Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week more work was poured into making Plasma 6.5 the best and most stable release ever. I know I write that a lot, but I feel like we get better at it every time, and this time it feels like that’s the case here too as well.

Our bug triaging team has basically finished getting through Plasma’s bug report backlog, allowing them and developers to focus on the known and fixable issues. And fix they did! This week there were just tons and tons of bug fixes. Among them were the #2 and #3 most common Plasma crashes, and we also identified the #1 most common crash as being caused by 3rd-party code.

This kind of concerted bug-fixing may not be the most glamorous work, but it makes a big difference to the overall quality of the product!

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.0

You can now activate the Sleep, Shut Down, and Restart (etc.) buttons in Kickoff using the Enter key in addition to the spacebar. (Julius Zint, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

The Breeze icon theme now has reversed versions of the “Send” icon (which normally looks like a little paper plane flying to the right), and uses them in notifications when using a right-to-left language, like Arabic or Hebrew. (Farid Abdelnour and Nate Graham, link)

Improved the randomness of randomly-ordered wallpaper slideshows. (Sebastian Meyer, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.6

Fixed an issue that could make KWin crash when trying to look at a device’s orientation sensor. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed the current second most common Plasma crash, which could happen when using a Weather Report widget displaying information from the Environment Canada source. (Ismael Asensio, link)

Fixed a very annoying issue that made graphical vector content copied in apps like Inkscape and LibreOffice Draw get unnecessarily and destructively rasterized when pasting them. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed an issue that made screen colors not look quite right (or at least not as intended) when playing HDR videos. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when dragging files or folders from Dolphin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed another case where KWin could crash. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you tried to create a new folder inside a sub-folder popup from a Folder View widget or a folder on the desktop. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed a case where KDE’s XDG portal implementation could crash. (David Redondo, link)

Fixed an issue that made text copied to the clipboard in an XWayland-using app get lost when the window focus changed immediately afterwards. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed an issue that could make automatic screen rotation not work properly. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed an issue that could make XWayland-using apps flicker a bit on some screens with some GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a weird issue in that could make the CPU and memory usage skyrocket after you used KRunner to search for certain specific things and then pressed the Page Up key. (Harald Sitter, link)

When you turn on automatic login and a message appears telling you to change your wallet to have en empty password so that it will automatically unlock, the button you can click to do so once again works. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a couple of labels that didn’t display localized text properly. (Nicolas Fella and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed an issue that made desktop icons jump around when you moved a panel to an adjacent screen edge. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Fixed a funny issue that made newly-created panels inherit some of their initial sizing settings from the most-recently-created panel, rather than using the default settings. (Fabian Vogt, link)

Fixed an issue in System Monitor that made it impossible to re-select table columns after clearing the selection by clicking in the empty area below the table. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Frameworks 6.20

Fixed the current third most common Plasma crash, which could happen when changing themes. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed an issue that made the external link icon look weird in GTK apps when using the Breeze icon theme (David Redondo, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 1 very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 29 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 28 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.5

Substantially reduced KWin’s CPU usage while playing full-screen video. (Someone amazing in KWin, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Improved the speed with which Discover fetches Flatpak information while starting up, improving launch speed and responsiveness in many cases. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Information about the size of the folder selection dialog is now stored in the state config file, not the settings config file. This helps keep the settings file from changing when transient states change, making it easier to version-control your config files. (Nicolas Fella, link)

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.

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.

You can also help us by making a donation! A monetary contribution of any size will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

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

Buttons in the Plasma Design System

Buttons play a pivotal role in user interaction within the Plasma Design System. It provides a set of states and roles for clear actions and navigation. In this design system, buttons are categorized into various types, each with distinct styles and purposes, contributing to an intuitive user experience.

Buttons are probably the most used component in a UI and it needs to clearly convey its meaning and purpose.

Button Types

1. Primary Buttons: These buttons are the primary interactive elements, designed to stand out on the interface with a shadow effect that creates a sense of depth. They are used for essential actions like “Create,” “Confirm,” or “Proceed,” encouraging user engagement. The elevation can adapt to the background color, ensuring good visibility across different surfaces. Default buttons are identified by their distinct brand color and are used sparsely in the UI.
2. Secondary Color: Provide an alternative action option. They often complement the primary buttons, allowing users to execute actions that may not be the main focus but are still significant. These buttons usually have a less prominent visual hierarchy, helping to guide user interactions without overshadowing primary actions. They can also serve for less urgent or secondary tasks, improving the overall user experience in UI design. They also come in Secondary Color, which is likely the most used version of the button in a UI.
3. Outlined Buttons: Outlined buttons are a secondary option, featuring a transparent background and a defined border. They serve as supplementary actions that are less critical than default buttons, maintaining clarity without overshadowing primary actions. They come in color and gray versions depending on their usage.
4. Text Buttons: Also known as flat buttons, these are used for less prominent actions or in placements where space is limited. Text buttons have no elevation or border, displaying a subtle underline on hover to indicate interactivity. They are effective for actions like “Learn more” or “Cancel,” blending harmoniously with text-based interactions.

States and Feedback

In Plasma Design, buttons incorporate multiple interaction states to provide immediate feedback to users:

• Default: Displaying the button’s primary style with appropriate color contrast.
• Hover: Changing background color slightly or applying a ripple effect, signaling potential interaction.
• Selected: Is a button that indicates it is currently active or chosen among a group of options. Its visual state (such as color, elevation, or outline) changes to show that it’s the selected or focused choice. Selected state is permanent and does not need the user to keep the mouse over it. The selection is removed when another UI element is selected.
• Pressed: A visual response when the button is actively being clicked, often shown by a darker shade or scale effect, reinforcing the tactile feel of the interface. It is a temporary state shown when the user clicks a button, for example.
• Disabled: Buttons in this state are visually muted and unresponsive, maintaining clarity that the action cannot be taken. There are disabled button versions for color and gray colorings.
• Round Buttons: Are used for additional visual interest and to draw differences between buttons and actions that are part of the general UI or external to it. They only come in icon-only varieties.

Accessibility and Responsiveness

Buttons should convey their functions through clear labeling and icons where applicable. Together they should have sufficient contrast between button colors and the background is essential for readability.

Implementation Guidelines

From a development standpoint, buttons in Plasma Design system should be structured as modular components. They need to utilize a consistent naming convention aligned with the design tokens defined in the system, such as button.primary or button.outlined. This approach promotes reusability and maintainability across the codebase. Incorporating customization options, such as size variations and whether to include icons, allows developers to create a diverse set of buttons while ensuring adherence to the material aesthetic.

The design system contains primary-derivative buttons and danger-related versions as well. Danger or destructive button states mirror the ones from the primary color but are dedicated for potentially damaging consequences in a system.

Internally, buttons contain color variables, shadow variables, text variables and spacing variables thus:

/* cyrillic-ext */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZJhiI2B.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0460-052F, U+1C80-1C8A, U+20B4, U+2DE0-2DFF, U+A640-A69F, U+FE2E-FE2F;
}
/* cyrillic */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZthiI2B.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0301, U+0400-045F, U+0490-0491, U+04B0-04B1, U+2116;
}
/* greek-ext */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZNhiI2B.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+1F00-1FFF;
}
/* greek */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZxhiI2B.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0370-0377, U+037A-037F, U+0384-038A, U+038C, U+038E-03A1, U+03A3-03FF;
}
/* vietnamese */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZBhiI2B.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0102-0103, U+0110-0111, U+0128-0129, U+0168-0169, U+01A0-01A1, U+01AF-01B0, U+0300-0301, U+0303-0304, U+0308-0309, U+0323, U+0329, U+1EA0-1EF9, U+20AB;
}
/* latin-ext */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZFhiI2B.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0100-02BA, U+02BD-02C5, U+02C7-02CC, U+02CE-02D7, U+02DD-02FF, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+1D00-1DBF, U+1E00-1E9F, U+1EF2-1EFF, U+2020, U+20A0-20AB, U+20AD-20C0, U+2113, U+2C60-2C7F, U+A720-A7FF;
}
/* latin */
@font-face {
  font-family: 'Inter';
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
  font-display: block;
  src: url(https://design.penpot.app/internal/gfonts/font/inter/v20/UcCO3FwrK3iLTeHuS_nVMrMxCp50SjIw2boKoduKmMEVuGKYAZ9hiA.woff2) format('woff2');
  unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+2000-206F, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD;
}


html, body {
  margin: 0;
  min-height: 100%;
  min-width: 100%;
  padding: 0;
}

body {
  display: flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  align-items: center;
  width: 100vw;
  min-height: 100vh;
}

* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}

.text-node { background-clip: text !important; -webkit-background-clip: text !important; }

/* Button */
.button-ef52f83471d2 {
  position: relative;
  width: 105px;
  height: 34px;
  border-radius: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
  z-index: 0;
}

/* _ButtonBase */
.button-bas-ef52f83471d3 {
  position: absolute;
  left: 0px;
  top: 0px;
  width: auto;
  height: auto;
  background: #4172deFF;
  border: 1px solid #4172deFF;
  border-radius: 6px 6px 6px 6px;
  box-shadow: 0px 2px 4px -2px #dedede54, 0px 12px 12px -8px #dededeFF, inset 0px -4px 12px -8px #0020461F;
  display: flex;
  align-items: center;
  align-content: stretch;
  justify-content: center;
  gap: 8px;
  padding: 8px 14px 8px 14px;
  flex-direction: row;
  flex-wrap: nowrap;
}

/* Button CTA */
.button-c-t-a-ef52f83471d4 {
  height: 18px;
  flex-shrink: 0;
}
.button-c-t-a-ef52f83471d4 .root-0 {
  
  
  display: flex;
  white-space: break-spaces;
  align-items: flex-start;
}
.button-c-t-a-ef52f83471d4 .root-0-paragraph-set-0 {
  display: inline-flex;
  flex-direction: column;
  justify-content: inherit;
  
  margin-right: 1px;
  vertical-align: top;
}
.button-c-t-a-ef52f83471d4 .root-0-paragraph-set-0-paragraph-0 {
  font-size: 0;
  line-height: 1.25;
  margin: 0;
  text-align: left;
}
.button-c-t-a-ef52f83471d4 .root-0-paragraph-set-0-paragraph-0-text-0 {
  color: rgba(250, 248, 255, 1);
  text-transform: none;
  
  line-break: auto;
  overflow-wrap: initial;
  white-space: pre;
  font-size: 14px;
  text-rendering: geometricPrecision;
  caret-color: rgba(250, 248, 255, 1);
  text-decoration: none;
  letter-spacing: 0px;
  font-family: "Inter";
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: 600;
}

<!-- frame: Button -->
<div class="frame button-ef52f83471d2">
  <!-- frame: _ButtonBase -->
  <div class="frame button-bas-ef52f83471d3">
    <!-- text: Button CTA -->
    <div class="shape text button-c-t-a-ef52f83471d4">
      <div class="text-node-html" id="html-text-node-26931f38-d193-8030-8006-ef52f83471d4" data-x="821" data-y="637">
        <div class="root rich-text root-0" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
          <div class="paragraph-set root-0-paragraph-set-0">
            <p class="paragraph root-0-paragraph-set-0-paragraph-0" dir="ltr"><span class="text-node root-0-paragraph-set-0-paragraph-0-text-0">Button CTA</span></p>
          </div>
        </div>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

As the design process progresses, these internal variables will make more sense. While today, Plasma Design is manually implemented, in the future, we see that developers would not need to interact with the button design directly and just implement the desired action.

The second maintenance release of the 25.08 series is out continuing the focus on stability and polish. It fixes issues with effects and transitions, improves clip selection, and resolves crashes related to filter jobs and effects on sequences. This version also comes with updated parameters for frei0r effects and GIF rendering preset.

The Windows package also fixes an annoying short freeze issue affecting the 25.08.1 version.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

I’m very glad to participate in the 2025 edition of the International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala, and present a talk to a great audience.

ICFK is organized by KaChaTaThaPa foundation headed by master calligrapher Narayana Bhattathiri. The event usually takes place on 2–5 October in Kochi. Varying talks, workshops, demonstration sessions, exhibitions, and above all meeting and learning from exemplary calligraphers is the best part of the event. The venue always bursts with beauty, energy, and fun; where everyone is approachable.

Reconnected with old friends and made new friends. Ashok Parab was traveling pan-India and documenting scripts, that lead to teaching scripts — including Malayalam — as well. Abhishek Vardhan is doing research on Nāgarī script. Syam is doing research on Malayalam calligraphy. They promised to share their findings and public/open resources, which would be very interesting to look at. Vinoth Kumar, Michel D’Anastasio, Nikheel Aphale, Muqtar Ahammed, and Shipra Rohtagi gave me souvenirs — thank you! I had chances for interesting long chats with Uday Kumar (who asked me about Sayahna Foundation after the t-shirt I wore), Achyut Palav, Sarang Kulkarni, Brody Neuenschwander, and also Shyam Patel of Kochi Biennale Foundation.

On many occasions delegates approached and asked me about font development process, complex text shaping and related topics. It was also too tempting to not buy fountain pens and Bhattathiri’s merchandise on sale, as gift to friends. The dinner with the ICFK team at Boulangerie Art Cafe was delicious. TM Krishna’s carnatic music concert on Saturday evening was a heavenly experience — Krishna Seth sitting next to me was spontaneously drawing on the notebook for the entire duration of the concert.

For the last edition, I presented a talk about font development, font engineering, complex text shaping, and such back-end tasks that designers generally find difficult. This year, I talked about the ‘Fundamentals of Typography’. I hope the talk succeeded to some extent in making everyone unhappy when they look at a badly typeset page .

The slides for the presentation are available here.

It has been a little quiet around my pet project Plasma Browser Integration. On one hand because I’ve been busy with life but also because browser extension APIs haven’t really gained much new functionality. Nevertheless, for Plasma’s October release I finally found the time to take care of some long-standing feature requests and/or bug reports.

Plasma Browser Integration consists of two pieces: the “native” host and the browser extension. The extension is a regular JavaScript browser extension for Chromium-based browsers and Firefox and is distributed on the corresponding browser extension stores. The plasma-browser-integration-host on the other hand is a binary which talks to the system services (KRunner, KDE Connect, MPRIS, job tracker, etc) and is shipped as part of regular Plasma releases. Often a new feature requires changes to both parts which is why it’s hard to predict when a certain feature will actually be fully released. We also have to ensure that the extension remains compatible with potentially super old host binaries. Even the latest browser extension should work just fine with the host that came with a Plasma 5.27 LTS.

With Chrome sabotaging ad-blockers through Manifest Version 3 I am spending more time in Firefox again. The most notable new feature in Plasma 6.5 with the soon-to-be-released browser extension version 2.1 is that Plasma Browser Integration will prevent the system from going to sleep while downloading a file. Chrome does that on its own but the relevant Firefox bug report reached Ontario legal drinking age (reported against Windows XP), so I guess it was time to just do it ourselves. I recently added this functionality to KIO while copying files but there’s many more jobs that might want to do that. Therefore, I moved the logic into a dedicated KInhibitionJobTracker in KJobWidgets. You just register your job with this job tracker and the system will remain on for the entire duration of the task (on Windows, too!). When using KIO’s “dynamic job tracker” like most file-related operations, you get this automatically now.

Speaking of Firefox, Plasma’s volume applet now shows the name of the tab that is playing audio. This information is actually provided by Firefox itself (and I wish Chrome did the same) and not Plasma Browser Integration but we didn’t show that property until Plasma 6.4. Pretty neat to have it now. For accessibility purposes, Plasma 6.4 also added a playback speed selector to the Media Controller in your System Tray which works with most websites.

The KRunner plug-ins (tabs and history) now limit the favicon size they send. Some websites have 512px favicons which, while visually pleasing, is a little excessive for the places we show them in (KRunner or Kickoff). It further requests the list of open browser tabs from the extension only once at the beginning of a new “match session”. They’re unlikely to change in between because, well, you’re interacting with KRunner right now. While KRunner waited for the request to complete before sending another one, it might have still requested your tabs several times depending on how fast you typed.

Finally, something I had wanted for a long time is to download the album cover on the browser extension side. Previously, the extension collected the artwork URL from a website and announced it via MPRIS. The plasmashell would then load that image and display it. You can probably imagine why it’s not a good idea to have the shell load random files off the internet. It’s also why album art from the browser didn’t work on the lock screen because it rightfully has no network access. From Plasma 6.5, the browser will actually download the album cover. This way it’s done in the browser’s protected environment and can also refer to your session cookies. Further, it leaks less information about you if only your browser is accessing the server. While the resulting image file can still be potentially malicious, it’s one less attack vector. I tried to draw the artwork into an off-screen canvas to sanitize it to a PNG on the browser side but I wasn’t able to do that from the extension’s background script. If you have any more ideas how to make this feature more resilient, please let me know!

Today I have finally been able to upload the first set of Ocean assets into Invent. For now, these elements will live in my personal git repository. These elements are not yet integrated into the Plasma ecosystem.

The page contains a few elements, a wiki page (under development and updates), color scheme (Light and dark), icon pack, and a Plasma style.

LINK: https://invent.kde.org/abetts/ocean-design

The workflow will be like this, for now:

• Users can submit bug or issue tickets into the issue tracker on Invent
• Users can clone the repository and use the assets. Note that assets are set up as folders. To install on your system, you will either need to move them into the right directory or compress the folders and then install using System Settings
• After applying fixes or suggestions into the application housing the assets, Figma or PenPot, we will create an export.
  • Exports are “not” workable copies of the assets. They are rendered graphics.
• Exported assets will make it into the github repository replacing the copy put online with its respective commit message.

Note that these assets are under heavy development and are changing constantly. They are not 100% finished and bugs are present.

Known Bugs

• Icons containing un-flattened and non-unionized paths will not render properly. This is most notable in emblem icons. We are working currently on fixing these icons. Another evidence of this issue is in icons that don’t change to the proper opposite color when switching to a dark color scheme. If you notice any of those, please report them.
• Missing dark versions of Plasma style. We have not completed the work on the light theme so it’s hard to make color variations for a dark theme. Work is ongoing.
• Missing app icons. Not all app icons have been redesigned. These icons take much longer to be done given they are colorful icons and require more attention. Redesigned app icons you see today, are also not fine tuned. They are the start of the redesign.

I wanted to thank all those contributors who have helped throughout this process. Your helpful recommendations, discussion, clarifications have aided to get to this point. More work is ongoing and I will report on that soon.

In September, I spent over 12 hours in airplanes and trains getting to Berlin to attend my second Akademy conference. The experience once again made the long trip worthwhile. It was lovely to see some familiar faces, and to meet other folks for the first time. This was my second trip to Berlin, and it was nice to see different areas of the city than last year. Like last year, people were so approachable, friendly and easy to talk to. The welcome event was at the lovely Schleusenkrug Beer Garden, just a short walk from the venue, nestled in one of the many areas of greenery.

There were more talks and BoFs I attended than I'll mention, these are things that stood out to me. There were so many good talks and workshops, I recommend checking out the recordings.

A small tangent about travel comfort

Or - How to spend a week in a different timezone without feeling like a zombie.

The jet lag was a lot easier this year because I learned the wisdom of hydration and getting decent rest on long haul flights. I took some electrolyte drink powder with me, which I mixed into the little bottles of water on my long flights. This made a huge difference in my energy levels and how much I enjoyed my time in Berlin.

Saturday

Opening things up, the keynote "Open by Design: How Governments Can Lead the Shift to Digital Sovereignty" made excellent points about the importance for countries to enable independence, autonomy and security in the digital world.

My colleague David Edmundson gave an informative talk on "Plasma: Lessons Learned and Our Path Forward in 2026 and Beyond". He recounted, with honesty and humor, things Plasma has done well and not so well over the years. There were good points to keep in mind, as someone focused on testing and quality, while reviewing bug reports and merge requests.

There were a handful of talks and BoFs about KDE Linux and the growth of the obtsalat. This is an important project for KDE in terms of dogfooding and testing, so I like keeping up to date on things here.

The talk "From Misunderstood to CEO – Breaking Bias and Building Inclusion" was particularly interesting, as a woman in a male dominated industry. I heard echos of some of my experiences, as well as useful advice on dealing with bias.

Sunday

The keynote "The Politics of the Pull Request: How Open Standards Can Shift Power" was educational. It made me aware of the ways in which technology does more than enable us to get work done. It shapes the conversations we have and the world we live in, in a tangible way. It determines who can access things that are fundamental to living in society and who can't. Open source can be more than a way of collaborating, it can also help make things more equitable for more groups of people. I especially liked that the "myth of meritocracy" was highlighted and challenged. It's a topic I've seen debated online quite a bit over the years. Recently, especially, I've seen various claims that "technology shouldn't be political", and this described the many ways technology can't help but be political. This is one talk I'd really recommend watching because it exposes things people might not think about or realize - such as how current systems enable rich and powerful families to stay that way and exclude others - as well as highlight ways open source projects can change things for the better.

"Handling Negative Feedback" by my colleague Akseli Lahtinen was informative about types of negative responses we might get in our open source work, and practical ways of handling it. He had useful advice not just about responding in productive ways, but also about taking care of ourselves to avoid burnout. There was also useful information about mentoring people, as well as encouraging community and maintainers. Related, David Edmunson had a talk specifically about "Maintainers Don't Grow on Trees".

"Getting Hired to Work on FOSS" had useful advice on working on FOSS for a paycheck and how it's different than when it's your hobby. It's useful for anyone thinking about making their FOSS work their living. There's information especially good for people who don't have experience working for a more traditional company.

In "Mass Migration from Windows", I could very much relate to the challenges of getting open source accepted in a business. Reluctant IT departments, nervous managers asking about who will support things; I'm sure I'm not alone in having met those points of friction when trying to use an open source operating system at the office. There was practical information of addressing those points and ways the sitation is improving.

Nate Graham, another colleague, spoke about "Minding the Big Picture: Opportunity from Chaos". This spoke to some of the surprising advantages of these "abnormal times" that KDE can take advantage of. There are some areas where KDE can do practical work to be a real leader in bringing the Linux desktop experience to more end users and enterprises.

The Social Event

After all those talks, it was nice to just hang out. We were at a bar and hacker space Sunday evening called c-base, which reconstructs a fictional, crashed space station. Neat! The company and the beer were nicely refreshing and it was a pretty chill place.

The Wednesday Day Trip

The day trip on Wednesday had two parts. The first was a scavenger hunt, which I skipped out on. Akseli, his wife and I went to Alexanderplatz and had bubble tea near the TV Tower before joining the others. The group then went to the Computerspielemuseum (Computer History Museum), which was a treat. In addition to information about historical computer advancements, and interactive exhibits, there is a small arcade, and some mini-room setups. There was a student desk that reminded me of one I had (mine had the Commodore 128 my brother and I shared). There were also models of historical computers on display. One of these was a TRS-80, the first model I had at home and where I learned word processing.

BoFs

End of 10 Campaign - discussion of the next steps and how folks can help out.

Automatic QA / Recoverability - in which I refreshed my familiarity with the tools currently being used.

KWallet Secret Service: problems and roadmap - this is something I keep up to date on in relation to development and QA.

KDE Out of Box Experience - you might be familiar with this as KISS. It's a setup UX for the first boot of a newly purchased / installed system. This is going to make life easier for people getting a pre-built system as well as for enterprise installation fleets.

That's a Wrap

After a week in Berlin, I was sad to leave but was at the same time looking forward to getting back home. As announced on 27-Sept - Rewatch the Highlights - Akademy 2025 Talks & Sessions Now Available Online. Time to check out recordings of things I wasn't able to attend. K'm looking forward to next year. The Call for Hosts is live, and it will be Akademy's 30th birthday!

Better late than never! After quite a few requests, here’s the second part of my backpacking adventure through the Balkans from back in July. If you missed the first part, you can check it out here.

After leaving Croatia, I traveled to the central Balkan countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia.

Mostar

Since there were no trains from Split to Mostar, I took the bus instead.

In Mostar, I stayed at another Hostel called Taso’s House. It was a small hostel but the host made us discover the whole Herzegovina region and explained us a lot of things about his country, the complex political situation there and how it was to grow up in Mostar during the war.

I only stayed there for two nights, and I regret not staying a bit longer or visiting the genocide museum, which I’d heard great things about.

Sarajevo

The next stop on my trip was Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I booked a train ticket online, and this is what I got. It was slightly tricky to import into KDE Itinerary, but the train ride itself was very enjoyable. Interestingly, although the train has both first- and second-class coaches, all tickets are sold as second class, and passengers are free to sit in the first-class coaches — which I did. 😉

Sarajevo itself was beautiful, and I took the cable car up into the mountains to visit the old Winter Olympics park. I even ended up appearing on the city’s television YouTube channel as a sort of side quest, along with three Australians.

Belgrade

Afterward, I went to Serbia — more precisely, to the capital, Belgrade. I took a night bus, which turned out to be a bit stressful. I almost missed it because I didn’t have one euro in cash to pay a surprising platform fee to enter the bus station. Then, at the border around 2 a.m., I was the only one who had to go through a full luggage check.

In Belgrade itself, I didn’t do much. I spent a lot of time at the hostel talking with other travelers and petting the hostel cat. I was a bit shocked by the amount of military propaganda I saw everywhere in the city.

Niš

On my way to Bulgaria, I made a short stop in Niš, in southern Serbia. It’s one of the largest cities in the country and has a strong Turkish influence.

Sofia

My next stop was Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Since there are no longer any passenger trains running between Niš and Sofia, I took an old bus from Niš across the Serbian and Bulgarian countryside, but the ride was confortable.

I only stayed one day in Sofia and scrolled the city with some people I meet in my hostel.

I visited the ‘Red Flat’, which was a time capsule of how a flat looked during the end of the comunism time. This was quite a retro experience. I also ended up visiting more orthodox churches.

Istanbul

The last stop on my trip was Istanbul. I took the night train there, which turned out to be a bad experience — we ended up waiting four hours at the border, and the whole process was quite inefficient.

Istanbul itself was amazing. I had originally planned to stay only three days before heading back to Bucharest, but I found a cheap flight (€50 with luggage) back to Berlin, so I ended up staying a total of six days. I stayed at a hostel called Second Home Hostel, which turned out to be a really fun place. The staff were extremely friendly, I met a lot of amazing people there, and we went out partying almost every night.

I also meet Jon Worth who was working on his #CrossBorderRail project and was at the same time in Istanbul.

And now back to the reality but I am already looking forward to my next backpacking trip.

One of the key problems we identified with previous KDE neon releases was that only user edition was receiving any meaningful testing. This often lead to a situation where problems were identified only when user edition was being readied for public release and bug squashing was hurried and therefore less than ideal.

To try and fix this problem, a dev archive named stable was created (this happened in Novemeber 24) and the daily builds for the neon testing are now uploaded there. Various automated and manual tests are run and when we are happy (usually at least on a weekly basis), the archive is snapshot out to the public facing testing archive. This is the same process that is utilised for KDE neon user edition which is snapshot from the dev based release archive.

So hopefully users of KDE neon testing and user editions have seen improved stability and less critical bugs over the last year. Live ISO’s are available to try at https://neon.kde.org/download