Dear Qt community!
with seven weeks to go until an exciting year 2025 will have passed, we are pleased to open the nomination period for the Qt Champion 2025 award!
See this Wiki page for more information about the award and its nomination process: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_Champions_2025
We're looking very much forward to reading about your favorite candidates!
Cheers
Axel
Welcome to the October 2025 development and community update.
The Text Tool's Tool Options have been overhauled. There's now a button to access the Text Properties docker, along with an option to create new texts with current properties or with a style preset. Options to switch between using visual or logical cursor direction for bidirectional text, and pasting rich or plain text have also been added. (Change)
The other addition is Type Setting Mode, which shows transform handles for the font size and baseline-shift. With preformatted or pre-positioned text, character transforms are also possible. Holding Shift shows different baselines to switch to. (Change)
In the area of file formats, basic support has been added for PSD text layers, vector masks, vector strokes, vector parametric shapes, and guides. (Change)
Wolthera discusses these changes in the Text Tool thread and asks again for feedback on a proposal for splitting character and paragraph properties.
Carsten has continued to fix issues with touch input in the Stable branch.
Long-press handled has been further improved. Long-pressing a slider-spinbox no longer shows text selection handles when not in text edit mode. The long-press distance is now calculated correctly, so a slight movement won't cancel it. The kinetic scrolling timeout no longer adds onto the long-press timeout. (Change)
Kinetic scrolling by left-click has been disabled on the animation timeline to not interfere with dragging frames and other operations. (CCbug report) (Change)
Popup-at-cursor widgets such as the Selection Action Menu now appear at the touch location instead of cursor location. (Change)
The Edit Shapes Tool now works properly with touch, instead of only making selections. (bug report) (Change)
Basic HDR support for the canvas on Wayland has been implemented by Dmitry. Testing instructions and discussion of issues can be found in the forum thread. (Change)
Krita 5.3.0 is scheduled to enter feature freeze on November 21st. This means no new features will be accepted for the next version, and developer focus will shift to finishing features already in progress and fixing bugs.
After a bugfixing period of a few months, the first beta testing release is currently planned for February.
14 forum members took on the challenge of the "The Burden of Power" theme. And the winner is… The Burden of Power by @Famouzy
For this month's theme, winner @Famouzy has chosen "Civilization Engulfed by Nature".
This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 21 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Young Escherstein! by @jimplex
Interstellar Gura by @RavioliMavioli
Peaceful Stream by @CrazyCatbird
Take a look at the nominations for next month, and suggest your favorite latest artworks to be featured. Don't forget to vote when the poll opens on November 11th!
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 in Krita's development builds from October 20, 2025 - November 11, 2025.
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.14-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64
Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64
Plasma's first-run experience (FRE) / out-of-box experience (OOBE) has seen significant improvements in security recently.
Although first off I think I maybe hadn't mentioned yet how the project was renamed.
Previously known as "KDE Initial System Setup" (KISS), the project has been rebranded to "Plasma Setup" and now sits nicely alongside other system projects like "Plasma Desktop", "Plasma Mobile", "Plasma Keyboard", etc.
We received a notice of potential security issues from the folks at openSUSE, which have now been addressed.
This sort of thing is a great example of why it can be so difficult to provide ETAs and timelines for software development: unexpected issues often arise that need to be addressed before other planned work can proceed, and these issues can take time to investigate and fix properly; in this case, the security issues required careful review and testing to ensure that they were resolved without introducing new problems, and delayed our initial release by weeks.
I had very little experience with this sort of security-minded defensive programming before this, so it was a great learning experience for me personally as well. It required a whole lot of reading and research to understand the best practices and principles involved, and I definitely have a better feeling for how to think about defensive programming in the future.
It amazes me the kinds of things people will try to do to break software, and many of them (like path traversal attacks) are things I would never have thought of on my own!
I'd like to thank the openSUSE security team for responsibly disclosing these issues, and for their patience while we worked through them. Their help has made Plasma Setup more secure for all users, and I appreciate their dedication to improving the security of open source software.
A massive thank you specifically to Matthias Gerstner for the multiple rounds of detailed and thoughtful reviews and suggestions on the MR to address these issues. Your help was invaluable, and it was a pleasure working with you! 🙇♀️ 💙 🦎
Plasma Setup is nearly ready for initial testing and adoption. There are a couple more items to wrap up, but (barring further unforeseen delays!) we are very close to being able to release it for early adopters to try out! 🎉
Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so), we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
As part of our yearly fundraiser, you can adopt one of KDE's apps and we can share with the whole world how awesome you are and how much you're doing to support us.
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE app scene, let's dig in!
Anders Lund added support for navigating between images when zoomed in using a touchscreen or stylus in Photos (25.12.0 - link). He also made the viewer auto-zoom when releasing a pinch when appropriate (e.g., the image is now smaller than the view) (25.12.0 - link).
Anders also enabled the slideshow feature on mobile (25.12.0 - link).
Jonah Brüchert implemented auto-resolving from railway station names to coordinates based on Nominatim (the geocoding engine powering OSM) (25.12.0 - link).
Volker Krause added support to the extractor for citycity.se, Comboios de Portugal, and Wiener Linien barcodes, and improved a bunch of existing extractors (25.12.0 - link 1, link 2, ...).
Christoph Erhardt fixed a segmentation fault when migrating an existing Akonadi database to SQLite (25.12.0 - link).
Nicolas Fella dropped the barely used feature to show an "About Data" dialog in Akonadi resources (25.12.0 - link).
Jack Barmes added new bookmark actions to add and remove books in various context menus in Okular (26.04.0 - link).
Waqar Ahmed improved Git support in Kate. The list of branches now shows the latest activity (25.12.0 - link).
Additionally, he improved the Quick Open dialog, and it is now possible to jump to a specific line and column by entering something like 10:5 (25.12.0 - link).
Dennis Lübke added a plugin to transparently edit encrypted text files with GPG in Kate (25.12.0 - link).
Joshua Goins added an informational Keyboard Shortcuts settings page to NeoChat (25.12.0 - link).
Joshua also improved the design of the room notification settings and made it more consistent in terms of wording with the context menu used to configure notifications (25.12.0 - link).
Among a multitude of other small fixes, he improved the user experience related to the basic Jitsi meeting button to show whether a meeting is in progress, and to only enable it when the user has permission to start a meeting (25.12.0 - link).
Carsten Hartenfels added a way to trigger the "toggle eraser preset" action via touch gestures in Krita (Krita 5.2.x - link).
Wolthera van Hövell ported the text tool dock to QML (link).
Dmitry Kazakov implemented basic HDR support on Wayland (link).
Manuel Alcaraz replaced the hamburger menu with a menu bar (link).
Easy Effects 8 was released and now uses Kirigami! Read the full announcement for details.
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. 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. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, 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 your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
About three weeks ago we released Plasma 6.5 and it's high time we talk about the plethora of improvements and bug fixes that arrived in Plasma Mobile and related projects. Let's not delay any further and get right into the juicy details!
While our end goal is obviously KDE for world domination and a resulting breadth of native apps, we're not quite there yet and until then we wanted to make it easier to use and integrate apps running through Waydroid into your Plasma Mobile system. To that end, Florian made it so you can now set up and manage your Waydroid install right from the comfort of your settings app and turn on/off the Waydroid container from the quicksettings dropdown.
(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)
The lockscreen is one of the most often used and seen parts of a phone's UI and it has two jobs: Securely lock your device, but ultimately, get out of your way. So far we succeeded at the first of these jobs, but in 6.5 Devin made sure we do in the second as well. Plasma Mobile's lockscreen will now load much faster, due to reusing the existing status bar and action drawer process from the shell, instead of loading them separately each time the lockscreen is loaded. This also has the positive side effect of notifications now properly being synced between the lockscreen and unlocked shell. (Devin Lin, Link)
Florian also worked on some other nifty additions:
(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2, 3)
Micah improved and expanded the background blur effect for both the Folio and Halcyon homescreens, resulting in more consistent use of blur.
(Micah Stanley, Link)
Devin put in some work to make Folio more keyboard navigation friendly, as well as improving it in various places under the hood: from cleanup to performance improvements there's a good mix of changes here
(Devin Lin, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Meanwhile, Florian added double tap to lock to Folio, as well as a number of other improvements.
(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
Devin unified some code paths between Halcyon and Folio, and added a small settings page to Halcyon. Like with Folio, he also ported Halcyon to use a new applet registration method which allows it to be precompiled by qmlcachegen
There's a good bunch of stuff here as well:
Devin made sure mobile settings pages only show up on form factors that they make sense on so we stop showing the mobile shell settings on desktop. (Devin Lin, Link 1, 2)
Luis has worked on the taskswitcher internals to make it more compatible with qmlcachegen. This lays the groundwork for improving its performance while also making the code more maintainable for the future.
Devin has done the first step on porting over our haptics plugin to use feedbackd as backend. In the future, this will allow us more fine-grained control over haptic feedback, as well as better cross-desktop compatibility
(Devin, Link)
Besides Devin's work on making the action drawer overlay over the lockscreen mentioned above, there's also been some more work on improving performance of it and its contained quick actions.
For all of you running multi-monitor setups with Plasma Mobile and/or regularly docking and undocking, thanks to Sebastian there's now a quick settings to configure multi monitor layouts when several monitors are connected.
(Devin Lin, Link)
(Florian Richer, Link)
(Sebastian Kügler, Link)
The envmanager, responsible for keeping track of the settings environment of the shell has gotten more robust while improving how Plasma Mobile and Plasma Desktop coexist: there is now less cross-talk between potentially conflicting settings between the two shells making a hybrid setup (like on a 2-in-1 laptop/tablet combo) easier to use. In light of the work on Plasma keyboard, envmanager now also properly supports changing of the selected virtual keyboard for the mobile session.
(Devin Lin, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
We've also spent some time improving the general look and feel of the UI. This includes updating some elements to use more appropriate theme colors, using system-wide animation durations and better layouting to reduce overlapping text/UI controls.
(Luis Büchi, Link)
While not technically part of the 6.5 release cycle, we've recently also released the first unstable version (0.1.0) of our new virtual keyboard. While it's not ready for prime-time just yet, progress is quick and it's already something enthusiasts may want to tinker with - so tinker away and do let us know of any feedback you might have!
...and there’s much more. To see the full list of changes, check out the complete changelog for Plasma 6.5.
Do you want to help with the development of Plasma Mobile? We are a group of volunteers doing this in our free time, and are desperately looking for new contributors, beginners are always welcome!
See our community page to get in touch!
We are always happy to get more helping hands, no matter what you want to do, but we especially need support in these areas:
Even if you do not have a compatible phone or tablet, you can also help us out with application development, as you can easily do that from a desktop!
Take Plasma Mobile for a spin! Check out the device support for each distribution and find the version which will work for your device.
If you have any further questions, view our documentation, and consider joining our Matrix channel. Let us know what you would like to work on or where you need support to get going!
Our issue tracker documentation also gives information on how and where to report issues.
(Please note this is still a draft of my final blog)
And just like that, my Google Summer of Code journey with OpenPrinting is drawing to a close. This post serves as a final summary of my project: rebuilding pycups from the ground up for libcups3. While I still have a few things I plan to update, this covers the core of my work over the summer.
It’s been an incredible experience, and I’m excited to share the architectural decisions, challenges, and “magic” tricks that went into creating the new pycups.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week something that I know a lot of people have been wanting for a long time was implemented: the ability to limit virtual desktops to only the primary screen! Thanks very much to Kristen McWilliam for this long-awaited feature, which arrives in Plasma 6.6.
But wait, there’s more…
The Networks widget now has a little button you can click on to connect to a network using a QR code, via the Qrca helper app. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
The DrKonqi crash reporting system now notices crashes for non-KDE apps too, and prompts you to report them to their developer or your distro. (Harald Sitter, link)
Added support for the MHC2 tag in ICC profiles, which is a non-standard tag used in Windows, but without support for it, profiles used on Windows won't produce identical color effects when used in KWin. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Colors picked using the color picker now reflect the raw RGB values of the color, rather than a tinted version that might be affected by the Night Light effect or the use of an ICC profile. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Breeze-themed GTK apps now have a bit of extra padding on either side of their toolbars to prevent the leading and trailing items from touching the edges of the window, and some ugly black lines have turned into nicer-looking appropriately-colored lines. (Kevin Duan, link 1 and link 2)
System Settings’ Remote Desktop page now displays any errors inline, so you don’t have to go digging around in the journal log to find them and wonder why it’s not working. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)
Hot-corner effects now trigger for all screens, rather than just the corner of one screen. This can be disabled if you don't like it. (Yiqun Lian, link)
Fixed a regression that broke adding a new widget by clicking on it, as opposed to dragging it somewhere. (Nicolas Fella, link)
The text at the bottom of the time zone picker map is now translatable, and should start being translated into languages other than English soon. (Nicolas Fella, link)
The selection checkbox for wallpaper slideshow grid items no longer overlaps with the “I have light and dark versions available” icon in the corner. (Adam S. link)
Fixed an issue that made some toolbar items in the Font Viewer app invisible. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Fixed an issue that could make the text displayed by the “Show Compositing” and “FPS” effects appear off-screen with certain multi-monitor setups. (Pavel Duong, link)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you removed widgets or panels. (Marco Martin, link)
Fixed a case where Discover could crash while installing a Flatpak app. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)
Fixed a weird regression that made it impossible to put icons on desktops of screens that didn’t have any panels on them. (Marco Martin, link)
Fixed a regression that made inactive windows get activated if you happened to hover over anything in them that made a tooltip appear. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed an issue that could unexpectedly give screens in HDR mode a greenish tint when using the Night Light feature. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Closing the lid on a laptop whose screen had already been disabled no longer sometimes shifts the layout of external screens. (Méven Car, link)
Fixed a visual glitch in “Active Window” mode screenshots that made their window borders look a bit weird when using a fractional scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a few more cases where desktop icons could shift around, this time in response to changes in screen resolution and arrangement. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)
Added another page to the HDR calibration wizard to determine the maximum fullscreen average luminance. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Clarified an unclear label in the OpenConnect VPN authentication dialog. (Philipp Kiemle, link)
Fixed a case where the DrKonqi crash reporter could itself crash when you clicked on the “Details” button of a notification about something else crashing. (David Edmundson, link)
Fixed a case where trashing a file on an NFS share would move it to the local trash (which might be very slow, depending on the network) rather than the remote trash. (Oliver Schramm, link)
Fixed a regression that could make Discover prompt you to send feedback about it every time you launched it. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Fixed a bug that resulted in all system tray icons of Electron-based apps having the same ID, which meant that changing the icon visibility setting for one of them changed it for all of them. (Damglador, link)
Fixed a source of elevated CPU usage in the SDDM login screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
Made KWin more robust against a graphics issue that could make the screen go black after the system displays the Plymouth boot splash screen, but before it gets to the SDDM login screen. (Xaver Hugl, link)
Fixed a source of elevated CPU usage in Plasma’s wallpaper dialog and page in System Settings. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Improved visual smoothness while switching modes on multi-monitor setups with VRR-capable screens. (Hongfei Shang, Link)
Reduced Plasma’s memory usage by over 100 MiB by being cleverer about unloading wallpaper images that aren't needed anymore. This had the side effect of making tiled wallpapers impossible with the new system for technical reasons, so tiled wallpapers have been re-introduced in the form of a new “Tiled” wallpaper plugin, so you can still rock out to your favorite KDE 1 nose wallpaper. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)
Improved the robustness of drag-and-drop operations between XWayland-using windows and native Wayland windows. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)
Toggling Bluetooth can no longer briefly freeze the UI of whatever you used to toggle it. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
The current activity is now stored in the state file, not the config file. (Nicolas Fella, link)
Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we're up to 91% of our €75k stretch goal! This is tremendous, and I can't thank everyone enough for their generosity. Thank you everyone for helping to keep the lights on!
If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.
To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Today I’m putting on a different hat and announcing that Techpaladin Software is hiring! Right now we’re looking for a software developer who loves KDE Plasma and wants to see it thrive and shine, with the passion and self-motivation to make that happen.
In this role, you would be working on topics related to KDE Plasma that Techpaladin’s clients want improved, such as general polish and QA, implementing new features, fixing specific bugs, working on private hardware-specific software that supports Plasma, backporting fixes, release management, and so on. It’s always KDE-related!
This is a fully remote contract position open to anyone in the world not living in a country sanctioned by the U.S. government (sorry, it’s just gotta be that way for legal reasons). The start date is flexible and can be whenever you’re ready.
We have no lists of explicit qualifications, minimum years of experience, or formal education requirements. But working for Techpaladin might be a good fit the more this sounds like you:
Does this sound a bit like you? We’d love to hear from you at jobs@techpaladinsoftware.com (please don’t send anything clearly written by AI; it will be discarded immediately) with your resumé, KDE Invent profile, links to KDE-related projects you’re proud of, or anything else that seems relevant.
Looking forward to hearing from folks!
The last maintenance release of the 25.08 series is out with fixes to issues with clip pasting on projects with different fps, subtitle styles, image rendering, as well as problems with image sequences. This version also adds support for SVG file replacement and correctly checks for disk space when archiving among other improvements.
For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.
toscalix
@merritt:kde.org
soumyatheman
GSoC
