerts for systemd services and custom health checks

Tags: tech, linux, systemd, monitoring, tools

OK, this is really a neat idea. Seems useful to have a simple check on important tasks on several machines.

https://github.com/dimonomid/montray/

Proving Rust Web Application Correctness with Lean 4

Tags: tech, safety, formal-verification, rust

As usual with such provers the model is fairly constraining. But nowadays it seems to start being usable in more cases. Deriving the Lean code from the source code is nice too.

https://medium.com/@Koukyosyumei/proving-rust-web-application-correctness-with-lean-4-8889583f1e15

Modernizing Utility Software Starts With the Workflow, Not the Technology

Tags: tech, complexity, work

Indeed, it would be way too easy if it was just about rewriting in a new stack. It’s often a question of better alignment with a changed context.

https://www.simplethread.com/modernizing-utility-software-starts-with-the-workflow-not-the-technology/

Redesign without fear

Tags: tech, architecture, refactoring

A bit of an advertisement for the author’s book but the advice makes sense. The strangler fig pattern indeed works at smaller scales. Grow the new API first, test it, then port.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2026/10/02/redesign-without-fear/

Bye for now!

Akademy 2026

Kdenlive — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 08:00:00 +0000

In September, I traveled to Graz, Austria, to attend KDE's annual conference - Akademy, which also marked KDE's 30th birthday this year.

Unfortunately I fell sick and was not able to celebrate as much as I would have liked. I wasn't able to attend the welcome event, not the first day of the conference. Luckily there was a great video team covering the event so I could enjoy the live streams.

Julius and Farid kindly replaced me on stage for the presentation about Kdenlive, you can view it here.

On the second day, I felt a bit better so was able to attend a few presentations, like the announcement of the new KDE Goals, and be on the group photo :)

This was also an occasion to meet and discuss with some people from the KDE and Qt community.

Kdenlive

We also used this time to make a few Kdenlive meetings since several of us were at the conference. We mostly discussed the ongoing keyframes refactoring, how the UI should look, and reviewed some of the feedback we had, and promo topics. We also managed to finalize and publish our new homepage with highlighted features.

More exciting Kdenlive news will follow soon as our dev community is very active !

Qt for Python Release: 6.12 is here!

Qt Dev Loop — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:01 +0000

Qt for Python 6.12 is here, alongside the Qt 6.12 LTS release. This is the biggest release we have had in a while. If you haven't read what's new in Qt itself, check out the general announcement.

KDE Ships Frameworks 6.31.0

KDE Community — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Friday, 9 October 2026

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.31.0.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version

Attica

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Baloo

[Codecs] Replace some pointers with references. Commit.
[Codecs] Fix varint helper const correctness. Commit.
Kinotify: handle gracefully event overflow. Commit.
[Codecs] Drop the undefined const overload of getVarint32Ptr. Commit.
[Term] Remove unused Term(const QString&) constructor. Commit.
Change internal AdvancedQueryParser class to QueryParser namespace. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Bluez Qt

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Breeze Icons

Centre the 64px mimetype icons in their canvas. Commit. Fixes bug #508535
Centre the 32px mimetype icons in their canvas. Commit. See bug #508535
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Add a tab-close icon instead of linking to window-close. Commit.
Add audio-speakers-bluetooth, and the other names PipeWire asks for. Commit.
Draw audio-speakers at 22. Commit.
Add Zeal tray icon to status. Commit.

KArchive

K7zip: fix integer promotion when decoding numbers. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Fix leak of rootDir in KArchive. Commit.

KAuth

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KBookmarks

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KCalendarCore

Android platform calendar plugin: drop no longer needed version check. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Enable LSAN in CI. Commit.
Fix memory leaks with libical 4. Commit.
Copy xCal element names during parsing. Commit.

KCMUtils

Fix margins of QML kcms. Commit.
Qml: rework separator API, deprecate extraFooterTopPadding. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Kpluginproxymodel: return value is a boolean not an int. Commit.
Remove unimplemented methods. Commit.

KCodecs

[KEncodingProber] Show final confidence in debug output. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Add statistical approach for UTF-16 and UTF-8 detection. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Evaluate pairs of accented/unaccented for Latin1. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Remove filter from Latin1Prober. Commit.
[kEncodingProber] Improve Latin1 confidence calculation accuracy. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Fix Latin1 model for pair of accented vowels. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Move Latin1 sequence model out of the loop. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Fix some more Latin1 codepoint classifications. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Add Windows-1252 Spanish and French input test. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Latin1: sharp s "ß" is not capital, fix formatting. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Use uint8_t for MBCS distribution and context analyser. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Fix Big5 state tables. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Extend tests for Big 5 encoding. Commit.
Fixes: no matching function for call to... Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Deduplicate code to find best prober. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Fix detection of Windows-1252 in WesternEuropean set. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Remove UTF-8/16 support from SBCS group prober. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Remove UTF-8/16 support from MBCS group prober. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Use Universal prober for Chinese/Korean subset detection. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Use Universal prober for Japanese subset detection. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Use Universal prober for Unicode subset detection. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Make subprobers in UniversalProber selectable. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Fix defaulting to UTF-8 even if invalid. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Fix duplicate/skipped UTF-8/UTF-16 probing. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Split ESC / HZ probers, reduce nesting. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Refactor UtfProber to make it reusable. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Make individual SBCS probers selectable. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Add SBCS and 7 bit probers to enum. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Move prober type enum to nsCharSetProber base class. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Simplify high byte / ESC scan. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Optimize check for sufficient data in JpCntx. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Provide more information in MBCS debug output. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Extend unit tests for CJK. Commit.
[KEncodingProber] Verify UTF-8 detection for Japanese/Unicode prober. Commit.

KColorScheme

KColorSchemeManager: drop code variant for Qt < 6.10. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KCompletion

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
[mem leak] action and qactiongroup parent to this. Commit.

KConfig

KConfigSourceGenerator: Add explicit moc include when we use macros that need moc generation. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Fix writing empty path entries. Commit. Fixes bug #487212
'Open' should have CTRL(O). Commit.
Kstandardshortcut: refactor internal shortcut handling. Commit.
KStandardShortcut: Fix using a null key sequence for removed shortcuts. Commit. Fixes bug #518683

KConfigWidgets

KLanguageButton: fix repainting issues. Commit.
KLanguageButton: fix the language menu overflow. Commit. Fixes bug #471293
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Kstandardaction remove whatsthis for ShowMenubar action. Deduplicate "show" "menubar" text. Commit.
Fix test to work with Qt 6.12. Commit.

KContacts

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KCoreAddons

About: Prefer AppStream data from the same prefix. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Kjob: Expose type as QML. Commit.
Introducing KSafeStringError. Commit.
Properly support Format::LongMode in formatTime(). Commit.
CMake config file: ensure ECM's UDev/LibMount find modules w/ static builds. Commit.

KCrash

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KDav

Fix documentation formatting. Commit.
Add DavPushUnregisterJob for unsubscribing dav push notifications. Commit.
Add davpushregistrationjob for subscribing DavPush notifications. Commit.
Add DavItemsSyncJob that fetches only changed items using sync-token. Commit.
Add detection of sync-tag property in collection fetch. Commit.
Add DavPushDontNotify to item and collection operations. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Fix CI tests by closing conncetions after each requests. Commit.
Fix since version. Commit.

KDBusAddons

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KDeclarative

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KDE Daemon

Fix ordering on Plasma 6.8. Commit. Fixes bug #525764

KDE SU

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KDNSSD

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KDocTools

Kde-include-common.xsl.cmake fix build warning "failed to load" "pt-BR.xml". Commit.

KFileMetaData

Fix abort in malformed file. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
FFmpegExtractor: Extract Apple-proprietary metadata. Commit.
FFmpegExtractor: Extract GPS latitude and longitude. Commit.
FFmpegExtractor: Extract creation time. Commit.
Fix exception crash on malformed files. Commit.

KGlobalAccel

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KGuiAddons

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
CMake config file: update wayland dep checks w/ static builds. Commit.

KHolidays

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Update Belgian (French-speaking) holidays. Commit.

KI18n

KF6I18nQml: list Qt6::QmlIntegration in public link interface. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
The old URL stopped being valid. Commit.

KIconThemes

Deprecate KIconLoader::loadScaledIcon overload with int type size arg. Commit.
KIconLoader::loadIcon/loadScaledIcon(): forward directly to implementation. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KIdletime

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KImageformats

Enable LSAN in CI. Commit.
EXR: store of "adobe_rsrc" attribute with XMP/EXIF/Resolution data. Commit.
EXR: support for metadata saved by Photoshop. Commit.
ANIHandler::nextImageDelay: Protect against overflow. Commit.
Autotests: add AVIF image-grid image to read test. Commit.
Ossfuzz: update libaom to 3.15.0. Commit.
EXR: fix alpha channel imperpretation. Commit.
EXR: RGB / YC subtype support. Commit.

KIO

Use d-pointer for RenameFileWarningDialog. Commit.
Kfileplacesview: elide the name of a place once, not on every paint. Commit.
KFileItem: share one QMimeType per name across items. Commit.
Renamefiledialog: let Enumerate keep the old file name. Commit. See bug #460626
Ktrash: report errors and exit non-zero on --empty/--restore failure. Commit. See bug #444719. See bug #413360
File_unix: unify FSTAT declaration. Commit.
Deletejobtest: watch the file tree, not the progress reports. Commit.
Kdirlistertest: share the worker that lists a search result. Commit.
Fix build with Qt 6.11.2 on Android. Commit.
Kurlnavigator "Copy Location" is the text used when you right click on file. Commit.
KCoreDirLister: update search results when a file is deleted or renamed. Commit. Fixes bug #392456
Thumbnail cache: Prevent repeated creation of already created thumbnails. Commit. See bug #526038
Krecentdocument: Reuse an already-known MIME type for recent-documents bookkeeping. Commit.
Kmountpoint: Consider all non-local fuse filesystems as slow in KMountPoint::probablySlow. Commit.
KNewFileMenu: resolve symlink targets when creating a new link. Commit. Fixes bug #525084
Copyjob: add a private header for tests. Commit.
[ftp] Synthesize missing '.' directory entries. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Fix since version for rename warning API. Commit.
Workers/ftp: implement proper file modification timestamps using RFC3659. Commit. Fixes bug #510976
Kdirlister: keep entries that share a name but not a url. Commit. Fixes bug #524791
Kemailclientlauncherjob: handle characters % , '. Commit.
Kurlrequester: Fix mem leak in slotOpenDialog. Commit.
Git-blame-ignore-revs: add insertServices reorganisation commit. Commit.
Kfileitemactions: move insertServices and insertServicesSubmenus closer to where they are used. Commit.
Ftpd: expand the directory the mock server is given. Commit.
Ftpd: require stringio for the mock server. Commit.
Widgets: Update RenameFileWarningDialog since version. Commit.
Widgets: Rename RenameFileWarning to RenameFileWarningDialog. Commit.
Widgets: rely on KConfig autosync for rename warnings. Commit.
Widgets: make rename warning dialogs window-modal. Commit.
Widgets: replace rename warning callback with QObject API. Commit.
Kio: use 'accepted' instead of 'proceed' in confirmRenameWarning. Commit.
Add KIO::confirmRenameWarning() helper for consistent rename confirmations. Commit.
File: copy one file through one routine. Commit.
File: put the content transfer of a copy in one place. Commit.
Fix build error by adding include in file_unix_copy.cpp. Commit.
File: move the copying code to its own source file. Commit.
Copyjob: stop counting the file being copied as one that is done. Commit.
Copyjob: report one percentage per report. Commit.
Kurifiltersearchprovider: parent QActionGroup to the actions menu. Commit.
Copyjob: three corrections to taking a skipped file off the byte total. Commit.
KFileItem: detect locally mounted remote filesystems in isSlow(). Commit. Fixes bug #460127
Trash: Watch physical trash directories for changes. Commit. Fixes bug #465581
Copyjob: stop counting a skipped directory as one that was processed. Commit.
Copyjob: take a skipped file out of the byte total. Commit.
Copyjob: count a file the user skipped as one the job is done with. Commit.
Copyjob: publish the byte total whichever way the stating phase ends. Commit.
Copyjob: keep the percentage of a move inside 100. Commit.
Copyjob: let a test say how often a job reports. Commit.
Copyjob: count the files a move skipped, not the sources it renamed. Commit.
Unexport private method in PreviewJob. Commit.
Fix documentation syntax. Commit.

Kirigami

GlobalDrawerActionItem: port away from QQC Impl. Commit.
Forms/cards: Fix label visibility for fullWidth form entries. Commit.
Forms: Don't indent other form entries for fullWidth: true. Commit.
Delegates/TitleSubtitleWithActions: Pass through textFormat. Commit.
Columnview: Fix rapid touch taps not working by fasttracking anim. Commit. Fixes bug #523866
Check whether applicationWindow is a function and not undefined. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Set CMAKE_MODULE_PATH directly to ECM_MODULE_PATH. Commit.
Kirigami_add_tests: initialize _extra_args variable in all cases. Commit.
Remove unused Kirigami_EXTRA_LIBS variable. Commit.
Fix usage of misnamed KF_INSTALL_TARGETS_DEFAULT_ARGS. Commit.
Enums: Add api doc for MessageType. Commit.
Doc: adjust example for Badge and add screenshot. Commit.
Doc: fix broken example of PlaceholderMessage. Commit.
Doc: adjust example for Chip and add screenshot. Commit.
ActionsMenu: Tie loader's visibility to its action's visibility. Commit. Fixes bug #525225
ActionsMenu: Tie separator's visibility to its action's visibility. Commit. Fixes bug #525225
Controls: fix submenus on collapsed GlobalDrawer. Commit.
Controls: avoid shadowing property. Commit.
Controls: avoid unqualified lookups in private drawer items. Commit.
Remove unused imports. Commit.
Forms: use application singleton. Commit.
Assert types. Commit.
Use stronger types. Commit.
Controls/private: make CallBackWrapper named type. Commit.
Controls: qualify parent properties. Commit.
Add textFormat property to other delegates. Commit.
Delegates/IconTitleSubtitle: Add textFormat property and pass through to TitleSubtitle. Commit.
PlatformTheme: Insert frameContrast to the data. Commit. Fixes bug #525364

KItemModels

Add more missing doc for QML interfaces. Commit.
Ksortfilterproxymodel: Improve documentation. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KItemViews

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KJobWidgets

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KMime

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KNewStuff

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KNotifications

Fix handling of deleted audio notifications. Commit. Fixes bug #525380
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
CMake config file: ensure ECM's Canberra find module w/ static builds. Commit.
Merge audio plugin into other plugins. Commit.

KNotifyConfig

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KPackage

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KParts

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KPeople

Remove no longer needed moc include. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KPlotting

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KPTY

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KQuickCharts

LegendDelegate: Force name to be plain text. Commit.

KRunner

AbstractRunnerTest: Utilize std::make_unique rather than calling .reset. Commit.
Port away from deprecated QSortFilterProxyModel::invalidateFilter. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KService

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Keep the shortest inheritance level when merging duplicate offers. Commit.

KStatusNotifieritem

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Remove unimplemented method + not existing forward declaration. Commit.

KSVG

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KTextEditor

Autotests: Verify when opening test files. Commit.
Vi-mode: Allow numpad digits to be used as count. Commit.
.kde-ci.yml - use run-installed-library-check-on with platform list. Commit.
Keep m_cursor & m_displayCursor better in sync. Commit. Fixes bug #525170
A11y: Fix text boundary offsets. Commit. Fixes bug #523883
Vi-mode: Add binary format to addition commands. Commit.
Vi-mode: Fix behavior of operation commands on numbers. Commit.
Vi-mode: Implement addition/substraction commands for visual modes. Commit.
Ensure we do some initial reload if we just enabled auto reload in the prompt. Commit. Fixes bug #524241
Move color theme selector to 'View' as that is view local. Commit. Fixes bug #518920
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Vi-mode: Fix motion for the backspace key. Commit.
KateIconBorder: Fill the blank area at the end. Commit.
Escape file path before using it as error text. Commit.
Add missing include. Commit.

KTextTemplate

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KTextWidgets

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KUnitConversion

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
CMake config file: add missing dep checks for static builds. Commit.
Fix typos. Commit.

KUserFeedback

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KWallet

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Ksecretd: Rename setter for clarity. Commit.
Use enum instead of int in function signature. Commit.
Ksecretd: Drop unused entryUpdated signal. Commit.
Ksecretd: Don't call emitEntryUpdated in writePassword. Commit.
Ksecretd: Drop redundant writeEntry function. Commit.
Ksecretd: Preserve entry type in setLabel. Commit.
Ksecretd: Remove unneeded null check in internalClose. Commit.
Ksecretd: Use find_if in KSecretD::findWallet. Commit.
Ksecretd: Simplify destruction. Commit.
Ksecretd: Drop KWalletTransaction::OpenFail. Commit.
Ksecretd: Manage KWalletTransaction as move-only type. Commit.
Ksecretd: Use QScopedValueRollback. Commit.
Ksecretd: Remove empty KWalletTransaction dtor definition. Commit.
Ksecretd: Drop Unknown transaction type. Commit.
Ksecretd: Drop dead code in transaction handling. Commit.
Ksecretd: Use QFuture for changing password. Commit.
Ksecretd: Use QFuture for opening the wallet. Commit.

KWidgetsAddons

KActionMenuTest::testActionMenu: fix leaking util widget instance. Commit.
KDatePickerTest/KDateComboBoxTest: use QTest's static initMain() utility. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
KCharSelectData::openDataFile: Check open succeeds. Commit.

KWindowSystem

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

KXMLGUI

Kxmlguiwindow: don't hardcode bug report address. Commit.
Only add noMerge to the menu if we're really saving a merged menu. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Modem Manager Qt

Fix since version in documentation. Commit.
Update manager interface to latest MM API. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Network Manager Qt

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Oxygen Icons

48x48 and 64x64 versions of the koko app icon. Commit.
Add scalable svgz variant of koko icon. Commit.
Add koko icon. Commit.
Initial experiment on plasma-studio icon. Commit.
Improved version. Commit.
Fix missing fill:none on zeal-tray symbolic icon. Commit.
Fix hardcoded black stroke color in disk/drive 32x32 symbolic icons. Commit.
New icons. Commit.

Prison

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Add separate CMake config file for KF6PrisonScanner. Commit.

Purpose

JobDialog: Fix translation call when cancelling. Commit. See bug #525866
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Plugins/bluetooth: Escape html. Commit.

QQC2 Desktop Style

Add DoubleSpinBox. Commit. Fixes bug #526008

Solid

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Always check that we don't pass a nullptr to CFRelease. Commit.

Sonnet

Core/Settings: Make a few functions invokable. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Syndication

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Syntax Highlighting

Perl: Missing operators, fix END section, operators style, heredoc languages, POD fix. Commit.
Systemd unit: update to systemd v262. Commit.
Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.
Zsh: prefer 'Parameter Expansion Operator' to 'Control' for ',' in subscript (i.e. $foo[1,2]). Commit.
Zsh: remove identical contexts or replaces rules with . Commit.
Zsh: fix some forms of floating number using separator. Commit.
Zsh: use Base style for anything that refers to base change and BaseN for associated numbers. Commit.
Zsh: use 'Replacement String' style in ${foo/patt/rep}. Commit.
Zsh: glob: enclosed characters: fix ']', '-' and '!' at the beginning of the pattern. Commit.
Zsh: replace ' &tab;' with '&ws;' entity. Commit.
Zsh: fix subscripting expansion followed by modifier (i.e. ${s:1:4:h}). Commit.
Zsh: glob modifier: add :f, :F, :w and :W ; :s behaves like with brace parameter. Commit.
Zsh: add f, F, w and W modifiers with variable when braces are absent. Commit.
Zsh: remove :x and :& modifier with variable when braces are absent. Commit.
Zsh: fix :s modifier with variable when braces are absent. Commit.
Zsh: fix subscript chain with variable when braces are absent, the second and subsequent ones are patterns. Commit.
Zsh: remove VarNameParam+ context and replace its use with VarNameSubstLen. Commit.
Zsh: add brace command substitution of zsh-5.10: ${ cmd }, ${|cmd} and ${{param} cmd}. Commit.
Zsh: add $[...] equivalent to arithmetic expansion $((...)). Commit.
Zsh: fix subscript and variable substring. Commit.
Zsh: fix glob subscript after modifier when braces are absent (i.e. $x:h[...]). Commit.
Zsh: fix digits after modifiers h and t when braces are absent (i.e. $foo:h3). Commit.
Zsh: fix value of character in arithmetic context (i.e. ##c and #word). Commit.
Use offscreen plugin for the one UI test. Commit.
Add LRC Lyrics syntax highlighting. Commit.

Threadweaver

Use ECMInstalledLibraryCheck. Commit.

Introducing the QML Live Preview MCP Tool for Agentic Development of Embedded Devices

Qt Dev Loop — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 11:34:35 +0000

Agents Edit QML, But Don’t See the Result Without Building, Compiling, and Running

AI agents can make many UI changes in a single iteration. AI agents edit files, maybe run a build, and then report success. Every change can costs a full rebuild and relaunch, or it goes unchecked by the developer. Qt's QML Live Preview MCP tool makes autonomous AI agent work transparent for the developer at a low token expense: it runs the app and hot reloads changed QML files, without a rebuild and without a restart.

KDE Gear 26.08.2

KDE Community — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over 180 individual applications plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

kdev-python: Fix undefined behavior in popExpression() (Commit, fixes bugs #525418)
kmail: Fix a crash when sending signed email (Commit, fixes bugs #525868)
plasmatube: Fix protocol being chopped off urls (Commit, fixes bug #525299)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

26.08 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
Package download wiki page
26.08.2 source info page
26.08.2 full changelog

Qt for MCUs 2.12.3 LTS Released

Qt Dev Loop — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:00:01 +0000

Qt for MCUs 2.12.3 LTS has been released and is available for download. This patch release provides several bug fixes and other improvements while maintaining source compatibility with Qt for MCUs 2.12 (see Qt for MCUs 2.12 LTS released). This patch release is stability and user workflow focused and does not add any new functionality. Below are some highlights of the improvements introduced. A comprehensive list of changes can be found here.

From Figma to Qt: A Comparison Between Manual and Assisted Workflows

Qt Dev Loop — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 12:29:47 +0000

We know that one of the biggest challenges for embedded UI/UX designers is to see their design vision through to the final product. That’s why earlier this year, we launched Figma to Qt: a plug-in that helps designers craft, preview, verify, and approve Qt applications without ever leaving Figma.

My Notes from Akademy 2026

Siddharth Chopra — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing this blog today feels a bit unreal. Six months ago, if you had told me I'd be attending Akademy in-person, 3000 miles from home - I probably wouldn't have believed you. And yet, here we are.

So I attended Akademy 2026, in Graz - and my experience was truly remarkable. I learnt a lot about the KDE Community, met some amazing people and returned with a fresh boost of motivation to keep contributing to the KDE Community! It also happened to be my first trip to Europe, and it really lived up to the expectations!

The Conference

The talks were fun & informative and gave us a chance to catch up with everything going on in the community, which happens to be quite vast. Some talks went deep into technical aspects, some gave us rapid fire project updates, some discussed future plans and goals, whereas some were about the community and its values. The new KDE goals were also revealed, which was cool to witness live!

Out of all, some talks really stood out to me, including the one on desktop UX by Scott Jenson, KaDAI by Eva Brucherseifer & Jan Mühlig, and the history of KDE code by Cornelius Schumacher.

But what was more interesting were the many conversations, short and long, that happened with various people. It was also a pleasure to finally meet my SoK mentor, Carl Schwan in person! It was fun meeting some experienced people from the community, including Lydia, Bhushan, Aniqa, Richard Gustavsen from Qt, Áron and many more!

Everything Else

With how beautiful Austria is, whatever time we had to explore felt too little. Still, we managed to see around Graz, Vienna, Hallstatt and Riegersburg. Cycling around Graz was really fun, especially in the mountainous outskirts. Vienna and its buildings were as grand as one would imagine. The Graz old town was also quite happening and picturesque. Hallstatt (albeit really cold) was absolutely beautiful and pristine. Riegersburg offered a glimpse into rural Austria and the Zotter chocolate factory.

Apart from the conference there were some other fun events also part of Akademy, including the welcome event, KDE's 30th birthday party and a day trip.

Here are some of my best clicks from the trip :)

I am really grateful to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my trip, without which it wouldn't have been possible! Also, huge shoutout to my companions and new found friends - Srisharan V. S., Tushar Gupta, Ansh Singhal and Ojas Maheshwari :)

Looking forward to working with the community and making this my first Akademy of many more to come!

2026-10-05 Fossy Camp KDE

Shawn W Dunn — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 14:19:57 +0000

Camp KDE at FOSSY 2026: Vancouver Edition

I just got to writing this blog post, regarding FOSSY 2026 in Vancouver, where I co-ran the Camp KDE track, gave a talk, sat on a panel, and spent a decent chunk of the weekend standing behind a table full of stickers. Here’s how it went.

The Camp KDE booth at FOSSY 2026 with everyone who helped out

Celebrating 30 years of KDE at Akademy 2026

Qt Dev Loop — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 08:53:56 +0000

Two weeks ago, several of us from Qt Group travelled to Graz for Akademy 2026, KDE's annual summit. The conference was hosted by Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). This year’s conference was extra special: it marked KDE's 30th birthday. Happy birthday, KDE!

Figma to Qt 1.1: Test Design Live, Ship It Anywhere

Qt Dev Loop — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:52:40 +0000

Click, drag, and tweak your design in Live Preview before a developer builds it. Ship the same workflow to flagship touchscreens and microcontrollers. And get more of what you draw back as native QML.

A new initiative: Tagoross Circle of Practice

Agustín Benito Bethencourt — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

I introduce Tagoross Circle of Practice, a safe harbor environment for professionals moving their organizations from reactive open source risk management to open source as strategy. In this post I explain why I created it and where it stands today.

Harmonicon's song editor, explained with one song about a jumping harmonica

Tomaz Canabrava — Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This one is about the song editor. Harmonicon has a song editor, it’s had one for a while, I just never sat down and explained what all the little buttons do, and there are a lot of little buttons. The game says four hundred and thirty one, but most of those are notes pretending to be buttons, so it’s less than that.

So I’m going to load a song into it and walk around the screen.

The song

The song is O Pulo da Gaita, or “The harmonica’s jump” in english. It’s a folk theme from the Northeast of Brazil, people know it from “O Auto da Compadecida”, and the Northeast is where I’m from, Salvador, so I’m a bit biased.

It’s a good song to show the editor with because it’s busy without being hard. Two hundred and thirty nine notes in a bit over a minute, on a C diatonic, in 2/4, at 100 bpm, and eighteen of those notes are bends. And the whole tune hangs on one move: you bend the 3 draw down half a step and then let it go, back up to the plain B. Bend, release. Remember that, it comes back.

The whole screen

There are three things on this screen, and once you know that it stops being four hundred and thirty one things.

Down the left there’s the sidebar, which is two columns. The left column is about the song and the tools: going back, the Edit / Record / Play modes, the lock, undo and redo, copy and paste, the tools for selecting and erasing ranges of time, tempo and meter changes, repeats and endings, the metronome, the legend, save and load. The right column is about the note. The one you have selected, or if you have nothing selected, the next one you’re going to place. Blow or draw, bend, overblow, overdraw, wah, vibrato and how deep, call and response, split, the phrase editor, delete. So the left column is “what am I doing” and the right column is “to which note”.

In the middle is the grid. One lane per hole, ten of them because it’s a ten hole harmonica, numbered down the side. Time goes left to right, and along the top there’s the ruler, counting bars and beats. This song is in 2/4, so the ruler goes “1 & 2 &” and then starts a new bar. Every note is a little block on the lane of the hole you play it on, with an arrow on it, up for blow, down for draw.

Under the last lane there’s a thin strip that says Silence, which shows the gaps between notes so you can spot a rest you didn’t mean. And under that there’s a scrollbar that’s also a tiny map of the whole song, every note drawn as a coloured speck, with a gold bit showing where you’re looking right now. In this screenshot the gold bit is about a fifth of the way along, so the song is roughly five screens long.

Along the bottom is a music staff, the same notes as sheet music. It follows the grid when you scroll, so you can read it as a harmonica player (holes and arrows) or as a musician (dots on lines), or both.

Colours, and how I got them wrong

Now look at hole 3 in that first screenshot. There’s a blue one, then an orange one, then a sort of mauve one, and then another blue. And I looked at that and I thought, the mauve one is the bend, and I wrote a paragraph about it.

Then I opened the Details tab, which has the colour legend in it, and the legend said: orange is the bend. Deeper bends get redder. And the mauve isn’t a technique at all, it’s a red tint, and it means “this note is outside the song’s scale”.

So that’s the bend and the release, right there. The orange one is the 3 draw bent down half a step. The mauve one is the 3 draw let go, back up to B, and B gets the tint because the editor is checking every note against a blues scale on C, and there’s no B in it. It’s not an error, it’s just the editor pointing it out. The tune does it on purpose, fifteen times, I counted: fifteen bends on the 3 draw, fifteen releases. The other three bends, to make up the eighteen, are on the 2 draw, down at the end, where the song answers itself.

And the same two notes show up again in bar 3. And again later. Bend, release.

Picking a note

In that close-up I’ve got the mauve one selected. A selected note gets a gold border and two little round handles, one on each end, and you drag those to make the note longer or shorter. Drag the middle of it and it moves. Click it and you hear it, the editor plays a short blip of exactly that note, bend and all, so you can check a bend sounds like a bend without picking up the harmonica.

The other thing selecting does is it goes and finds the note on the staff and paints it gold too, so you can see where you are in the actual music. And the right column of the sidebar lights up Draw, because that’s what the note is. Click Blow and it would turn into a blow note.

Phrases

Up in the header, above the lanes, there are these gold labels, “§ A” at the start and “§ A again” at bar 9. Those are phrase markers, and you can click one and it opens a little panel right there.

Section is the name of the bit of the song. Chord is the chord under it, if you want the player to know. Groove is how it should feel, something like “laid back”, in words, for humans. And Lyric is the syllable that’s sung when those notes start, which then shows up karaoke style during the game. This chart doesn’t have chords or lyrics filled in yet, which is why those three boxes are empty.

Details

The other tab is Details, and it’s where the song keeps its paperwork.

On the left there’s everything about the song itself: the harmonica type, the key (C), the position (1st), the tempo (100), the grid snap, who wrote it (Traditional), the genre, the difficulty, where the transcription came from, and the licence. In the middle there’s how strict the game is when it scores you: how many milliseconds count as perfect, as good, as a miss, how the combo multiplier works, and which phrases loop. And on the right is the legend, which I should have read first.

The status line at the bottom says where the chart was loaded from.

So that’s the editor. Three parts, two tabs, one legend, and a song that bends the 3 draw and lets it go, and bends it and lets it go. You can play it, it’s in the song pack, and it’s on GitHub with everything else.

Bend, release.

Akademy 2026 in Graz

Carl Schwan — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:05:00 +0000

Two weekends ago, I spent around 24 hours in a train to go to and back from Graz to attend Akademy. This year was a bit special since we are celebrating the 30 years of KDE and this was also my first time attending as a member of the KDE e.V. board.

Unfortunately I could only attend the weekend as I was also expected at the Nextcloud Community Conference in Berlin during the week.

I attended a bunch of talks, one of my favorite was “Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?” from Scott Jenson, which I found super interesting and insightful. It really was a call for us to try to innovate and experiment with new UX concepts and he proposed some interesting directions, where we could be going. A good wake up call that now that macOS and Windows are not inventing anything anymore on the desktop we should be driving UX changes forward.

I also very much liked the talk “What Has Been Brewing in KDE PIM Land?” from Dominique Michel and arnaud chirat. As a fellow PIMster, it is great to see some real progress on fixing some longstanding issue in the backend. It’s great to see the Sovereign Tech Agency investing in this core technology. This also motivated me to spend some time on improving Merkuro again (more on that in a separate post).

Aside from that, as always it’s great to meet up with my fellow KDE developers, share some drinks, exchange ideas or just catch up.

On Saturday evening, I attended the sponsors dinner to discuss a bit with our sponsors. Akademy is a free event to attend and we are very grateful about companies sponsoring us to make it happen.

Sunday morning, I went for a short stroll across the city, because while I was only staying for the weekend, I still wanted to discover Graz at least a bit.

The famous clock tower of graz

Music

Konqi

View from Graz

Kirigami Addons 1.15.0

Carl Schwan — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 15:00:00 +0000

After a few weeks of work, I am happy to announce that Kirigami Addons 1.15.0 is out. Kirigami Addons is a collection of many useful modules for your QML and Kirigami applications. I have been working more on Merkuro lately (more on that in a separate blog post) and as always when working on an application, it is also the occasion to improve Kirigami Addons even more :)

FormCard

The FormCard module received a new component, FormSliderDelegate, which is a form delegate for sliders.

Another nice improvement in terms of usability is that FormCard has a new property, autoSeparators, to automatically add and manage separators between delegates. This allows simplifying some code and in particular code involving Repeater. Internally, the AboutPage component already uses it.

Speaking of AboutPage, this component will now indicate when a new version is available and no longer shows “unknown” as the distribution mechanism. Additionally, the links now use FormGridContainer and we fixed the sizing of its internal dialogs.

In terms of mobile UI, FormTextFieldDelegate and FormPasswordFieldDelegate now have a special mobile design where the text field is hidden until clicked. On top of being a bit more compact, this also improves the input interaction and scrolling on mobile.

Date and time

The date and time popup can now be reset when resettable is set to true. Before, you could only set a new value but not reset it to an unset state. This is useful in Merkuro Contact, where we can unset a birthday or anniversary for a contact.

There are more changes planned around the date and time module, and I have a huge pending merge request for using proper date and time objects instead of JS dates, which should fix a lot of edge cases.

KirigamiApp

KirigamiAppDefaults has a new load() function. It loads your main QML module and, if loading fails, shows the QML errors to the user instead of silently exiting. On desktop the errors are displayed in a native message box, and on Android a Qt Quick dialog is used so you don’t need to depend on Qt Widgets. This makes debugging startup issues a lot easier, especially when the application is launched outside of a terminal.

QQmlApplicationEngine engine;
KLocalization::setupLocalizedContext(&engine);
if (!KirigamiAppDefaults::load("org.kde.myapp", u"Main", &engine)) {
 return EXIT_FAILURE;
}
return app.exec();

Documentation

This release also includes various improvements to the documentation with some module overviews and cleanups of the existing documentation. For example, here are the overview pages for the formcard, actions and settings modules.

We also updated the application templates provided by Kirigami Addons to be up to date with the best practices.

Packager section

Kirigami Addons now requires Qt 6.10 or later.

You can find the package on download.kde.org (kirigami addons) and it has been signed with my GPG key.

KStars 3.8.5 Released

Jasem Mutlaq — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:10:16 +0000

KStars v3.8.5 is released on 2026.10.03 for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. We are providing arm64 (Apple Silicon) and x86_64 variants for the MacOS release, but we hope to release a universal binary by the next KStars release.

For Linux users, it's highly recommended to use the official KStars Flatpak hosted at Flathub.

This release brings major stability improvements, a comprehensive AI Guider overhaul with multi-night training and closed-loop fixes, expanded MCP tool coverage for headless automation, multi-camera support in Analyze, and significant enhancements to the scheduler, capture, and guide modules. Here are some highlights:

FITS Viewer Quality of Life improvements

You can now drag and drop any FITS/XISF files directly unto the KStars sky map and it would be automatically opened. If you dragged a folder, it would be opened in Blink mode. Furthermore, when opening FITS files from file manager (e.g. Dolphin), it now re-uses the same KStars instance and does not open a new instance for each new file.

AI Guider: Major Reliability & Performance Overhaul

Fixed closed-loop RLS divergence in Active mode — the online phase/amplitude tracker in WormGearGuider (WORM_GEAR mounts like the EQ8) could re-learn its own leftover prediction error once its output started influencing the applied pulse, making RA guiding measurably worse under Active mode than Standard. The tracker now freezes whenever the applied pulse contains the AI's own prediction, preventing contamination. Confirmed live: RA RMS improved from 3.06" (diverging Active) to 2.41" (frozen Active) vs. a 3.56–5.38" Standard baseline.
Per-axis confidence — RA and DEC now maintain independent confidence scores instead of sharing one across both axes. A bad prediction on one axis no longer drags the other axis's trust up or down. Verified live: DEC RMS improved 4.75"→1.26" same-session A/B after the split.
Shadow Mode now stays in Shadow Mode — applyFingerprintToOptions() was unconditionally switching the guide algorithm to AI on every weights load, defeating Shadow Mode's purpose. Verified live: a 1500+s Shadow session held Standard/SHADOW throughout with zero AI-influenced pulses.
Multi-night pooling and neural Shape Net for RA — new offline training scripts (pool_sysid_data.py, train_shape_net.py, loocv_shape_net.py) pool free-drift data across multiple nights, phase-aligning each night to its own fitted period before combining. A small neural net (phase, altitude → predicted RA drift) trained on pooled data beats a fixed 4-harmonic Fourier baseline by a statistically real margin (95% CI excludes zero), winning in 7 out of 7 held-out nights. LOOCV-validated with a night-level cluster bootstrap.
DEC online drift tracker — adds a 1-state recursive Kalman filter tracking residual DEC rate against the existing physics baseline (refraction + polar drift). First live test achieved r=0.65 then r=0.55 physics_dec vs actual DEC error — the strongest correlation of the investigation. Matched-altitude live A/B testing found real altitude-dependent patterns (~29% DEC RMS improvement at low altitude, reversing to ~22% worse at mid altitude). Per-mount opt-in via weights.json's new residual_filter section.
Multi-harmonic PE model — extended from a single sinusoid to 4 independently-tracked harmonics (RA), mirrored in the offline trainer's physics model. Real free-drift data shows significant power through the 4th harmonic that a single-sinusoid model structurally cannot represent.
Safer AI/PID pulse blending — fixed a chronic RA under-correction bug where proportional gain was backed off by a flat confidence-scaled fraction regardless of whether the AI's feed-forward term was large enough to replace the P-authority being removed. Replaced with a capped backoff that only removes as much P as the AI term demonstrably reinforces, proven via unit tests to never weaken the blend below plain P+I when the AI term doesn't justify it.
PID Auto-Tune improvements — cold vs. warm pulses now distinguished (3 consecutive pulses per direction instead of alternating), and Andreas R. added a short-exposure switch during pulse_response phases (0.25s) so the default ~2s guide cadence can actually sample the dead-time transient the fitter needs. DEC auto-tune timing tightened (12 response frames/10s settle → 6/2s) to keep the axis closer to continuously engaged.
PE period detection fixed — train_worm_gear.py was picking a 2nd-harmonic peak (~100s) over the true fundamental (~198–201s) via a bare argmax() over one Lomb-Scargle periodogram. Now walks toward longer periods when a comparably-strong harmonic relationship exists, gated on ≥2.5 cycles resolved.
Fixed k_ref (RA refraction term) loaded from weights.json but never read by physicsRA()
RLS cold-start now warm-starts from the offline-trained physics fit instead of zero, with anisotropic covariance
AI Guide Wizard slew-skip bug fixed — a restarted session could silently skip its slew by matching a stale target position
Data-collection phases now target a frame COUNT (with wall-clock as a 3x backstop) instead of fixed duration, so slower Debug-build cadence doesn't silently halve the frame count
AI debug CSV logging added for dark-guiding pulses (previously only visible via verbose qCDebug)

Scheduler & Observatory Automation

Fixed scheduler not shutting down when a safety alert outlasts the job — with the weather grace period set to wait indefinitely, an alert lasting past a job's completion constraint left the observatory open (reported in daylight in one incident). The monitoring branch now releases the active job when a soft shutdown starts, re-evaluates jobs before any post-startup task, and runs the full shutdown when no job is left.
Fixed internal guider not guiding after the scheduler restarts it while suspended — when a scheduler job repeats and its sequence ends with non-light frames (e.g. flats), guiding is still suspended when the next iteration starts. The cgmath suspend flag set by suspend() was never cleared, so every guide frame was skipped for the rest of the night. BUG: 526397
Fixed scheduler retrying autofocus on an optical train without focuser — when a Focus tab switched to an optical train without a focuser, canAutoFocus() kept reporting the capability of the previously selected focuser. The scheduler then started autofocus on the train without focuser, which aborted and was retried until the job aborted and rescheduled, oscillating between Scheduled and Running.
Fixed scheduler double-counting captured frames for targets with a dot in the name — Wolfgang Reissenberger fixed PlaceholderPath::getCompletedFiles() deriving its file-matching pattern by stripping everything from the last . onward. A target like SNR_G108.2-0.6 got truncated right after that dot, discarding camera, filter, exposure, date tokens. Two optical trains capturing the same target into a shared directory each reported the combined frame count instead of its own.
Fixed UI test startup D-Bus service name and location — locationNamed("Greenwich") returns Greenwich, Connecticut with US DST rules while tests expect Greenwich, UK
Fixed greedy scheduler tests using the standard-time UTC offset instead of DST
Fixed scheduler not creating the Ekos Manager while loading sequence files (crashed testschedulerunit)
Added scheduler and test pitfalls to AGENTS.md — notes for AI agents from the scheduler weather work
Thomas Nemer added MCP scheduler tool family: scheduler_status, scheduler_jobs, scheduler_current_job, scheduler_start/scheduler_stop, scheduler_load

Camera & Capture

Fixed follower camera hanging after focusing — Wolfgang Reissenberger fixed a multi-camera bug where a follower camera could get stuck after re-focusing if the camera was paused while the lead camera dithered and a re-focus became due at the moment the sequence continued. Resuming a paused sequence now retries pending actions instead of giving up after the first attempt.
Fixed capture status label stuck at "Focus Offset" — Wolfgang Reissenberger fixed the status label over the capture preview keeping "Focus Offset" while the frame is being exposed instead of switching back to "Capturing".
Capture: do not restart an aborted sequence when dithering ends — Wolfgang Reissenberger fixed capturing that was stopped while a dithering run is still in progress restarting on its own as soon as the dithering finishes. Only capturing that was paused for the dithering itself is now resumed.
Unified Temperature with Gain/Offset "no value" semantics — removed the separate enforce checkbox (could fall out of sync with the spinbox's own value) and gave Temperature the same special-value convention Gain/Offset already use: the spinbox itself carries a "--" sentinel (min - step) for "no target temperature".
Fixed dark frame matching to use the target chip's camera, not the dialog's — DarkLibrary::findDarkFrame() read gain/temperature from the camera tied to the optical train selected in the Dark Library dialog, not the camera that owns the chip being matched. For setups with a dedicated guide camera, this caused valid dark frames to be rejected on a gain mismatch that never existed.
Multi-camera bug fixed: disconnect from old camera device if device changes — Wolfgang Reissenberger fixed the camera tab not disconnecting from its former device if the device has been changed (e.g. optical train switched). Turning off cooling on the first camera appeared to turn off cooling on the second camera as well (the INDI driver showed cooling was still on).
jc tk added camera name and optical train placeholders for filename generation: %opticaltrain/%o and %cameraname/%c
Andreas R. added stream depth selector for video sequences — a combo box (Stream OFF / 16-bit / 8-bit) in the capture sequence editor for video frame type, allowing users to specify bit depth directly in the sequence file
Thomas Nemer added MCP capture sequence tool family: capture_status, capture_get_jobs, capture_start/capture_stop/capture_abort, capture_suspend/capture_pause/capture_resume, capture_load_sequence, capture_set_target

Guide

Warn when mount stops tracking while guiding is active — if the mount reports MOUNT_IDLE or MOUNT_ERROR while guiding/dithering is running, Guide now fires a loud GuideFailed notification instead of silently guiding into a wall (e.g. AM5N mounts spontaneously losing tracking mid-session per user reports).
Andreas R. added reset calibration when the field rotates — an opt-in option that invalidates a completed/stored guide calibration when the field has rotated (detected via the Align module's plate-solved position angle), so a fresh calibration is measured on the next guide start instead of guiding on a stale, rotated one. Handles both electronic rotator moves and manual camera rotation. Works with the internal guider and PHD2. Meridian flip changes are explicitly excluded via pier-side tracking and a 180° magnitude fallback.
Andreas R. added a Stream OFF/16-bit/8-bit selector (per optical train) — replaces the guide module's Stream checkbox with a stream mode combo box offering three choices. The selection is saved per optical train. Includes Camera::setStreamDepth(int) helper (0 = 8-bit, 1 = 16-bit).
Andreas R. fixed GUI freeze on streaming guide + normal dither (self-join deadlock) — a hard GUI freeze with the internal guider in streaming mode when the capture module requests a normal (multi-pulse) dither. Ekos locks up the instant "Dithering…" is logged. Root cause: a stream frame processed on the GUI thread spins a nested QEventLoop during star extraction, which dispatches the imaging camera's queued newImage → dither → synchronous InternalGuider::dither() → findStars on the same FITSData whose extraction future is still running inline → deadlock. Streaming normal dither now uses the same deferred path as single-frame guiding.
Andreas R. made calibration always run single-frame; stream only while guiding — streaming guide calibration produces erratic results (scattered plots, mis-estimated pulse rates, "Lost track of the guide star" aborts) because calibration is frame-driven and assumes each frame reflects a completed, settled pulse. With the default 1000 ms calibration pulse longer than the exposure, pulses overlap and the mount never settles. Guide::calibrate() now stops any active stream before buildOperationStack(), so the whole calibration runs on the single-frame path; the stream starts automatically when active guiding begins.
Andreas R. applied dark/defect-map correction to streaming guide frames — in streaming mode the GUIDE_DARK operation step is skipped, so the "Dark" checkbox was a no-op. The correction is now applied inline in processData() for streaming frames via new DarkProcessor::denoiseSynchronous() before the frame is loaded into the guide view or handed to the guider. Verified on real hardware (PlayerOne Xena 585M): glow pedestal and gradient removed, edge-spread 5.0 → 0.2/0.7.

Alignment & Mount Modeler

Lower the default align check threshold to 10 arcminutes and improve logging to identify if the actual mount moved between checks
Account for declination when calculating total alignment error
Properly display annotated objects after plate-solving an image from Sky Map objects
Fixed align hang when a slew completes without an observable IPS_BUSY — some mount drivers finish very short corrective slews within a single status tick and never emit an intermediate IPS_BUSY for EQUATORIAL_EOD_COORD. Align's ALIGN_SLEWING handler only trusted an IPS_OK once it had witnessed IPS_BUSY, and the elapsed-timer fallback is only re-evaluated when a new property update arrives. Snapshot the mount's reported RA/DE right before Slew() commands the move, and also accept an IPS_OK whose position differs from that snapshot as proof

KDE Akademy 2026

Volker Krause — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 05:45:00 +0000

Last week I attended this year’s KDE Akademy in Graz, Austria, my 20th in-person Akademy.

KDE Akademy 2026 group photo (source)

Akademy

Akademy for me is mainly about meeting the people I otherwise just work with online, and hanging out with old and new friends. And even 22 years after the first one I’m still excited about that. This year also happened to be KDE’s 30th anniversary, making this extra special.

Lydia and Aleix stabbing poor little cake-Konqi (source)

Recordings of the talks are available on media.ccc.de, recordings of the BoF wrap-up sessions are on KDE’s PeerTube channel, and BoF notes should be in the wiki. There are also a couple of reports from other attendees already on Planet KDE.

Topics

QA and CD

On Saturday I spoke about how continuous delivery (CD) builds help with QA, based on the experience with using those for Itinerary.

While we see very little testing on pre-releases (betas, release candidates), getting people to daily-drive the latest CD builds from the main development branch turned out to be the single biggest improvement to overall quality in recent years.

It was great to see this was just one in several talks that focused on different aspects of QA this year.

New contributor experience

Daily-driving CD builds already turns people from users into contributors, becoming part of the QA team, maybe without even realizing this. A possible next step, sending a first merge request, even if just for something very small, is currently made way harder than it needs to be though.

As part of my talk I demonstrated a possible alternative workflow, getting to a modified and fully isolated version of Alligator within a few minutes, without requiring any modification on the host system or involving any risk of otherwise interfering with that.

Edit Application action on the about page

This prototype involved a small modification to Kirigami Addons to add an “Edit Application…” action to the about dialog, and a custom URI handler to also make this work for fully sandboxed applications. It’s also currently only working with GNOME Builder, as none of our editors/IDEs so far have the Flatpak handling integrated seamlessly enough. Changing that was dicussed with the Kate later during Akademy then.

Assuming all that would be integrated, the only thing needed on the application side then is adding a link to the source code repository in the AppStream metadata file (and of course having a Flatpak manifest in its Git repository).

Plasma Mobile

For NFC support there’s now an agreement on where the integration code for Plasma should live eventually, very similar to how the Bluetooth code is organized. There was also the chance to test the existing code with a few more NFC-enabled cards/devices, which found a few more (usability) issues to address.

Shortly before Akademy, support for the xx-cutout-v1 Wayland protocol landed in Qt 6.13. This makes Qt’s SafeArea API work with Wayland compositors supporting that protocol as well, allowing us to benefit from all the work on supporting that in applications for Android.

KWeather with simulated display cutouts.

What we were missing still is the compositer-side part of this in KWin, and I expected that to be much more work than the client part in Qt. An expectation the KWin team defied though, I got to see a prototype for cutout support in KWin already, so this looks very much in reach now.

We also discussed support for the XDG camera portal with the Qt MultiMedia team. We need that for accessing the camera from a sandboxed Flatpak application without giving it full device access. It’s something they want to have as well at least, but there’s no specific timeline yet (ie. we might have to implement it ourselves).

PIM

There was a talk about the Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) funded PIM work, as well as plenty discussion about this in the two-part PIM BoF, which was good to see.

Something I’m particularly excited to see being implemented is UnifiedPush support for CalDav, something which started at a meeting two years ago at a NextCloud conference. That’ll not only make calendar syncing faster and more efficient, it could also make synchronized reminder states viable, so dismissing an reminder on one of your devices would also dismiss it on all other devices.

Another exciting aspect is work on making calendar and contact data accessible to and from Flatpak applications. That’s currently an unsolved problem for GNOME and KDE, as both our PIM APIs were designed as platform APIs at a time before sandboxed applications were a thing. The ultimate goal here would be an XDG portal API for contact and calendar access, closing a gap that Linux currently still has compared to most proprietary platforms. This is a huge task though, but there’s several publicly funded efforts currently addressing parts of this.

As usual we also talked about the next steps in the repository consolidation work. KMime finally made the move to KDE Frameworks earlier this year, and we are almost done with dissolving kcalutils with a mix of up- and downstreaming its content. The likely next target would then be getting KIMAP to Frameworks as well.

Itinerary

Akademy is also the time of some of the most intensive Itinerary usage during the year, and thus lots of feedback coming in, causing a few improvements:

Fixed the unreachable transfer warning not being shown.
Fixed currency exchange rates shown in the wrong direction.
Fixed a crash in online post-processing of reservation data commonly observed on Sentry but not easily reproducable.
Fixed inaccessible entries in the country combo box due to an outdated qqc2-breeze-style in the APK.

Despite efforts following a previous Akademy to avoid a certain unnamed member of the community ending up at the wrong airport, said person got apparently lost entirely this time and didn’t make it to Akademy at all. So we still have a lot of work ahead of us to make travel David-proof.

More conferences

Akademy was the second in a close series of three major conferences for me now, following SotM 2026 and ending with the Open Transport Community Conference 2026 starting on Tuesday. That’s also why the bi-monthly Itinerary update post that would usually appear at this point has to wait a bit.

This Week in Plasma: 6.8 Beta 2; Keep Testing!

Nate Graham — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 00:00:01 +0000

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week, Plasma 6.8 continues to pass through the bug-fixing process in preparation for its release on October 14th, including the release of a second beta version. So far we still don’t have many reported regressions, so again either Plasma 6.8 is amazing already, or else people aren’t testing it enough!

In addition to bug fixing and polishing, Plasma contributors also began landing some features and UI improvements for Plasma 6.9. Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

The context menu for Task Manager tasks now includes a “Move to Screen” feature, mirroring the similar one already accessible from windows’ titlebar context menus. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #465058)

System Settings’ Firewall page can now display comments associated with custom firewall rules made with the ufw firewall backend. (Arie Miller, plasma-firewall MR #109)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Tiled windows now have square corners, so they fit together nicely. (Ethan Chappel, KDE Bugzilla #490716)

The Dictionary widget now fully adjusts its colors when the active color scheme or Plasma style changes, and looks more “Plasma-style” in general. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1141)

New

Old

System Monitor’s Processes and Applications pages no longer sometimes show double scrollbars. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-systemmonitor MR #466)

Plasma now sends fewer notifications about the screen configuration changing — particularly for cases where they offer no real value. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7094 and plasma-workspace MR #7148)

Plasma 6.9

System Settings’ Touchpad page now expresses the available options for right- and middle-clicking in a more natural way. (Jakob Petsovits, plasma-desktop MR #4041)

On System Settings’ Notifications page, some icons on the list items for configuring individual notifications now have tooltips to explain what they do, in case their icons aren’t comprehensible enough. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6785)

If you’ve configured any custom clipboard actions in the Clipboard widget’s settings, they’re now placed above the standard MIME type actions, rather than below them. (Paul Wise, plasma-workspace MR #6107)

The “In rows” and “In columns” arrangement options for desktop icons now arrange icons the way they say they will, rather than according to the opposite option. (Daniel Pflager, KDE Bugzilla #512993)

Notifications with speed graphs no longer redundantly show the current speed twice while expanded. (Méven Car, plasma-workspace MR #7050)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze on systems where the Wi-Fi adapter is disabled and re-enabled frequently. (Jay Fleischer, plasma-nm MR #669)

Fixed an issue in the Comics widget that could make it occasionally get stuck in an infinite loop and waste system resources. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #525856)

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a case where KWin could crash on systems with NVIDIA GPUs using version 610.57.04 or later of the proprietary driver. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #524840)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you dragged a widget to a panel. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #501289)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while trying to fetch weather data from Environment Canada. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #512054)

Fixed a memory leak in the Process Table widget. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525978)

Worked around an upstream issue in version 9.12 or later of the coreutils library that prevented KWallet from being unlocked at login as expected. (Omid Kordbache, KDE Bugzilla #525805)

Fixed a recent regression that made the names of touchpads vanish from the device chooser combobox on System Settings’ Touchpad page. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #521800)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash in response to apps closing or crashing in very specific ways. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #506562)

Fixed an issue that made Spectacle sometimes fail to save screen recordings. (Zhora Zmeykin, KDE Bugzilla #516848)

Spectacle’s “Share” feature once again works. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #525413)

When you drag the thumbnail of a file or screenshot from a notification to somewhere else, the drop menu once again includes “Move” as an option. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #508520)

Remote desktop authentication now works with version 3.32 or later of the freerdp library. (Ben Marshall, krdp MR #248)

Fixed an issue that could cause remote desktop sessions closed remotely while in progressive mode to get stuck and block starting new sessions. (Oliver Beard, krdp MR #246)

The Brightness & Color widget is now fully screen-reader-friendly. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #508485)

Fixed a bizarre clipboard issue that mis-rendered certain Unicode characters in the 100th position of a piece of copied text. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #508224)

Plasma 6.9

Text in a right-to-left language that you copy to the clipboard while using a left-to-right language is no longer covered up by the hover buttons in the clipboard history. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #440349)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting notifications with speed graphs that could appear when you sent them to the history, and then restored them. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #514677)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

The Task Manager widget’s feature to filter tasks by virtual desktop has been made compatible with the “per-screen virtual desktops” feature. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7147)

System Monitor and its widgets now measure GPU memory usage more accurately. (Roan Bukaci, KDE Bugzilla #525481)

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.

Web Review, Week 2026-40

Kevin Ottens — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 11:23:51 +0000

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-40.

NVIDIA’s Greenwashing Tactics & Hidden Emissions

Tags: tech, nvidia, hardware, economics, ecology

Are we surprised? Unfortunately not, they almost increased their indirect emissions 8 folds in a few years. And it could get worse still.

https://www.aigreenwashing.org/news/new-ai-report-reveals-nvidias-greenwashing-tactics-and-hidden-emissions/

AI’s Unsustainable impacts to grow x7 by 2030

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ecology

There’s clearly a major issue in terms of environmental impacts with the AI industrial complex. Yes it’s also about electricity consumption but not only. We have at last a comprehensive study on the matter. Without major changes it’s just unsustainable and something we can’t collectively afford.

https://www.greenit.fr/2026/09/30/ais-unsustainable-impacts-to-grow-x7-by-2030/

Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, hardware, memory, business, economics

Looks like the mess on hardware prices will continue for a while…

https://www.techpowerup.com/353296/micron-ceo-says-memory-supply-will-be-much-tighter-in-2027-and-2028-than-in-2026

The AI Pascal’s Wager

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, foss, community

It makes sense to me, it’s better to not fall prey to the marketing induced FOMO. Instead projects have a chance to do the right thing.

https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal_wager.html

If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, community

Aren’t we loosing sense of community and our humanity indeed?

https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/

The opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhood

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, community, politics

Kind of an unusual read. But I think the message is powerful. We should definitely favor community over tools controlled by the new robber barons.

https://thewhitepages.net/p/the-opposite-of-the-apocalypse-is

One month without AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, productivity, quality

The slippery slop seems clear… If you start generating a bit you’ll be pushed to loose full control in the end. Do you think you can learn this way? Improve? I doubt it.

https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html

Tags: tech, automotive, privacy

The automakers still don’t care about privacy apparently…

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/09/connected-car-data-privacy-is-still-abysmal-study-finds/

File Notification Attacks

Tags: tech, security

Interesting new family of side channel attacks. Surprising it lingered for so long before being noticed.

https://inoti.fyi/

Don’t couple your Go code to GitHub

Tags: tech, go, supply-chain, vendor-lockin

This is clearly something which bugs me about the Go ecosystem. It’s way too coupled to a single Git provider. The approach to dependency management is neat otherwise but more care should be taken about avoiding this GitHub lock in.

https://iain.rocks/blog/dont-couple-your-go-code-to-github

Taking Out The Garbage In Postgres

Tags: tech, postgresql, databases, performance

Interesting issues around cascading deletes in Postgres and how the indices are managed.

https://www.dbos.dev/blog/scaling-deletions-in-postgres

DTAP - Text and Test Anything Protocol

Tags: tech, tests, infrastructure, shell

Looks like an interesting tool for black box testing. Seems especially suited for full system tests.

https://dtap.sparrowhub.io/doc/README

Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function

Tags: tech, c++

This is indeed a good way to reduce the code generated by templates.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260820-00/?p=112629/

We Have Named Arguments at Home

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

It’s indeed not urgent to have this language feature in Rust. I’m less convinced about the case put forth regarding function overloading not being necessary though. Feels a bit like post-hoc justification in this case.

https://corrode.dev/blog/named-arguments-at-home/

Rusty thoughts on “Parse, don’t validate”

Tags: tech, type-systems, reliability, rust

This is indeed an important pattern to build reliable systems. It’s worth exploring in various languages. Here is the Rust perspective.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2026/rusty-thoughts-on-parse-dont-validate/

What makes Lisp difficult to read?

Tags: tech, lisp, vision

Interesting take and exploration for the reasons which might make Lisp harder to read than other languages.

https://paultm.nl/paren-thesis

Keep if clauses side-effect free

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship

You’re not paying for a couple more intermediate variables. For sure they make things more readable though.

https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/keep-if-clauses-side-effect-free.html

Modern Motherfucking Website

Tags: tech, web, frontend, framework, complexity

Indeed web frameworks are not needed for everything.

https://modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems/

A Staff Engineer’s Guide to Inventing Work

Tags: tech, ecosystem, product-management, project-management

Interesting points. If you’re making a platform you can’t really figure out what to do next in the same way than when usual product management is possible. There are signals to look for to feed your roadmap though.

https://sujithjay.com/inventing-work

Even at 100 meters, PV makes neighbours more likely to go green

Tags: tech, energy, ecology

This finding is kind of surprising to me. Time to install solar systems at home I guess?

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/08/20/even-at-100-meters-pv-makes-neighbours-more-likely-to-go-green/

Sodium-Ion Batteries May Be Close to Market Readiness

Tags: tech, energy, battery

Let’s see if it really takes off. It’d be a step in the right direction for sure.

https://en.reset.org/electric-cars-powered-by-salt-instead-of-lithium-sodium-ion-batteries-may-be-close-to-market-readiness/

Pirating the Pirates

Tags: movie, culture, copyright

Fascinating account of what people must go through for proper film preservation. It’s kind of weird that it is still illegal. You’d wish there’d be more recognition for such passion.

https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates

Bye for now!

Implementing Tracepoints in Qt Applications using Qt Creator 21

Qt Dev Loop — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 16:10:21 +0000

Sometimes, as a developer, you need to find out why your application is misbehaving. The usual advice is to add tracing or use a profiler.

Qt Creator 21 Beta released

Qt Dev Loop — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 10:45:59 +0000

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 21 Beta!

This Month in KDE Linux: September 2026

Nate Graham — Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:01 +0000

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

September was a bit of a slow month for KDE Linux, the result of multiple contributors preparing for, attending, and recovering from Akademy 2026, and then later All Systems Go! 2026.

But it was hopefully not all for naught; Harald and Nate gave a presentation about the project at Akademy:

…And then Harald gave another one at All Systems Go!

Anyway, most work consisted of infrastructure and code maintenance, documentation improvements, and small bug fixes. Sky Poincet and Philip Grant did a lot of the heavy lifting while Harald and Nate were absent, which is much appreciated.

Despite us still calling KDE Linux an alpha release, the project is maturing to focus on stability and polish, a classic application of the Pareto principle (colloquially known as the “80/20” rule).

One interesting project did land in September, though: Hadi Chokr replaced sudo and pkexec with wrappers that call the more modern and secure run0 tool. This reduces the number of SUID binaries that can be used for privilege escalation attacks.

BuildStream

This is probably a good time to talk about BuildStream. What’s BuildStream?

If you know what Yocto is, BuildStream is basically Yocto but stewarded by the Apache Foundation.

If you don’t, then the easiest wasy to explain BuildStream is that it’s a tool for compiling and packaging software from arbitrary sources. In the same way that mkosi currently builds KDE Linux an OS image from distro packages, BuildStream builds an OS image from individual projects’ source code — bypassing distro packages entirely.

KDE Linux has had a skunkworks project going on in the background that replaces the base OS’s Arch Linux packages with basically the same software stack, but built by us, using BuildStream. The project is quite close to a “shall we integrate it or not?” decision point.

If we do, the result should behave identically and users won’t even notice the change — an advantage of KDE Linux being image-based rather than package-based.

So here’s an obvious question: why are we considering doing a huge amount of work ourselves to rebuild what we’re already getting for free with Arch? KDE Linux has been able to inherit everything that makes Arch awesome, really accelerating its development.

But ultimately Arch is a rolling release OS, and KDE Linux does not plan to be a rolling release OS. The user and stable editions will have discrete, time-based releases. If we stick with Arch, at the moment we branch for a new release, we have to either accept whatever’s in Arch (which could include regressions that we miss) or polish a fork of Arch for some amount of time (which entails doing a bunch of packaging work ourselves anyway).

So while BuildStream offers other advantages too, the big win would be allowing us to have total control over the software versions we build, and making it easier for us to add new things that aren’t currently packaged by Arch (here are some examples).

We wouldn’t be doing it all ourselves, either. The BuildStream-based KDE Linux variant is based on the FreeDesktop Flatpak SDK, same as GNOME OS. So maintenance will be shared across all three projects’ contributors.

This project has consumed quite a bit of time over the past few months, and we’ll be plugging away in October, hopefully to the point where we can make a decision about it one way or another.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and remains 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.

Planet KDE | English

QML Quick Editor: my QtCreator extension has been integrated

Features:

This Week in Plasma: Finishing Touches on 6.8

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Plasma 6.9

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Plasma 6.7.6

Plasma 6.8

Frameworks 6.32

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.9

How you can help

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

Web Review, Week 2026-41

Wherein the slopbros won’t stop

That Time I Worked With a Laptop Thief

Why I recommend Renovate over any other dependency update tools

montray: A tray icon and desktop alerts for systemd services and custom health checks

Proving Rust Web Application Correctness with Lean 4

Modernizing Utility Software Starts With the Workflow, Not the Technology

Redesign without fear

Akademy 2026

Kdenlive

Qt for Python Release: 6.12 is here!

KDE Ships Frameworks 6.31.0

New in this version

Introducing the QML Live Preview MCP Tool for Agentic Development of Embedded Devices

Agents Edit QML, But Don’t See the Result Without Building, Compiling, and Running

KDE Gear 26.08.2

Qt for MCUs 2.12.3 LTS Released

From Figma to Qt: A Comparison Between Manual and Assisted Workflows

My Notes from Akademy 2026

The Conference

Everything Else

2026-10-05 Fossy Camp KDE

Camp KDE at FOSSY 2026: Vancouver Edition

Celebrating 30 years of KDE at Akademy 2026

Figma to Qt 1.1: Test Design Live, Ship It Anywhere

A new initiative: Tagoross Circle of Practice

Harmonicon's song editor, explained with one song about a jumping harmonica

The song

The whole screen

Colours, and how I got them wrong

Picking a note

Phrases

Details

Akademy 2026 in Graz

Kirigami Addons 1.15.0

FormCard

Date and time

KirigamiApp

Documentation

Packager section

KStars 3.8.5 Released

FITS Viewer Quality of Life improvements

AI Guider: Major Reliability & Performance Overhaul

Scheduler & Observatory Automation

Camera & Capture

Guide

Alignment & Mount Modeler

KDE Akademy 2026

Akademy

Topics

QA and CD

New contributor experience

Plasma Mobile

PIM

Itinerary

More conferences

This Week in Plasma: 6.8 Beta 2; Keep Testing!

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Plasma 6.9

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7