With great power comes great responsibility, and your task is to depict an object to be worn by those with authority to physically or mentally remind them of that burden. Read the topic for further explanation, and find out how much you're power willing to take on.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - August/September 2025
This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 19 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!
Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.
Other Notable Changes
Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from September 24, 2025 - October 20, 2025.
Stable branch (5.2.14-prealpha):
Touch Input: Improve the behavior of long-presses. Sliders now enter edit mode when double-clicking, not long-pressing (bug 471473). Long-press now summons context menus instead of making a right-click (bug 506042, bug 510229), which can be toggled in settings under General->Miscellaneous. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
Touch Input: Make the Bezier Curve Tool's autosmoothing and double-clicking work with touch drawing. (bug report) (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
Android: Fix showing the Android supporter badge on the welcome page if previously purchased. Purchasing is still disabled pending replacement. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
Android: Fix a crash when failing to save a document. (Change, by Agata Cacko)
Nightly Builds
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
When direct contribution brings too much friction within your company, you might need a temporary intermediate layer as an interface. See how this evolution helps organizations maximize value flow and ROI when contributing to open source. 1. Introduction: Evolving the Model In the inaugural post of this series, “The Virtuous Open Source Cycle: Model Description“, … Continue reading Part 3: Evolving the Model by adding a company-driven open source project
After four months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 8.8.0. This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency.
The digiKam team remains committed to providing a powerful, open-source digital photo management solution, continuously enhanced with new tools and optimizations for photographers and enthusiasts alike.
This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.5, and I think it’s gonna be a pretty darn good release when it comes out in 3 days! So eyes started turning towards features and UI improvements again, and you’ll notice a few of them this week.
Let me also draw your attention to another topic: KDE’s birthday! KDE is 29 this week and celebrating by kicking off our annual fundraiser. It’s a great time to donate if you’ve been on the fence or just want to show your love for Plasma!
The majority of KDE e.V.’s yearly budget comes from fourth quarter fundraising at this point, so it really does make a big difference. Donate today! And then check out this week’s goodies:
Notable New Features
Plasma 6.6.0
The Application Dashboard widget can now be configured to follow the color scheme, though it remains dark by default. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Keep in mind this dashboard hasn’t had any visual sprucing-up in years; if you’re tempted to complain that it’s ugly or unpolished, we probably agree, and would welcome any contributions!
You can now resize the area between Application Dashboard widget’s Favorites and Applications areas, allowing for one or the other to take up more space. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Klipper actions can now be disabled, without having to remove them. (Jonathan Marten, link)
Notable UI Improvements
Right Now
The Plasma Browser Integration add-on’s settings window now has a dark background when its browser is using dark mode. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
KWin’s Dim Inactive effect is now clamped to strength levels between 10 and 90%, because anything outside that range doesn’t really make sense and can produce nonsensical results. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
If you’ve deliberately masked the Systemd service for the firmware updater (fwupd), Discover no longer considers this an error to bug you about. (Nate Graham, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
The highlights for top-level menu items are now slightly rounded. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
When using the Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper provider, the thumbnail preview for the day’s wallpaper will now reflect the wallpaper’s actual aspect ratio — landscape or portrait — instead of always showing a portrait version of it. (Gergely Kovács, link)
Passwords for Wi-Fi networks are, by default, now stored globally (in a root-owned location, so not just anyone can go look at them), rather than per-user. This yields multiple benefits, including:
No more KWallet popups on misconfigured systems
New user accounts on the same system don’t need to manually log into common Wi-Fi networks all over again
Login screen features like LDAP account login that need internet access now always work out of the box
KRunner’s search results no longer dynamically change the priority of search results based on how often they’re used. This was a very clever feature, but ultimately made it impossible to offer a good default sort order because the actual sort order would be different for every person. Removing that makes the search result ordering predictable, and hence learnable. (Harald Sitter, link)
Notable Bug Fixes
Plasma 6.4.6
The app chooser window now respects whether the app that opened it wanted it to be modal or not. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Plasma 6.5.0
Fixed two cases where KWin could crash when you put a laptop to sleep with an external display connected, and then woke it up again with the screen disconnected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)
Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash while closing after saving a file. (Noah Davis, link)
Fixed a bug that could make remote desktop connections fail when using a recent version of ffmpeg. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Fixed a bug that made it possible for screen content to not update frequently enough when using one of the full-screen colorblindness correction effects. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a visual issue that could make full-screen HDR content in certain games not actually look HDR. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Rotating a screen with HDR active no longer makes it become brighter than the surface of the sun for a few milliseconds. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a bug that made System Monitor sensors display the wrong values for certain NVIDIA GPUs. (David Redondo, link)
Notifications marked “transient” once again stay out of the notification history even if they include actions. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Fixed the scroll handle of the Application Dashboard widget; dragging it now works. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Fixed two layout issues with custom System Monitor layouts when using the “Maximum” height option, or more than 11 rows. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)
Large panels can no longer cover up the Edit Mode dialog when there are several of them in a complex layout. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Worked around a newly-introduced Qt 6.10 issue that made notifications about downloaded files inappropriately remain visible until manually closed. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Plasma 6.5.1
Fixed some UI issues in System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (David Edmundson and Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)
Fixed a bug that could cause minor visual glitches when moving the pointer in and out of certain apps’ windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue that made Plasma tab bars not look quite right with non-default Plasma styles. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Plasma 6.6.0
Discover no longer crashes when you’ve got Flatpak installed but it’s nonetheless not available for some reason. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed a bug that would store the IPsec passwords of some VPNs incorrectly, making them ask for the password every time you connected. (Mickaël Thomas, link)
Frameworks 6.19.1
Fixed a serious regression accidentally introduced into Frameworks 6.19 that made it impossible to write files into Samba shares. The relevant code will be covered with an autotest soon so it doesn’t regress again. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Frameworks 6.20
Separator lines throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now pixel-perfect, resolving an issue that could make them look much brighter than intended with a dark color scheme. Marco wrote an interesting blog post about this, too. (Marco Martin, link)
System Settings pages opened standalone using kcmshell6 no longer sometimes experience the bottom part of scrollable views being cut off. (Jakob Petsovits, link)
Fixed a bug that made the icon chooser dialog not let you re-select the same icon you selected the last time it was open. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)
Other bug information of note:
Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (down from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
Made some improvements to nested KWin sessions, including better performance and inhibiting global shortcuts outside of the nested environment. (Xaver Hugl and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)
Plasma 6.6.0
kcmshell6 --list now sorts its output alphabetically. (Taras Oleksyn, link)
If money is tight, you can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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, too.
I have a laptop – a Framework 13, AMD CPU – which I received for the purpose
of making KDE-on-FreeBSD good on it. For KDE Akademy Reasons, that laptop is
covered in stickers: bicycle stickers, KDE, RUN BSD .. and it got three Linuxes installed on it next to FreeBSD.
I mentioned that KDE Akademy is people,
and I’d like to thank Doug (openSUSE), Neal (Fedora) and Harald (KDE Linux)
for helping me get the bits in place. Here’s some brief notes about the resulting systems.
I must have botched the openSUSE installation. This is my go-to Linux distro
for the past ten years at least and … this time it just isn’t a very good experience.
A KDE Plasma 6 session auto-starts, but it is the X11 version, and scaling is messed up
on the 2880x1920 screen, such that fonts are too big and UI elements too small.
The KCM for scaling doesn’t work nicely, and clicking on buttons like Apply is haphazard.
It might just be X11 bitrot, though, and I have not sat down with the system
to figure out what’s going on.
KDE Linux, I know it’s there, it starts, but I find that I don’t have confidence
that the immutable + flatpak does anything useful for me, and I fear that
it takes stuff away – although I can’t exactly articulate what, since
I don’t want to sit down to try to turn it into my daily driver and then
on day three find out that spacebar-heating is disabled in the flatpak portal.
Dangit, I need my spacebar heating. Someday I’ll sit down longer with KDE Linux,
but not with this laptop.
That leaves Fedora, which doesn’t deliver a stock wallpaper but does provide
a really nice KDE Plasma 6 experience. Here, too, I can’t put my finger on what
makes it nice, it just … is. It’s a wayland session. Using the Keyboard KCM and swapping ctrl- and caps-
just works,
and it stays there even in the face of jiggery-pokery with connected keyboards
(unlike in an X11 session on FreeBSD).
Scaling is reasonable at 170%. Scrolling with the touchpad goes the “right” direction.
Focus-follows-mouse is easy to configure.
FreeBSD works pretty well on this machine, right now except for the oops-poor-choice WiFi,
but that is enough to keep my from daily-drivering it just yet, and that’s why this
post is all about Linuxes. The configuration space is the same, though.
One hardware trick I found since I last wrote about this machine:
the hardware turns out to have a “Fn-lock”. Press Fn-ESC to prefer
function-keys over media-keys. (Source: forum posts) It even
says “Fn-lock” on the physical escape key, but I had not connected
those letters with the desired functionality yet.
This setting is preserved across hibernation and reboots.
Takeaway: fear of change is a genuine cause of non-adoption of technologies;
Fedora KDE Workstation is pretty darn nice; like many others I have covered over
the laptop’s branding with queer stickers.
This week marks KDE’s 29th birthday, which is pretty special. Did you know KDE has been around longer than Google, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Tesla, Spotify, Uber, VMware, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Github? Seriously! That’s a long time producing high quality, autonomy-respecting, non-exploitative software.
And humanity needs and deserves it, so we’re gonna keep going! We’re celebrating KDE’s birthday by kicking off our annual end-of-year fundraiser: https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2025/
The money raised here will support the ability of KDE e.V. (the nonprofit behind KDE) to continue hosting Akademy, funding development sprints, affording server hardware and hosting, and employing engineers, marketers, documentation writers, and support personnel (but not board members; we’re unpaid volunteers).
There’s a big set of initiatives, and they’re growing all the time as KDE gains in prominence worldwide! We have extremely ambitious goals of spreading humane software throughout the world.
Looking at the kind messages people have written in their donations, it seems like we’re seeing some success. Here are a few recent examples:
Thanks for KDE Plasma, can’t wait for KDE Linux!!! HB
To the most consistently feature rich Desktop Environment and just generally awesome set of applications! Thanks for the hard work!
Happy Birthday! Thank you, the Plasma Desktop and the KDE family of applications have made my life so much better. Keep up the good work on the newly-minted KDE Linux.
I’m giving you guys the money that would have gone to Windows 10 ESL had I not switched to Kubuntu earlier this year!
This might sound dumb but the wobbly windows option convinced one of my friends to install Linux so you win
Plasma is the best, very excited for Bigscreen!
KDE’s really great for both enthusiasts and newcomers. Without it, I’d be worried about “the linux desktop” hehe.
Thank you for you great work! One day I’ll find the time to contribute!
I know it’s only the minimum amount, but I love using your DE and software and want to help out any way I can. Thank you!
Thank you for your work and contribution!
Keep up the kood kork!
With love from Spain!!
Keep up the great work!
thank you for a fine desktop
KDE is my daily driver for personal computing. It’s abundance of features and the distraction-free experience is great. Keep it going! I’ve been an on-and-off user since the KDE 1 Beta 3.
Thank you KDE team for your wonderful work. I use Neon daily and it’s truly a joy to use
Thanks for making the computing world a significantly better place.
Happy Bday, KDE has be rock solid this year!
VIEL ERFOLG von der Alten (84) !! (GOOD LUCK from the old folks (84) !!)
I love your work – thank you for everything! Greetings from Germany
Hope this helps you keep up the great work!
Thanks for the hard work! Keep it up! From a french user!
To many more birthdays to come.
Great work, KDE!
First time donating. I really love to use KDE.
Thank you, KDE developers & KDE application developers, for 29 years of FOSS-licensed desktop software for Unix.
Grazie mille per tutto quello che fate. Fedora KDE è fantastico!
Thank you for bringing Plasma and Kdenlive to the world. Keep doing what you’re always doing.
Just a small donation for now, more in December
I dunno why, but I really love what you are doing! I really enjoy KDE’s vibe overall and everything that you guys did!
We’ve set the comparatively modest goal of raising €50,000, and I’m happy to see that we’re already a quarter of the way there after only three days. But we need to keep up the push, as typically the first few days see the most donations. So please donate if you can, and spread the word far and wide!
The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects.
Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time,
be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant.
The same happens for our communication channels or web sites.
20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like discuss.kde.org or in our Matrix channels.
Unfortunately our community is not that good at cleaning dead stuff up or deciding that the zombie state of some things hurt.
Dead Web Sites
A no longer updated website might be a small issue, that just looks bad, but most people will see that stuff with news from 2010 will likely be not alive.
Still, I think it makes sense to remove such sites and just redirect them (if there is any follow up information online).
It is no good state if we have stuff up that rots away since a few years, at least if it contains no other valuable info, like documentation or howtos.
Zombie Git Projects
Worse than dead web sites are zombie Git repositories that still get merge requests but nobody takes a look as all people are just gone but the stuff is not clearly marked as archived.
People waste their time and will likely be upset their contributions are not even looked at.
If a project is really dead, that should be archived, one can still resurrect it with easy later on, it is not gone, just clearly marked as dead.
Blackhole Mailing Lists
Even worse are in my eyes dead mailing lists.
People will drop questions there, in worst case that will even already hang for days in moderation or then forever without answer on the list.
That turns away people, you have a question or contribution and it ends in a black hole? No good first contact.
Solutions? Gardening!
What can we do?
We not just need to create new stuff and maintain what we have, we need to do some house cleaning or gardening.
We did that in the past, we can do it again :)
If you want to help, or just turn up and tell that your old project, web site or list it dead, show up on one of these issues:
TSDgeos
@christoph-cullmann:matrix.org
