So… more Oxygen icons

This weekend I been filling some of the more obvious holes in the icon set and recently these 2 landed.

The first one is for KeepSecret, the application that is replacing the old KWallet.

Security icons are funny. There are only so many ways to draw "keep your stuff safe" before you end up with another lock icon. Or a key. Or a lock pretending not to be a lock.

I ended up going with a small vault door. Which is basically also a lock pretending not to be a lock but at least it looks kinda cool, and more important I think it looks as smart as our users are...

The other one is for generic package managers.

And apparently software still arrives in wooden crates.

I dont know who started this visual convention but after all these years I kinda stopped questioning it. Software packages are boxes. Everybody understands boxes. Lets move on, and debate the real important things such as the relevance of the save icon as a flopy device

One thing that I love about icon design is how different the process becomes depending on size.

At large sizes you can spend hours messing around with materials, reflections, shadows and tiny details.

At small sizes all that disappears and suddenly you are fighting for every pixel. trying to keep the meanigfull details and creating a source svg monster in Oxygen repo

I think icon design is really just the art of deciding what can be removed before the whole thing falls apart.

Talking about things that may or may not fall apart…

I've also been spending some time exploring styling in QML and thinking about possible future directions for O².

Nothing concrete yet.

Mostly experiments.

Some ideas are sensible.

Some ideas are absolutely not sensible. On propose

The main goal is realy to show range of things I would ike to see available on Union.

Those are usually the interesting ones.

Right now I'm more interested in exploring the range of possibilities than deciding what a final result should look like. There are some surprisingly fun things hidden in there.

If all goes well we will soonish publish a video with KDAB showing some of these experiments and crazy ideas.

Or at least the ones that dont completely explode before then

So stay tuned.

And as always, thanks for using Oxygen.

This old project still finding new excuses to keep going.

The second maintenance release of the 26.04 series is out with the usual batch of bug fixes and improvements for workflow and stability. This update comes with fixes to rendering, timeline editing, project file handling, and Windows, MacOS, AppImage and Flatpak packaging.

One noteworthy bug closed in this version is a fix on Windows to finally allow exporting your videos to a network drive, closing a 4-year-old bug.

Head to our download section to get the latest binaries, or check the updates from your package manager. Please note that for Linux only AppImage and Flatpak are supported by the Kdenlive team.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team continued polishing Plasma 6.7 for its release later in the month. As such, this week saw mostly bug fixing.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Hovering over a partially-visible item in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget no longer unexpectedly automatically scrolls the view to show the entire item. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #426015)

Spectacle’s feature to automatically copy the screenshot to the clipboard is now temporarily turned off while extracting text via OCR, so that the extracted text makes it onto the clipboard instead. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #520758)

When launching an app from a terminal window, the animated launch feedback effect now ends after the app launches, as expected. (Nicolas Fella, Vlad Zahorodnii, and Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #459986)

Plasma 6.8

Notifications about connected devices having low battery power are now shown in full-screen apps so you won’t miss them, just like notifications for the internal battery being low. (Jan Bidler, plasma-workspace MR #6623)

The Peek at Desktop and Window Aperture effects now respect the system-wide animation speed setting. (Sudip Datta, KDE Bugzilla #490531)

Frameworks 6.27

KRunner now assumes you mean US pints rather than Imperial pints when you convert to or from them, since pints are still official in the USA. (Nate Graham, kunitconversion MR #86)

After

Before

Disk sizes displayed in various places now fully respect your preference regarding storage units. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518493)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while refreshing the list of nearby wireless networks. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519739)

Fixed an issue that reset custom tiling layouts on portrait-rotated monitors after restarting the system. (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #514355)

Searching for an app in the Kicker Application Menu widget and launching one that isn’t the first item in the search results list no longer launches it twice. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521001)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a regression in VNC-based screen sharing that prevented the Ctrl and Alt modifier from being sent to the machine being controlled. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519690)

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze if you quickly switch months in the Digital Clock widget by dragging on the calendar view multiple times in quick succession. (Sander Wolswijk, KDE Bugzilla #511028)

Made the Task Manager Widget’s “Move to Desktop” feature work on grouped tasks. (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #520777)

Fixed two issues with the Grouping widget: not re-appearing instantly after undoing deleting it, and a phantom header remaining visible after removing the last app from it. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517044 and KDE Bugzilla #517043)

Fixed a variety of issues with icons or list items not properly reversing themselves when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Tobias Fella and Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #518932, KDE Bugzilla #518909, KDE Bugzilla #518935, KDE Bugzilla #518835, and KDE Bugzilla #518837)

Made System Settings raise and focus its window as expected when launched using a higher-than-default level of focus stealing prevention. (Kai Uwe Broulik, systemsettings MR #408)

Frameworks 6.27

Switching between light and dark Global Themes no longer sometimes results in various UI elements in Plasma only changing their colors halfway. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #503671)

Fixed an issue saving and retrieving config data in cases where a setting has been given a system-wide default value by the OS vendor that differs from KDE’s own default value. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #509416)

Fixed various related issues with network shares auto-mounted using systemd, including the trash not working properly, and appearing strangely in GUI apps. (Oliver Schramm, KDE Bugzilla #518012)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to rename files on the desktop via the “Suggest new name” feature in the overwrite dialog. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #509461)

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.

This week, I completed the port of KeepSecret's actions to the new org.kde.kirigami.actioncollection API from kirigami-app-components, a recently introduced library developed by Marco Martin (notmart).

Before working on this task, actions were defined separately throughout the UI. With ActionCollection, I could define each action once in a central place and then reuse it wherever it was needed. This makes the code easier to maintain and also integrates KeepSecret with KDE's standard shortcut system, allowing users to configure shortcuts through the usual KDE interface.

The main change was creating a dedicated Actions.qml file with AC.ActionCollectionManager as the root element. Inside it, actions are now centrally defined across three collections — one for the wallet list, one for wallet contents, and one for item details. These include actions such as New Wallet, New Entry, Search, Lock, Unlock, Copy Password, Save, Revert, and Delete.

During review, additional actions were added, dependencies were simplified, and Flatpak build issues were addressed. Since kirigami-app-components is still very new, some CI and packaging adjustments were needed before everything built correctly.

The merge request !29 has now been reviewed, approved, and merged into KeepSecret.

Next up is the Import/Export feature — I'll be studying KeepSecret's wallet data structures and designing the file format this week.

Hello Reader!

In case you don't know me (quite likely 😆), I am Ojas Maheshwari (@the_epicman:matrix.org) and I am currently working in the Google Summer of Code program for the KDE community on a project about Font Subsetting in Poppler under my mentor Albert Astals Cid.

Community Bonding

If I am being honest, I had already bonded with the Poppler community before GSoC started 😅

I had a lot of conversations with Albert, Sune, lbaudin and ats, and they already helped me a lot with my technical problems with my contributions prior to GSoC :D

However, I also managed to bond with other fellow GSoC contributors this summer so it's a win in my book :D

Week 1

I learnt a lot about how PDF files work this week.

Technical terms like Indirect Objects, Default Appearance, Appearance Streams which used to sound confusing to me before finally clicked.

I got more comfortable with traversing and using PDF data structures such as Objects, Arrays, Dicts, Streams etc.

The Happy News is that I got the Font Subsetting to work for FreeText Annotations.

I have raised a Draft MR which should be ready-to-review by end of this week and my plan is to get it fully correct and merged first and then move on to doing the same thing for forms.

Code screenshot to make the blog look cooler

How it works

If you are interested to know what my current approach is:

• The whole subsetting runs only when the user saves the document.

• We go over all resources (for now, just FreeText annotations) that were modified, and call a subsetFonts method on them.

• This is a method implemented by every class that needs subsetting, and inside this method we pass the data on what "font" renders what part of the "text" to our FontSubsetter::getSubsetFonts.

std::map<Ref, Ref> FontSubsetter::getSubsetFonts(const std::map<std::shared_ptr<const GfxFont>, std::string> &fontMappings) const

• The function generates the subset font objects and adds them to the PDF and returns mappings of old font refs and newer font refs. The subsetting happens using a library called "Harfbuzz".

• Then the subsetFonts function simply replaces the older refs with the newer ones inside the font subdictionary of the appearance stream of the annotation.

Thanks for reading

Although this blog might look small, it took me more than 1.5 hours to write this because I kept writing and deleting things. I am hoping I get better at writing blogs in the future.

But anyways, thanks for reading!
And have a great day !
Byee 😃!

How long does it take for an Item to become visible?

Frames skipped counter in application

#include <QQuickItem>
#include <QQuickWindow>

class TimedItem : public QQuickItem
{
    Q_OBJECT
    QML_ELEMENT

    Q_PROPERTY(qint64 timeToDisplay READ timeToDisplay NOTIFY timeToDisplayChanged FINAL)

public:
    TimedItem(QQuickItem* parent = nullptr) : QQuickItem(parent),
              m_elapsedTimer(new QElapsedTimer())
{
    setVisible(false);
    // When made visible, measure time to display
    QObject::connect(this, &QQuickItem::visibleChanged, this, &TimedItem::startMeasuringTimeToDisplay, Qt::DirectConnection);
};

qint64 timeToDisplay() {
    return m_timeToDisplay;
};

signals:
    void timeToDisplayChanged();

private:
    void startMeasuringTimeToDisplay()
    {
        if (isVisible())
        {
            // Reset
            m_frameReady = false;
            // Attempt to take measurement after frame swaps
            QObject::connect(window(), &QQuickWindow::afterFrameEnd, this, &TimedItem::measure,
            static_cast<Qt::ConnectionType>(Qt::DirectConnection | Qt::UniqueConnection));
            // Force polish, ensuring elapsed measurement is taken on the right frame
            ensurePolished();
            // Take initial measurement
            m_elapsedTimer->start();
        }
    }

    void updatePolish()
    {
        // The frame for this component will be rendered after this
        m_frameReady = true;
    }

    void measure()
    {
        // This will be called for every frame until the right frame has been rendered
        if (m_frameReady)
        {
            // Measure elapsed time
            m_timeToDisplay = m_elapsedTimer->elapsed();
            // Prevent measuring further frame
            QObject::disconnect(window(), &QQuickWindow::afterFrameEnd, this, &TimedItem::measure);
            // Propagate measured time
            emit timeToDisplayChanged();
        }
    }

private:
    qint64 m_timeToDisplay = 0;
    QElapsedTimer *m_elapsedTimer;
    bool m_frameReady = false;
};

The post How long does it take for an Item to become visible? appeared first on KDAB.

When we first announced the transition to Plasma Wayland, one of Martin's slides from stated, "It's done when it's done!"

That talk was 15 years ago!

Nothing in software is never truly "done", but as announced previously we are finally at a point where we're ready to retire the X11 and put all our focus on the future.

As of today, the Plasma X11 session you can log into has been officially removed, and we will start a mass cleanup of X11-specific code soon.

When does it take effect?

This change will be included in Plasma 6.8, which will be released in around five months.

What's Changed?

In Plasma 6.8, there will be no X11 session in the login screen. There will only be a Wayland session available to log into.

In 6.8, all X11-specific code paths in Plasma for Plasma Shell, System Settings, and device configuration will be gone.

What's stayed the same?

XWayland support remains present. You can keep using your X11 applications, and our XWayland application support is second-to-none.

If you use KDE applications on another desktop environment, this change will have no effect. KDE applications will continue to work in X11 for the foreseeable future.

Plasma Login Manager will continue to be able to log you into X11 sessions of other desktop environments.

What's Next?

The possibilities this opens up are very exciting. Until now, on the desktop side, we've had to target the lowest common denominator or be stuck trying to maintain two conflicting code paths. It was absolutely the right choice to do a gradual transition and approach things this way, but that approach has its limits.

Moving forward with a single code path going through Wayland is going to allow us to bring new performance improvements, memory optimisations, and brand new exciting features throughout Plasma.

How Ready Are We?

Our internal metrics within KDE show that over 95% of users of Plasma 6.6 are on Wayland, with a gradual increase every release. The metrics also show that basically no one is testing or developing Plasma on X11 anymore. The platform was already, for all intents and purposes, abandoned by KDE contributors.

We have every reason to trust this metric data, as it is exactly in-line with what Sentry (our automatic crash reporting tool) reports for newly-encountered crashes shows.

For transparency, the one caveat in all of the above is that I've deliberately always focused on people using the latest Plasma release. We do still have a sizable chunk of users on X11 still using Plasma 5.27. Including them, the total Wayland adoption rate is about 76%. But back then, Wayland wasn't the default session type, so it's hardly a surprise those users are still on X11. Things have come a massively long way in the three years since Plasma 5.27 was released.

Anyone still using Plasma 5.27 — or any release older than Plasma 6.8 — won't be affected by what we do in Plasma 6.8, and nothing will be applied retroactively.

Still Have Issues with Wayland on 6.7?

Whilst we have had full confidence since Plasma 6.0 that our Wayland session provides the better overall experience, we are aware that things don't behave exactly the same. Not everything works the same especially in specialised areas.

We are not expecting a completely seamless transition for everyone. Custom scripts, tools used and even workflows might have to change. But we are aiming to offer a transition where there is still a way to accomplish all your day-to-day tasks.

Plasma 6.7 is the last release that will include an X11 session, and it's coming out in just a few days. If you still have issues that force you back to X11 we would love to hear from you.

We can't promise to get everything fixed in time for 6.8, but we can promise to listen and be aware. People's remaining pain point are and will be on our radar, so please take this time to communicate them.

Hot on the heels of Krita 5.3.2, we're releasing Krita 5.3.2.1. 5.3.2 had a bug with the layer docker that was very pervasive, and could cause anything from unsynced layers to crashes to groups not behaving as they should. 5.3.2.1 fixes this. Furthermore, we also had some issues where the Windows packages weren't signed. This too should now be fixed.

⚠️ Warning

We consider Krita 5.3.2.1 suitable for productive work; 6.0.2.1 is, because of the many changes from Qt5 to Qt6 more experimental.

Download 5.3.2.1

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-5.3.2.1-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-5.3.2.1.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

⚠️ Warning

Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.2.1-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.2.1-signed.dmg

Android

Krita on Android is still beta; tablets only.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK

• 64 bits Arm CPU APK

• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

Sources are the same as 6.0.2.1

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.3.2.1/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

See the 6.0.2.1 key section.

Download 6.0.2.1

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-6.0.2.1-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-6.0.2.1.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

⚠️ Warning

Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.2.1-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.2.1-signed.dmg

Android

Krita 6.0.2 is not yet functional on Android, so we are not making APK's available for sideloading.

Source code

• krita-6.0.2.1.tar.gz

• krita-6.0.2.1.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/6.0.2.1/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

KStars v3.8.3 is released on 2026.06.01 for Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

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

This release brings major improvements to the Mount Modeler with artificial horizon filtering and uniform point distribution, significant connection speed optimizations, better guide streaming integration, and enhanced rotator handling. We've also fixed several scheduler and stability issues reported by the community. Here are the highlights:

Alignment & Mount Modeler

• Christian Kemper added Artificial Horizon filtering to the Mount Modeler wizard, allowing generated alignment points below the active horizon to be automatically filtered out. Candidate coordinate points (both generated AltAz coordinates and snapped catalog objects) are now checked and rejected if they fall into active artificial horizon regions.
• New Uniform Distribution mode generates points spread evenly across the visible sky using a Halton sequence, sampling in AltAz space to guarantee every point is above the configured minimum altitude. Points whose declination exceeds +/-80 degrees after conversion are rejected. The Any Stars, Named Stars, and Any Object modes now adopt this distribution internally and snap each generated position to the nearest qualifying object.
• Auto-sorted wizard output: points added by the wizard are automatically sorted in nearest-neighbour slew order, minimizing total slew distance. Users no longer need to click Sort after running the wizard. Clicking Sort during a run reorders only the remaining unvisited points, leaving completed rows undisturbed.
• The wizard now automatically configures the solver for each alignment point. Blind solves are used by default because no pointing model exists yet at the start of a run, so the mount's reported position may be significantly off. The GOTO mode is forced to Sync so the mount is updated after each successful solve. The original settings are saved and restored when the run finishes, is aborted, or is reset.
• Refactored point generation logic to eliminate duplicated generation and conversion math in the test suite, improving generator efficiency using a stateful sequence
• Toni Schriber fixed activation of the rotator button in the align module
• Fixed effective focal length calculation to use radians in the DSLR branch

Guide

• Thanks to Andreas Ruthner, guide streaming now correctly handles video stream window interaction. The video window no longer pops up when guide streaming starts, displays frames correctly when opened from the Capture module after a guide session, and now renders 16-bit mono stream frames (previously only 8-bit mono and RGB were handled).
• Andreas also fixed frame, binning, gain and exposure sync for streaming mode. When starting guide streaming, the module now applies the same frame settings that captureOneFrame() applies for single-frame captures. Previously, streaming mode skipped this setup entirely, causing stale values from other modules to remain active in the driver.
• Frame ROI and binning now sync on stream start, live gain updates apply immediately when the user changes the spinner during active streaming, and binning/exposure changes automatically stop and restart the stream
• Added 0.001-0.01s exposure values to the guide exposure spinner for fast streaming and daytime testing

Rotator

• Fixed several issues with Reversed rotator state not taken into account in various rotator operations
• Rotation now aborts if the Position Angle error keeps increasing due perhaps to reversed rotator behavior

Ekos Profiles & Connection

• Significantly cut down time to connect to INDI web manager by skipping DNS resolution if we already have an IP address specified for the remote host
• Fixed rare crash due to dangling clientManager pointer with test to verify the fix

Capture & Livestacking

• Use OpenCV debayering by default. Enforce even ROI selection to ensure bayer boundaries are respected.
• Always sync from INDI to overwrite shadow states in the Camera process
• Account for STREAM_FULL_DEPTH when streaming
• John Evans added support for Live Stacker Alt/AZ data via Seestar S30 Pro. It should support other telescopes in Alt/AZ mode.
• John added a gradient removal option to post processing in Live Stacker.

FITS Viewer & File Handling

• Use standard gzip compress instead of Qt own compression algorithm
• Support loading .fits.gz and .xisf.gz in the viewer

Scheduler & Observatory Automation

• Fixed scheduler freezes when loading ESL referencing many ESQ files (patch by Tomas). BUGS:519294
• Autopark should work over multiple nights now
• If observatory is not started, skip shutdown procedure
• Fixed issue where post-shutdown script run in infinite loop
• Fixed scheduler and capture scripts not running inside flatpak

Optical Trains & DBus API

• Added DBus call to set and get Pictures directory
• Fixed warning of missing devices when we already selected alternative devices in the optical train

Build & Infrastructure

• Use KSUtil to consolidate all calls to external executable so they can run correctly within a flatpak as well
• Within flatpak, run the external scripts on the host system since it may require libraries that are only available on the host system
• Christian Kemper fixed macOS iconutil failure by adding 256px and 512px icon sizes rendered from the existing SVG source, which are required by iconutil on macOS 15 (Sequoia)
• Wolfgang Reissenberger updated the Dockerfile to be based on installation scripts for all steps: INDI, StellarSolver, PHD2, GSC, openCV. All scripts are built uniformly such that existing packages or installations are preferred. If the package is missing, first installing the appropriate package is tried. If this fails, the package is built from sources

Stability & Bug Fixes

• Fixed crash reported in crash-reports.kde.org regarding invalid base device or message text. The check for message text now occurs earlier in the process to protect against this crash.
• Milhan Kim fixed test deadlock by replacing QTest::mouseClick with animateClick(), which posts the click through the event loop and prevents tests from hanging indefinitely on QDialog::exec() loops
• Fixed an issue where frequent temperature updates can cause the dark cover check to run indefinitely
• Hy Murveit fixed green lines display issue
• Fixed solution assignment
• Fixed crash and distorted artifacts in video streaming
• Replaced all abs and fabs with std::abs for consistency
• Modernized signals and slots

Many thanks to Christian Kemper, Andreas Ruthner, Toni Schriber, Hy Murveit, John Evans, Milhan Kim, Wolfgang Reissenberger, Tomas, and all others who contributed fixes and improvements to this release! Your work makes KStars better for everyone.

Download KStars v3.8.3 today and enjoy improved mount modeling, faster connections, and more reliable guiding!