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Sunday, 19 October 2025

digiKam 8.8.0 Running Under Linux to Preview HEIF Images

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After four months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 8.8.0. This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency.

The digiKam team remains committed to providing a powerful, open-source digital photo management solution, continuously enhanced with new tools and optimizations for photographers and enthusiasts alike.

Saturday, 18 October 2025

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.5, and I think it’s gonna be a pretty darn good release when it comes out in 3 days! So eyes started turning towards features and UI improvements again, and you’ll notice a few of them this week.

Let me also draw your attention to another topic: KDE’s birthday! KDE is 29 this week and celebrating by kicking off our annual fundraiser. It’s a great time to donate if you’ve been on the fence or just want to show your love for Plasma!

The majority of KDE e.V.’s yearly budget comes from fourth quarter fundraising at this point, so it really does make a big difference. Donate today! And then check out this week’s goodies:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The Application Dashboard widget can now be configured to follow the color scheme, though it remains dark by default. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Application Dashboard’s light mode
Application Dashboard’s traditional dark mode

Keep in mind this dashboard hasn’t had any visual sprucing-up in years; if you’re tempted to complain that it’s ugly or unpolished, we probably agree, and would welcome any contributions!

You can now resize the area between Application Dashboard widget’s Favorites and Applications areas, allowing for one or the other to take up more space. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Klipper actions can now be disabled, without having to remove them. (Jonathan Marten, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Right Now

The Plasma Browser Integration add-on’s settings window now has a dark background when its browser is using dark mode. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

KWin’s Dim Inactive effect is now clamped to strength levels between 10 and 90%, because anything outside that range doesn’t really make sense and can produce nonsensical results. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

If you’ve deliberately masked the Systemd service for the firmware updater (fwupd), Discover no longer considers this an error to bug you about. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

The highlights for top-level menu items are now slightly rounded. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Rounded top-level menu highlight for dolphin’s Edit menu

When using the Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper provider, the thumbnail preview for the day’s wallpaper will now reflect the wallpaper’s actual aspect ratio — landscape or portrait — instead of always showing a portrait version of it. (Gergely Kovács, link)

Passwords for Wi-Fi networks are, by default, now stored globally (in a root-owned location, so not just anyone can go look at them), rather than per-user. This yields multiple benefits, including:

  • No more KWallet popups on misconfigured systems
  • New user accounts on the same system don’t need to manually log into common Wi-Fi networks all over again
  • Login screen features like LDAP account login that need internet access now always work out of the box

(Kristen McWilliam, link)

Frameworks 6.20

KRunner’s search results no longer dynamically change the priority of search results based on how often they’re used. This was a very clever feature, but ultimately made it impossible to offer a good default sort order because the actual sort order would be different for every person. Removing that makes the search result ordering predictable, and hence learnable. (Harald Sitter, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.6

The app chooser window now respects whether the app that opened it wanted it to be modal or not. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed two cases where KWin could crash when you put a laptop to sleep with an external display connected, and then woke it up again with the screen disconnected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash while closing after saving a file. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed a bug that could make remote desktop connections fail when using a recent version of ffmpeg. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed a bug that made it possible for screen content to not update frequently enough when using one of the full-screen colorblindness correction effects. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a visual issue that could make full-screen HDR content in certain games not actually look HDR. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Rotating a screen with HDR active no longer makes it become brighter than the surface of the sun for a few milliseconds. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a bug that made System Monitor sensors display the wrong values for certain NVIDIA GPUs. (David Redondo, link)

Notifications marked “transient” once again stay out of the notification history even if they include actions. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Fixed the scroll handle of the Application Dashboard widget; dragging it now works. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Fixed two layout issues with custom System Monitor layouts when using the “Maximum” height option, or more than 11 rows. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Large panels can no longer cover up the Edit Mode dialog when there are several of them in a complex layout. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Worked around a newly-introduced Qt 6.10 issue that made notifications about downloaded files inappropriately remain visible until manually closed. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.1

Fixed some UI issues in System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (David Edmundson and Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

Fixed a bug that could cause minor visual glitches when moving the pointer in and out of certain apps’ windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma tab bars not look quite right with non-default Plasma styles. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Discover no longer crashes when you’ve got Flatpak installed but it’s nonetheless not available for some reason. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed a bug that would store the IPsec passwords of some VPNs incorrectly, making them ask for the password every time you connected. (Mickaël Thomas, link)

Frameworks 6.19.1

Fixed a serious regression accidentally introduced into Frameworks 6.19 that made it impossible to write files into Samba shares. The relevant code will be covered with an autotest soon so it doesn’t regress again. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Frameworks 6.20

Separator lines throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now pixel-perfect, resolving an issue that could make them look much brighter than intended with a dark color scheme. Marco wrote an interesting blog post about this, too. (Marco Martin, link)

System Settings pages opened standalone using kcmshell6 no longer sometimes experience the bottom part of scrollable views being cut off. (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Fixed a bug that made the icon chooser dialog not let you re-select the same icon you selected the last time it was open. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Other bug information of note:

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Made some improvements to nested KWin sessions, including better performance and inhibiting global shortcuts outside of the nested environment. (Xaver Hugl and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

Plasma 6.6.0

kcmshell6 --list now sorts its output alphabetically. (Taras Oleksyn, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference.

If money is tight, you can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist, too.

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.

The Skrooge Team announces the release 25.10.0 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

Changelog

  • Correction bug 479854: The tool "Align sub-operation date..." don't update an operation
  • Correction bug 498606: ##WARNING: QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
  • Correction bug 507235: bad Unit import for Ms Money
  • Correction bug 507414: Regression: Error importing ISO20022 XML into Skrooge
  • Correction bug 510022: MS Money import: Dividends cause Unit Value = 0
  • Correction bug 510025: MS Money import: split transaction comments lost/overwritten
  • Correction bug 510027: MS Money import: Investment transactions not grouped
  • Correction bug 510115: MS Money import: Ignore (/import?) Classifications
  • Correction bug 492495: Empty New Account after CSV Import
  • Correction bug 491382: Wishlist: Add an option for work days in Schedule Transactions
  • Correction bug: Increase width of unit combo box
  • Correction bug: Not possible to create SEK and NOK units because they have the same symbol. Fiw by using CurrencyUnitSymbolUnambiguous
  • Feature: Search transactions from tool bar
  • Feature: Add benchmark mode in debug page
  • Performances: Improve various sql performances

Thursday, 16 October 2025

This week marks KDE’s 29th birthday, which is pretty special. Did you know KDE has been around longer than Google, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Tesla, Spotify, Uber, VMware, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Github? Seriously! That’s a long time producing high quality, autonomy-respecting, non-exploitative software.

And humanity needs and deserves it, so we’re gonna keep going! We’re celebrating KDE’s birthday by kicking off our annual end-of-year fundraiser: https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2025/

The money raised here will support the ability of KDE e.V. (the nonprofit behind KDE) to continue hosting Akademy, funding development sprints, affording server hardware and hosting, and employing engineers, marketers, documentation writers, and support personnel (but not board members; we’re unpaid volunteers).

There’s a big set of initiatives, and they’re growing all the time as KDE gains in prominence worldwide! We have extremely ambitious goals of spreading humane software throughout the world.

Looking at the kind messages people have written in their donations, it seems like we’re seeing some success. Here are a few recent examples:

Thanks for KDE Plasma, can’t wait for KDE Linux!!! HB 🎂

To the most consistently feature rich Desktop Environment and just generally awesome set of applications! Thanks for the hard work!

Happy Birthday! Thank you, the Plasma Desktop and the KDE family of applications have made my life so much better. Keep up the good work on the newly-minted KDE Linux.

I’m giving you guys the money that would have gone to Windows 10 ESL had I not switched to Kubuntu earlier this year!

This might sound dumb but the wobbly windows option convinced one of my friends to install Linux so you win

Plasma is the best, very excited for Bigscreen!

KDE’s really great for both enthusiasts and newcomers. Without it, I’d be worried about “the linux desktop” hehe.

Thank you for you great work! One day I’ll find the time to contribute!

I know it’s only the minimum amount, but I love using your DE and software and want to help out any way I can. Thank you!

Thank you for your work and contribution!

Keep up the kood kork!

With love from Spain!! ❤

Keep up the great work!

thank you for a fine desktop 🙂

KDE is my daily driver for personal computing. It’s abundance of features and the distraction-free experience is great. Keep it going! I’ve been an on-and-off user since the KDE 1 Beta 3.

Thank you KDE team for your wonderful work. I use Neon daily and it’s truly a joy to use

Thanks for making the computing world a significantly better place.

Happy Bday, KDE has be rock solid this year!

VIEL ERFOLG von der Alten (84) !! (GOOD LUCK from the old folks (84) !!)

I love your work – thank you for everything! Greetings from Germany 🙂

Hope this helps you keep up the great work!

Thanks for the hard work! Keep it up! From a french user!

To many more birthdays to come.

Great work, KDE!

First time donating. I really love to use KDE.

Thank you, KDE developers & KDE application developers, for 29 years of FOSS-licensed desktop software for Unix.

Grazie mille per tutto quello che fate. Fedora KDE è fantastico!

Thank you for bringing Plasma and Kdenlive to the world. Keep doing what you’re always doing.

Just a small donation for now, more in December 🙂

I dunno why, but I really love what you are doing! I really enjoy KDE’s vibe overall and everything that you guys did!

We’ve set the comparatively modest goal of raising €50,000, and I’m happy to see that we’re already a quarter of the way there after only three days. But we need to keep up the push, as typically the first few days see the most donations. So please donate if you can, and spread the word far and wide!

The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects.

Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time, be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant.

The same happens for our communication channels or web sites. 20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like discuss.kde.org or in our Matrix channels.

Unfortunately our community is not that good at cleaning dead stuff up or deciding that the zombie state of some things hurt.

Dead Web Sites

A no longer updated website might be a small issue, that just looks bad, but most people will see that stuff with news from 2010 will likely be not alive.

Still, I think it makes sense to remove such sites and just redirect them (if there is any follow up information online).

It is no good state if we have stuff up that rots away since a few years, at least if it contains no other valuable info, like documentation or howtos.

Zombie Git Projects

Worse than dead web sites are zombie Git repositories that still get merge requests but nobody takes a look as all people are just gone but the stuff is not clearly marked as archived.

People waste their time and will likely be upset their contributions are not even looked at.

If a project is really dead, that should be archived, one can still resurrect it with easy later on, it is not gone, just clearly marked as dead.

Blackhole Mailing Lists

Even worse are in my eyes dead mailing lists.

People will drop questions there, in worst case that will even already hang for days in moderation or then forever without answer on the list.

That turns away people, you have a question or contribution and it ends in a black hole? No good first contact.

Solutions? Gardening!

What can we do?

We not just need to create new stuff and maintain what we have, we need to do some house cleaning or gardening.

We did that in the past, we can do it again :)

If you want to help, or just turn up and tell that your old project, web site or list it dead, show up on one of these issues:

Discussion

Feel free to join the discussion at the KDE reddit.

Wednesday, 15 October 2025

Sometimes an application can look kinda wrong due to very small details, few pixels can make or ruin the first impact. And since today a lot of monitors, especially laptop ones have to use fractional scaling, making things look sharp and pixel perfect is even harder.

Here is System Settings, on a screen scaled at 175%:

Here is zoomed, you can see some separators being one pixel, some other being two, usually blurred, making them appear of significantly different colors:

It was something that always annoyed me, so this is how System Settings will look with the next Kirigami that will come with the next Frameworks release in the beginning of November:

Here zoomed:

Separators are now 2 perfectly sharp pixels everywhere on 175%, giving the app a much cleaner look.

This will apply to every application which uses the Separator QML component. There are of course a lot of similar details fixes to do (and yes, I can see several ones still in the above screenshot), but sometimes small polishes can look like a big improvement 🙂

Sunday, 12 October 2025

Matrix Widgets in NeoChat, systemd user units in KJournald and a lot of fixes all other the place

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.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

KDE PIM

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Yuki Joou continued improving Merkuro Calendar, fixing the "Today" button, which wasn’t working as expected (25.08.3 - link).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Akseli Lahtinen fixed an issue where the icon sizes of list items were incorrect when zooming in and out rapidly. (25.12.0 - link).

Journald Browser Browser for journald databases

Andreas Cord-Landwehr added support for loading user units in KJournald Browser (25.12.0 - link).

Utilities

Kate Advanced text editor

Jack Hill added configuration for rust_hdl, a language server for the VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) (25.12.0 - link).

Kåre Särs fixed Git blame parsing for commits containing tabs in their summary. (25.12.0 - link)

Clock Keep time and set alarms

Kai Uwe Broulik reworked how the list of alarms and timers is loaded. This process is now asynchronous. (25.12.0 - link)

Konsole Use the command line interface

Wendi Gan fixed some styling issues that occurred when saving Konsole output as HTML. (25.12.0 - link)

Calculator A feature rich calculator

Alberto Jiménez Ruiz fixed decimal number parsing for locales that don’t use a dot as the decimal separator, such as Spanish. (25.12.0 - link)

Qrca Scan and create QR-Codes

Volker Krause added some missing icons on Android (25.12.0 - link).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

Forest Crossman fixed a crash in the virtual monitor plugin when used with misbehaving virtual monitor devices (link).

Games Applications

KRetro Libretro emulation frontend for Plasma

Laurent Montel updated KRetro to follow KDE best practices (link 1, link 2, link 3 , link 4, link 5, and more).

Chat Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Arno Rehn added basic support for Matrix Widgets and Jitsi (25.12.0 - link).

James Graham and Tobias Fella fixed various crashes in NeoChat detected by Sentry (link 1, link 2, and link 3).

Social Networks

Tokodon Browse the Fediverse

Joshua Goins moved the "Post" toolbar action to be a floating button on mobile devices (25.12.0 - link).

Browsers

Falkon Web Browser

Juraj Oravec added a context menu to the bookmark menu (25.12.0 - link) and fixed custom protocol handler registration (25.12.0 - link).

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Stefano Crocco increased the quality of the exported PDFs (25.12.0 - link) and added support for the standard JS window.print() call to open a print dialog (25.12.0 - link).

Third Party Applications

Dr. Tej A. Shah started porting Clear.Dental to Kirigami!

…And Everything Else

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.

Get Involved

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.

I'm writing this blog in the very very early stages of development because I'm 50% sure someone will link me to some existing library that Google failed to find.

Varlink

Varlink is an IPC mechanism that is gaining popularity in a few places across Linux. It's very simple, JSON blobs over a socket terminated with a null byte. It doesn't have anywhere near the features of DBus, but the simplicity is the main selling point.

Ultimately when it comes to choosing IPC what matters is what the servers you want to talk to are already using and then things become forced.

QtVarlink

Interacting with C APIs is a horrible experience for all involved. We want something that looks and behaves likes a Qt developer would expect and used the inbuilt QtJson classes.

My new library provides API as follows.

    VarlinkClient client("unix:/tmp/foo");
    QFuture<VarlinkResponse> pendingResponse = client.call("org.example.Ping", QJsonObject({{"ping", "1"}}));
    pendingResponse.then(this, [](VarlinkResponse response) {
        qDebug() << response.parameters()["pong"].toString();
    });

Or any variation of QFutureWatcher or just blocking.

State

Code is available at: https://invent.kde.org/davidedmundson/qtvarlink

As mentioned in the intro, it's pre pre alpha. It's the minimum viable product for a task I had, but I intend to make it a standalone project.

Please let me know if this would be useful to you. There's a roadmap in the Readme and pull requests are more than welcome!

Saturday, 11 October 2025

Linux Magazine included a nice article about Tellico in its June 2025 edition on Cool Linux Hacks. It has a nice description of adding items to one’s collection and how to search various sources online. A couple of screenshots are included that do a good job of showcasing the interface.

It even connects to the subsequent review of a barcode scanner to talk about using it together with Tellico. The distinction between using a webcam for scanning, where Tellico has to convert the image to a barcode, and a specific barcode scanner isn’t always clear to users. A scanner can essentially act as a keyboard, where the barcode comes across just as if someone were typing it in. For Tellico’s use, the webcam functionality isn’t well-tested since scanners are much more prevalent.

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:

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.