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.
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.
Konqi surfing the world wide web
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.
Firefox tab title displayed in the volume applet
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.
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.
Stop on the middle of the road
Landscape from the bus
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.
The old bridge of Mostar
View from the old bridge
Bunker for airplanes build during the Yugoslavia time
Town next to Mostar called Blagaj
Another view of Blagaj
Two rivers merging together and creating some waterfalls
The same two rivers
Old Bosnian village
The Kravice Falls
The group of people I spent my time in Mostar
View from Mostar in the evening
Close view from the old bridge
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.
River in Sarajevo
Taking the cable car
Old Bobsleigh
Old destroyed building by the war
View from the old destroyed building
View of Sarajevo
A copper shop (there was a lot of them in Bosnia)
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.
Me before taking the bus
Cool place in Belgrade full of bars
The citadel. There was a massive amount of old war machines next to it.
Ice tea
Matcha <3
A orthodox church
The crypt of orthodox church
Soviet style monument about the second world war
The cutest cat ever <3
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.
Entrance of the old Turkish fortrest in Nis
The other side of the entrance of this fortrest
Selfie of me :)
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.
A train
Morning Matcha <3
The living room of the 'Red Flat'
The bedroom room of the 'Red Flat'
Another gigantic orthodox church
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.
The night train I took
Me at 2 in the morning waiting for border check
Me in front the Hagia Sophia
One more hostel cat :)
Small cute street
Lot of olives
Nice food but I can't remember what was inside, just that it was vegetarian and with some rice
More cute street
Interior of a mosque
The spice market
I drank some chai so many times a day
And there was cats everywhere
Famous umbrella street
Beach during a day trip
Istanbul by night
View from a ferry to the other side of Istanbul
The group of people I hanged with during this trip
Prince island
One of the biggest wood structure of the world: Büyükada Greek Orphanage
The Blue Mosque
The Blue Mosque inside
Sunset
Selfie on a ferry
Selfie after going to a hammam/turkish bath
And now back to the reality but I am already looking forward to my next
backpacking trip.
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
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
"This Week in KDE Apps" is back! It's been a long time since the last issue, but every week, we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!
Yuki Joou improved the handling of sender information in the mail viewer header (25.12.0 - link). She also fixed the mail composer not showing the right sender address (25.12.0 - link).
Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease
Yuki also worked on Merkuro Calendar and fixed adding sub-items to tasks (25.12.0 - link), added a menu button to show/hide all calendars from an account (25.12.0 - link), and made sure we are only showing one refresh button in the account context menu (25.12.0 - link)
Supporting PIM libraries
Volker Krause made some more parts of the KMime API const correct and adapted various parts of the PIM codebase to that.
Allen Winter made Akonadi prefer MariaDB to MySQL when both are available (25.12.0 - link).
A Pixel 3a with postmarketOS running KRetro on Plasma Mobile
KRetro is a libretro frontend from KDE written in Qt with Kirigami! That means when given both a libretro core, and a game cartridge/disk ROM, it plays your favourite games. It is designed to be convergent, usable across all Plasma Platforms: Desktop, Mobile and Bigscreen.
What is Libretro?
You may have heard of RetroArch, a popular and famously portable retro game emulator frontend with a console-style UI. One of the important innovations from RetroArch is libretro, a standard API that can adapt the many numbers of independent game console emulators to a single program. This is what allows RetroArch to support a vast number of systems without needing to build support for each bespoke emulator into the frontend itself.
A libretro “core” is simply a .so/.dylib/.dll dynamic library file that packages an emulator (or an independent game), and can be loaded into any application that can consume it using the libretro.h C API specification.
Through the libretro API, cores are adapted to the native Qt interface of KRetro (for example, pixels are drawn onto a QImage, audio is rendered out using Qt Multimedia, and reading keyboard events is handled by the QML engine).
The Road to KRetro
KRetro screenshots – Desktop game view and player view, and the mobile player view.
KRetro’s development started in 2023 with a desire to help build more apps for Plasma Mobile (shout out to Devin for the idea and help along the way). I worked on it for a while, but unfortunately got busy with school and other things. In addition, the Qt 6 transition came and went, which left KRetro effectively abandoned.
The name? The K-prefix naming has mostly been phased out these days in KDE for new apps… you could say it is a retro naming scheme
What KRetro Can Do Today
As you probably guessed, this is an Alpha quality release, and while I did my best to have the experience be polished, you should expect bugs and missing features.
The Game Library view on KRetro – a list of game ROMs
More importantly, KRetro is not feature complete. This release is intentionally limited – I wanted to make sure the scope was not too large so meaningful progress can be made towards a release.
As of this first alpha release, KRetro can play games from the following fixed list of consoles:
Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom
Super Nintendo Entertainment System/Super Famicom
Game Boy Advance
Sega Master System
Sega Genesis/Mega Drive
libretro 2048 (a built-in demo game)
KRetro Controller Settings Page
KRetro also supports fully mappable controls for both keyboard and controller inputs, though only 1 port is available for now (so no multiplayer). Controller support is provided by SDL3 (and keyboard input is handled directly from the QML engine).
Per-game save states menu in KRetro
KRetro has a system for managing save states for each of your games, including a default save slot that automatically saves and restores your game progress when you quit and launch KRetro.
The Road Ahead: What’s Left to Do?
Lots! In fact, too many things to list here in detail. There are a number of big ticket items though, like enabling OpenGL/Vulkan support for cores (this will allow supporting most 3D consoles, like the N64, Wii, or Playstation), or allowing arbitrary core+rom combinations (allowing users to select any of the 200+ libretro cores they want, instead of having a fixed list of consoles as it is currently).
There are also lots of smaller quality of life features, for example:
Supporting more than 1 controller
Improve the touch controller layout on tablets
A better game/ROM list with extended metadata
Save state screenshots
And many more…
The Mobile platform also needs some more love specifically, like having transparent and customizable touch controller layouts.
Plasma Bigscreen support is generally pretty rough (given that Bigscreen itself isn’t released yet either), there is only basic remote navigation support for selecting games, and all other parts of the UI require a mouse to reach (such as the settings page).
KRetro has also at one point in the past run on Android (which is to say – it should be able to run on Android, but this hasn’t been tested in quite a while, and is probably broken), and iOS builds have never been attempted (however it has been run on macOS).
Does any of these features interest you, and you want to help out? Do you have more ideas? Come and contribute on the KDE Invent page!
Trying out KRetro
Sonic the Hedgehog on KRetro
Given that this is the first release, and an alpha quality release, KRetro is not packaged on any distros yet. The easiest way to experience KRetro if you are on x86_64 is to use the nightly flatpak:
$ wget https://download.kde.org/unstable/kretro/0.0.1/kretro-0.0.1.tar.xz
$ tar xvf kretro-0.0.1.tar.xz && cd kretro-0.0.1/
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake .. # install required dependencies if needed
$ make -j${nproc}
$ ./bin/kretro # or sudo make install
Besides installing KRetro, you will also need some libretro cores. On the nightly flatpak, these are already bundled in for you, and you’re ready to play games! If you install KRetro manually, the recommended/tested cores are as follows:
Nestopia for NES
snes9x for SNES
mGBA for GBA
Gearsystem for SMS
BlastEm for Genesis/MD
Some distros (like Arch and Alpine) already package these, so you can install them from their package managers (ex. pacman -S libretro-snes9x). Once installed, you can select them for use in the KRetro settings.
Games are detected and matched to their respective console type by their file extension, so all you need to do is place your game ROMs in “~/Documents/Games” (or another folder of your choosing).
For general discussion (especially if you want to contribute), I recommend you join the KDE Games Matrix room.
And last but not least, if you would like to develop and hack on KRetro, you can find everything you need at: https://invent.kde.org/games/kretro
Thank you!
Thank you for reading this far! I hope you will try out KRetro and enjoy it, and I hope the KRetro community will grow too!
I would like to give a special thanks to Devin Lin for his invaluable help, without him KRetro would never have gotten this far. I’d like to also give thanks to Carl Schwan for helping me along the KDE development process, his contributions to KRetro, and for being my sponsor for getting KDE developer status.
rajeesh
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@srisharan_v_s:matrix.org
