Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw quite a lot of feature work and user interface polish for Plasma 6.6! Have a look:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

There are now global actions for seeking forwards or backwards 5 or 30 seconds in the currently playing media. These work as long as the current media player supports letting other apps control seeking via MPRIS. The actions don’t have keyboard shortcuts assigned by default, but you can set them yourself. (Christoph Wolk, link)

You can now configure the Window List widget to show its menu on hover, or to hide the icon and only show the name of the active window. (Shubham Arora, link 1 and link 2)

You can now configure the order of the icons shown in the Lock/Logout widget. (Shubham Arora, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

Continued to polish up the XDG portal dialogs. This time the screen & window chooser dialog has been simplified and improved some more. (Harald Sitter, link)

Canceling a paste of some files onto Plasma’s desktop no longer produces a pointless error notification. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Added pin buttons to the Web Browser and Audio Volume widgets so that if you have either them in standalone form on a panel, you can keep their popups open while you’re still using them. (Alexander Lohnau and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the usability of searching using the Kickoff Application Launcher widget in several ways: now you can use the arrow keys to navigate from the search results view back to the search field, and new search results that come in late don’t cause the selection highlight to jump around. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the appearance and usability of the disks shown in Info Center’s S.M.A.R.T. Status page. (Joshua Goins, link)

Clearing the clipboard while it happens to be showing a QR code for one of the now-cleared items now dismisses the QR code, too. (Fushan Wen, link)

The Kicker Application Menu widget no longer very briefly flashes a message saying “No matches found” right after you search for things. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Improved the experience of rapidly moving the pointer over top-level menu items in the Kicker Application widget; now the sub-menus appear in the same way they do for other menus in apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)

When using the Kicker Application Menu widget on a right screen-edge panel, sub-sub-menus now open to the left of their parent, rather than on the right where they cover up the main menu. This also now works properly with an RTL language and a left screen-edge panel. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2)

Frameworks 6.21, with the full effect arriving in Plasma 6.6.0

The headers of Kirigami-based apps are now the same height as those of QtWidgets-based apps. In the process of improving this, we also managed to equalize the padding on all four sides of highlighted list items, and make them consistent with the outer padding of header items, too. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

The Fifteen Puzzle widget now has a nice new icon, and also uses a symbolic icon when placed on a panel. (Martin Sh, link 1 and link 2)

Frameworks 6.21

Reverted a change made a few months ago that hid .desktop files with NoDisplay=true set on them from apps’ “Open with” menus. While the original change seemed technically correct, it had negative side effects outweighing its advantages. (Nate Graham, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a random Plasma crash. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a case where turning on automatic updates in Discover would just make Discover crash in the background rather than running the updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed an issue that broke pasting images from the clipboard into Dolphin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where drawing using certain oddly-behaving drawing tablets would draw outside of the screen area. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where re-mapping drawing tablet stylus buttons didn‘t work. (Joshua Goins, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that mangled the desktop icon arrangement when dragging something to the desktop while it was using one of the automatic sorting modes. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that made certain GPUs get displayed as “llvmpipe” in Info Center. (Oleg Gorobets and Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some issues that made Plasma’s desktop sometimes fail to notice newly-created, -deleted, or -changed files. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that prevented re-opening the virtual keyboard immediately after closing it, but before clicking or re-focusing anything else. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that mangled the display of devices whose names contain Unicode characters in USB plug/unplug notifications. (Nicolas Fella, link)

When you drag and drop an item from a Dolphin window that’s accessing a network location that requires Kerberos authentication, dropping it on the desktop now successfully downloads the file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for XRandr emulation in KWin, which allows it to behave sensibly when running XWayland-using apps that make use of X11 APIs to change the screen resolution in a way that requires letterboxing or pillarboxing. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Improved the performance of the rectangular box you can drag on the desktop to select items. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Implemented support for the standard “reduced motion” setting that lets apps know that you’d like animations minimized. Now it’s toggled on automatically when you disable animations in System Settings. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’re up to almost €90,000 raised in a month and a half. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

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.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-48.

Open Source Power

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, business, economics, politics, commons, criticism

This debate around licensing, politics and making our FOSS efforts sustainable need to happen. It looks like for now to some people the path forward is defensive licensing? I wish at least we’d first attempt to have more strong copyleft use…

https://blog.muni.town/open-source-power/

Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships

Tags: tech, foss, maintenance, sustainability, supply-chain, commons

Indeed, if you benefit from Free Software you’d better engage with it. Maintainers should stop bending backwards to please free loaders.

https://pivotnine.com/blog/open-source-has-too-many-parasocial-relationships/

What They Don’t Tell You About Maintaining an Open Source Project

Tags: tech, foss, maintenance

Want to start a new project? Here is what you’re signing for.

https://andrej.sh/blog/maintaining-open-source-project/

A Message to the Computing Community About ACM’s Transition to Full Open Access

Tags: tech, science, research, open-access

Excellent news! It is long overdue that such organisations switch to open access.

https://cacm.acm.org/news/a-message-to-the-computing-community-about-acms-transition-to-full-open-access/

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Tags: tech, blog, web, culture

This would probably be a good thing indeed. We’ll see of the web culture will evolve next.

https://disassociated.com/personal-blogs-back-niche-blogs-next/

Zig: Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

Tags: tech, git, forgejo, foss, community, vendor-lockin

Very good move on their part. It’s time more people do so. Beside, Forgejo (powering Codeberg) looks very interesting. I plan to play with it more next year.

https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/

s&box is a modern game engine, built on Valve’s Source 2 and the latest .NET technology

Tags: tech, 3d, game, foss

Nice to see another game engine go the Free Software route. This one is particularly feature packed.

https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public

libfive

Tags: tech, framework, geometry, 3d

Looks like a neat software library for procedural geometry.

https://libfive.com/

How Cloudflare uses Rust to serve (and break) millions of websites at 50+ millions requests per second

Tags: tech, cloudflare, rust, reliability, failure

A bit of a shameless plug toward the end. That said the explanations of why Cloudflare is banking on Rust so much or how the recent downtime could have been avoided are spot on.

https://kerkour.com/how-cloudflare-uses-rust

Rust unit testing: file reading

Tags: tech, rust, tests

Nice approach to stub standard types in Rust. The article is a bit confusing the different types of test doubles though.

https://jorgeortiz.dev/posts/rust_unit_testing_file_reading/

Linux Kernel Explorer

Tags: tech, linux, kernel

Looks like a neat code explorer for the kernel. It’s nice that it comes with a guide to point you to the right places per topic.

https://reverser.dev/linux-kernel-explorer

The Input Stack on Linux — An End-To-End Architecture Overview

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, system, input

A long article which seems to be a good reference document on the Linux input stack. There’s a lot to cover as it’s quite fragmented.

https://venam.net/blog/unix/2025/11/27/input_devices_linux.html

Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics, funny

Ever wondered if we could solve the Fizz Buzz with a Fourier series? Trigonometry is magic.

https://susam.net/fizz-buzz-with-cosines.html

Fifty Shades of OOP

Tags: tech, object-oriented, type-systems

Another post which reminds everyone what object oriented programming is about. And yes, there’s indeed a variety of different tools in there, not all object oriented languages are equivalent.

https://lesleylai.info/en/fifty_shades_of_oop/

What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems

Tags: tech, reliability, failure, complexity

Error handling is not easy. Having simple rules to apply for complex systems is a good thing. Of course the difficulty is to apply them consistently.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/11/20/what-now.html

10 Years of thinking about Pair Programming

Tags: tech, pairing, programming

Gives an idea of what pair programming looks like when practiced properly.

https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/10-years-of-thinking-about-pair-programming/

We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs

Tags: tech, programming, quality, craftsmanship, engineering

I’m not really a fan of the leaderboard part of their approach. That said, if the maturity of the organisation allows it, having such bug squashing sessions is a good idea.

https://lalitm.com/fixits-are-good-for-the-soul/

“Good engineering management” is a fad

Tags: tech, engineering, management

Interesting thinking, indeed expectations are changing quite a bit for engineering managers over time. Thus the proposed list of core and growth skills is interesting. It is likely a good framing for the job, then the art is finding the right balance for your organisation.

https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/

Solve problems with experiments

Tags: tech, team, organization, agile, problem-solving

You can also have experiments on your organisation. This is actually a good thing and probably should be done when something keeps popping up as a problem.

https://www.viktorcessan.com/solve-problems-with-experiments/

Invert, always invert

Tags: tech, planning, risk, project-management

Interesting approach I didn’t know about. Definitely worth trying. I like how it seems to bake risk management in.

https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/invert-always-invert/

Bye for now!

Its been quite a while since I attended the IndiaFOSS 25 event late September. I have been meaning to write the blog post for a while but didn’t get time. A lot has happened since then, I have moved continents and am now in Germany pursuing my masters at Philipps University of Marburg. I’ll write lot more about my new experiences in Germany in upcoming blog posts but for now back to IndiaFOSS 25. This was a very exciting event for me since this was the first time I was representing KDE booth at a conference. This event occurs yearly in the city of Bangalore which is also known as the Silicon Valley of India. I discovered IndiaFOSS after watching a talk by Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre and Kitty - two programs I have used heavily in my day to day life so regardless to say I was excited about the conference.

Day 0

I arrived a day before the conference in Bangalore and met with Bhushan at the airport as we continued our journey towards the city. The Kempegowda International Airport is located outside the city about 40km north of Bangalore’s city center. It took us around 2 hours to reach the airbnb I was sharing with the my friends who were also attending the event. After encountering the much dreaded city traffic jam I took a much needed rest and spent my rest of the day exploring the area of Jayanagar and Indiranagar.

Day 1

I spent most of my time at the booth and met a lot of people who were already using KDE software, specifically from the state of Kerala. It was made popular through the ICT initiative. I have to be honest here, I did hear about this initiative from Subin earlier this year at cki25 but didn’t know it was this widespread.

There was general amazement among the booth visitors when we showed them KDE powered Laptops, mobile phones, steamdeck and even a rasberry pi powering the giant tv screen at our booth. The steamdeck was the most popular device at the booth since its still not officially available in India. Some people already knew about the steamdeck while others who didn’t were amazed to find out that gaming on handheld that too on a linux powered device had come such a long way.

Some of the people who we met at the booth were also interested in helping us spread the word and gave us testomonials which I have forwarded to Aniqa. Additionally we were able to help few people with creating their invent profiles and there were others who showed interest in helping out with code contributions and translation support. Few also asked about India specific KDE events and we were happy to tell them about Conf KDE India (cki 25).

We also connected with James Reilly from AlmaLinux (can be reached on Matrix), who is looking for a KDE Community member to create a KDE bootc-image built on CentOS base and has also offered to mentor a new contributor in tackling this project.

Our booth was also located right next to Inkscape’s booth and seeing Rishi make Konqi on Krita led them to battle it out to see who can make a Konqi faster. It was a friendly battle ofcourse and all of us enjoyed the drawing contest complete with cheer and laughter. It was a pretty eventful day and we met a lot of users of KDE software at our booth.

Day 2

The second day of the conference saw the attendance dwindle a bit but this also gave me a chance to checkout the other booths. Some of the most interesting ones that I found were (in no particular order):-

Mecha Comet

It is a handheld modular Linux computer. It has a magnetic snap interface powered by a standard GPIO serial port which allows hardware extensibility. Additionally Its made up of repairable and recyclable parts. The particular distro that it runs is called Mechanix OS, which is based on Debian. It packs in a PCIe 3.0 M.2 B-Key, Wifi 6, a dedicated Secure Element (CC EAL 6+) for security with a 3.92 inch screen. The project is still in Kickstarter phase but its definitely one of the most exciting projects I found at the conference. You can find more about the project here.

SFLC India

Software Freedom Law Center, India is a donor supported legal services organization that promotes Open access to knowledge, Free Speech, Online Privacy, Innovation and Equality. It was because of them, I became aware of the dubious practices surrounding DigiYatra’s mandatory biometric data collection in India. Unfortunately, at the time I had already surrendered my data as I was forced to comply, otherwise the airport staff denied me entry. SFLC India at the time had started a huge social media campaign against this and had even gathered huge media attention to bring a change against this. Sadly, the DigiYatra gates still exist but are atleast no longer mandatory. If you wanna know more about them, you can visit them here.

Absurd Shop

I found their CoryDora DIY Kit to be an interesting project, a fully opensourced 3x3 macropad with hotswappable switches. You can use it to control media, set-up scripts and write macros. A nice project if your just starting with soldering and still getting the hang of things. You can find the CoryDora DIY kit here.

PCB CUPID

They provide opensource pcb and sensors at affordable prices and also have guides and tools for you to test and play with. Growing up I always wanted to tinker with pcb boards and build with them but always found the boards out of budget so seeing them change this, is definitely for the positive.

OpenstreetMap India

I was happy to see a thriving presence of openstreetmap indian community, I have volunteered in two of their Delhi meetups previously where I got to know how to map data and mapped areas around lesser known of parts of Delhi so it was nice to see some familiar faces.

and there were many more… unfortunately I can’t cover all the interesting booths that were there at the conference but regardless to say there were plenty!

Final Thoughts

All in all, I enjoyed my stay at Bangalore and was happy to meet the oss enthusiasts from all over India. I was lucky to get a chance to represent KDE at IndiaFOSS and meet with its diverse users and hopefully future contributors. I would also like to thank KDE for making this possible by sponsoring my travel for the event.

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session, it’s the default on most distributions, and some of them have already dropped — or are planning to drop — the Plasma X11 session independently of what we decide.

In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.

Because we’re certain that many people will have questions about this change, the Plasma team has prepared the following FAQ:

Plasma 6.8 means the X11 session will be supported by KDE until…?

The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.

We cannot provide a specific date, as we’re exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.

What if I still really need X11?

This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.

Will X11 applications still work?

Outside of rare special cases, yes, they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer. It does a great job of providing compatibility for most X11 applications, and we provide several additional compatibility features on top, namely improved support for fractional scaling and (opt-in) backwards compatibility with X11 global shortcuts and input emulation.

In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots or screencasting need to be adjusted to work as expected on Wayland. Most have already done so, and the remaining ones are making progress all the time.

Does X11 forwarding still work?

Yes, Xwayland supports it. Waypipe exists for similar functionality in Wayland native applications as well.

Can I still run KDE applications on X11 in another desktop environment?

Yes. There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.

This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.

What about gaming?

Games run better than ever on the Wayland session! Adaptive sync, optional tearing, and high-refresh-rate multi-monitor setups are all supported out of the box. HDR gaming works with some additional setup, too!

What about NVIDIA GPUs?

While Wayland support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver was quite rocky a few years ago, it has matured tremendously. Graphics cards still supported by the manufacturer work just fine nowadays, and for very old NVIDIA GPUs, the open source Nouveau driver can be used instead.

What about accessibility?

Accessibility is a very broad topic, so it’s hard to make any definite statements, but we’re generally on par with the X11 session. All the basics already work as expected, including screen readers, sticky & bounce keys, zooming in, and so on.

Some things are better, like touchpad gestures for adjusting the zoom level, and applying systemwide color filters to correct for colorblindness. And even more improvements are expected by the time Plasma 6.8 rolls around.

However, accessibility features provided by third-party applications may be worse in some aspects. Please open a bug report if you have any special requirements that we don’t cover yet! This is an active topic we’re very interested in improving.

What about automation?

Many tools can be used for automation in the Wayland session; for example wl-copy/wl-paste, ydotool, kdotool, kscreen-doctor, and the plasma-apply-* tools. Generally Plasma is extensible enough that you can add what’s still missing yourself, for example through KWin scripts or plugins.

What about the Significant Known Issues?

While we can’t promise all problems will be completely gone (some depend on application support), we’re actively working on addressing the last stragglers on that Wiki page.

Some of them are really close to being fixed; for example, the issues around output mirroring will be gone in Plasma 6.6. Session restore and remembering window positions are also being actively worked on.

What about Plasma on the BSDs?

FreeBSD is already shipping a working Wayland session, so there should be no upstream problems on that front. If there are any remaining issues we can help with upstream, please reach out to us!

What about the kwin_wayland and kwin_x11 split?

In Plasma 6.4, we split KWin into separate X11 and Wayland versions. This allowed KWin to go all-in on Wayland earlier, without being held up so much with legacy support for X11. For users with remaining edge-case requirements for X11, we put in the extra effort to keep X11 support for the rest of the desktop since then.

While the split helped a lot, KWin is only one piece of the puzzle. The Plasma desktop as a whole has many places where development is held back by the need to support the lowest common denominator of the two window systems.

The bottom line

This is happening because we believe that eventually dropping the Plasma X11 session will allow us to move faster to improve stability and functionality for the majority of our users — who are already using Wayland.

If we want to keep producing the best free desktop out there, we have to be nimble enough to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with many opportunities, without the need to drag forward legacy support that holds back a great deal of work.

The Wayland transition has been long, and at times painful. But we’re very close to the finish line. Passing it will unlock a lot of positive changes over the next few years that we think folks are going to appreciate!

We're happy to announce the release of version 1.10.0 of the Qt Extension for Visual Studio Code! This release introduces plenty of quality-of-life improvements to developing Qt solutions on Visual Studio Code.

When comparing Qt for MCUs vs LVGL, our independent study with Spyrosoft shows that Qt for MCUs reduces development time for microcontroller GUI by 30% compared to LVGL. The efficiency improvement comes from Qt’s integrated toolchain, which facilitates better collaboration among designers (Figma to Qt), developers (Qt Creator or Visual Studio Code), and QA engineers (Squish for MCUs), making Qt for MCUs ideal for complex projects with cross-functional teams. Additionally, Qt for MCUs offers comprehensive safety certification packages for safety-critical industries such as automotive, two-wheelers, and medical applications, positioning it as a superior LVGL alternative when functional safety and regulatory compliance are essential.

There have been a few discussions about what Flathub should do to push developers to maintain their apps on the latest versions of the published runtimes. But most of those lack important details around how this would actually happen. I will not discuss in this post the technical means that are already in place to help developers keep their dependencies up to date. See the Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User blog post instead.

The main thing to have in mind is that Flathub is not a commercial entity like other app stores. Right now, developers that put their apps on Flathub are (in the vast majority) not paid to do so and most apps are under an open source license.

So any discussion that starts with “developers should update to the latest runtime or have their apps removed” directly contradicts the social contract here (which is also in the terms of most open source licenses): You get something for free so don’t go around making demands unless you want to look like a jerk. We are not going to persuade overworked and generally volunteer developers to update their apps by putting pressure on them to do more work. It’s counter productive.

With that out of the way, how do we gently push developers to keep their apps up to date and using the latest runtime? Well, we can pay them. Flathub wants to setup a way to offer payments for applications but unfortunately it’s not ready yet. So in the meantime, the best option is to donate to the projects or developers working on those applications.

And make it very easy for users to do so.

Now we are in luck, this is exactly what some folks have been working on recently. Bazaar is a Flathub first app store that makes it really easy to donate to the apps that you have installed.

But we also need to make sure that the developers actually have something set up to get donations.

And this is were the flatpak-tracker project comes in. This project looks for the donation links in a collection of Flatpaks and checks if there is one and if the website is still up. If it’s not, it opens issues in the repo for tracking and fixing. It also checks if those apps are using the latest runtimes and open issues for that as well (FreeDesktop, GNOME, KDE).

If you want to help, you can take a look at this repo for apps that you use and see if things needs to be fixed. Then engage and suggest fixes upstream. Some of this work does not require complex technical skills so it’s a really good way to start contributing. This is probably one of the most direct way to enable developers to receive money from their users, via donations.

Updating the runtime used by an app usually requires more work and more testing, but it’s a great way to get started and to contribute to your favorite apps. And this is not just about Flathub: updating a Qt5 app to run with Qt6, or a GNOME 48 app to 49, will help everyone using the app.

We want to build an App Store that is respectful of the time developers put into developing, submitting, publishing, testing and maintaining their apps.

We don’t want to replicate the predatory model of other app stores.

Will some apps be out of date sometimes? Probably, but I would rather have a sustainable community than an exploiting one.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week there were many user interface and performance improvements — some quite consequential. So let’s get right into it!

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

Windows can now be selectively excluded from screen recording! This can be invoked from the titlebar context menu, Task Manager context menu, and window rules. (Stanislav Aleksandrov, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

With a dark color scheme, the blur effect now produces a blur that’s darker (ideally back to the level seen in Plasma 6.4) and also more vibrant in cases where there are bright colors behind it. People seemed to like this! But for those who don’t, the saturation value of the blur effect is now user-configurable, so you can dial it in to your preferred level. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

When clicking on grouped Task Manager icons to cycle through their windows, full-screen windows will no longer always be raised first. Now, windows will be raised in the order of their last use. (Grégori Mignerot, link)

Did a round of UI polishing on the portal remote control dialog to make it look better and read more naturally. (Nate Graham and Joshua Goins, link 1 link 2, link 3 and link 4)

When you open the Kickoff Application Launcher and your pointer happens to end up right on top of one of the items in the Favorites view, it won’t be selected automatically. (Christoph Wolk, link)

The Kickoff Application Launcher widget now tries very hard to keep the first item of the search results view selected — at least until the point where you focus the list and start navigating to another item. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Discover now uses more user-friendly language when it’s being used to find apps that can open a certain file type. (Taras Oleksy, link)

You’re now far less likely to accidentally raise an unintended app when a notification happens to appear right underneath something you’re dragging-and-dropping. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

KMenuEdit now lets you select multiple items at a time for faster deletion. (Alexander Wilms, link)

The QR code dialog invokable from the clipboard has been removed, and instead the QR code is shown inline in the widget. This makes it large enough to actually use and also reduces unnecessary code. (Fushan Wen, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.3

Fixed a rare case where KWin could crash when the system wakes from sleep. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Worked around a QML compiler bug in Qt that made the power and session buttons in the Application Launcher widget overlap with the tab bar if you resized its popup. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a regression in menu sizing that got accidentally backported to Plasma 6.5.3. All should be well in 6.5.4, and some distros have backported the fix already. (Akseli Lahtinen and Nate Graham, link)

Fixed a Plasma 6 regression that broke the ability to activate the System Tray’s expanded items popup with a keyboard shortcut. (Mikhail Sidorenko, link)

Fixed a regression caused by a Qt change that broke the clipboard’s Actions menu from being able to appear when the configuration dialog wasn’t open. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed a bug that could make the Plasma panel’s custom size chooser appear on the wrong screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a bug that could make the clipboard contents get sent many times when it’s being set programmatically in a portal-using app. (David Redondo, link)

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma’s desktop. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a memory leak in the clipboard Actions menu. (Fushan Wen, link)

KWin’s zoom effect now saves its current zoom level shortly after you change it, rather than at logout. This prevents a situation where the system is inappropriately zoomed in (or not zoomed in) after a KWin crash or power loss. (Ritchie Frodomar, link)

Fixed a bug that made the optional Textual List representation of multiple windows in the Task Manager widget fail to get focus when using medium focus stealing prevention. (David Redondo, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Worked around a bug in some XWayland-using games that made it impossible to type text into certain popups. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Clearing KRunner’s search history now takes effect immediately, rather than only after KRunner was restarted. (Nate Graham, link)

With a very narrow display and a high scale factor, the buttons on the login, lock, and logout screens can no longer get cut off; now they wrap onto the next line. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed a bug that could confuse KWallet — when being used as a Secret Service proxy for KeePassXC — into becoming convinced that it needed to create a new wallet. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed two memory leaks affecting QML-based System Settings pages. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (Same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 34 15-minute Plasma bugs (Up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.3

Apps that use the Keyboard Shortcuts Portal to set shortcuts can now remove them in the same way. (David Redondo, link)

You can now use Spectacle’s Active Window mode to take a screenshot of WINE windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Made a major improvement to the smoothness of animations throughout Plasma and KWin for people using screens with a refresh rate higher than 60 Hz! (David Edmundson, link)

Reduced the amount of unnecessary work KWin does during its compositing pipeline. (Xaver Hugl, link)

When you delete a whole category’s worth of shortcuts on System Settings’ Shortcuts page, all the shortcuts get grayed out and cease to be interactive, and a warning message tells you they’ll soon be deleted and gives you a chance to undo that before it happens. (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.21

KConfig now parses config files in a stream rather than opening them all at once, which allows it to notice early when a file is corrupted or improperly formatted. This prevents freezes in several places. (Méven Car, link 1, link 2, and link 3)

When using the Systemd integration functionality (which is on by default if Systemd is present), programs will no longer fail to launch while there are any environment variables beginning with a digit, as this is something Systemd doesn’t support. (Christoph Cullmann, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we’ve already hit out our €75k stretch goal and are €5k towards the final one. I’m just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

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.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-47.

In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon - Ars Technica

Tags: tech, history, culture

If you’re wondering where emoticons and emojis are coming from, this is a nice little piece about that.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/in-1982-a-physics-joke-gone-wrong-sparked-the-invention-of-the-emoticon/

Screw it, I’m installing Linux

Tags: tech, linux, foss, gaming

Clearly something is brewing right now. We’re seeing more and more people successfully switching.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/823337/switching-linux-gaming-desktop-cachyos

Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing

Tags: tech, vpn, privacy, law

This is totally misguided… Let’s hope no one will succeed passing such dangerously stupid bills.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpns-and-they-have-no-idea-what-theyre-doing

Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, learning, teaching

If there’s one area where people should stay clear from LLMs, it’s definitely when they want to learn a topic. That’s one more study showing the knowledge you retain from LLMs briefs is shallower. The friction and the struggle to get to the information is a feature, our brain needs it to remember properly.

https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-compared-to-old-fashioned-web-search-269760

The Psychogenic Machine: Simulating AI Psychosis, Delusion Reinforcement and Harm Enablement in Large Language Models

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, psychology, safety

The findings in this paper are chilling… especially considering what fragile people are doing with those chat bots.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10970v1

Feeds, Feelings, and Focus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Examining the Cognitive and Mental Health Correlates of Short-Form Video Use

Tags: tech, social-media, cognition, psychology

Unsurprisingly the news ain’t good on the front of social media and short form videos. Better stay clear of those.

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-89350-001.html

Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don’t Need To

Tags: tech, cloud, decentralized, web

Friendly reminder following the Cloudflare downtime earlier this week.

https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-put-your-site-behind-cloudflare-if-you-dont

Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

Tags: tech, cloud, complexity, safety, rust

Wondering what happened at Cloudflare? Here is their postmortem, this is an interesting read. Now for Rust developers… this is a good illustration of why you should stay clear from unwrap() in production code.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/

Needy Programs

Tags: tech, ux, notifications

Kind of ignore the security impact of the needed upgrades, but apart from this I largely agree. Most applications try to push more features in your face nowadays, unneeded notifications and all… this is frankly exhausting the users.

https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

Tags: tech, browser, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mozilla

Looks like Mozilla is doing everything it can to alienate the current Firefox user base and to push forward its forks.

https://manualdousuario.net/en/mozilla-firefox-window-ai/

DeepMind’s latest: An AI for handling mathematical proofs

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, mathematics, google

That’s an interesting approach. Early days on this one, it clearly requires further work but it seems like the proper path for math related problems.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/deepminds-latest-an-ai-for-handling-mathematical-proofs/

Production-Grade Container Deployment with Podman Quadlets

Tags: tech, systemd, containers, linux, system, podman

Podman is really a nice option for deploying containers nowadays.

https://blog.hofstede.it/production-grade-container-deployment-with-podman-quadlets/

Match it again Sam

Tags: tech, regex, rust

Nice alternative syntax to the good old regular expressions. Gives nice structure to it all. There’s a Rust crate to try it out.

https://www.sminez.dev/match-it-again-sam/

10 Smart Performance Hacks For Faster Python Code

Tags: tech, python, performance

Some of this might sound obvious I guess. Still there are interesting lesser known nuggets proposed here.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/11/10-smart-performance-hacks-for-faster-python-code/

Floodfill algorithm in Python

Tags: tech, python, algorithm, graphics

This is a nice little algorithm and it shows how to approach it in Python while keeping it efficient in term of operations.

https://mathspp.com/blog/floodfill-algorithm-in-python

AMD vs. Intel: a Unicode benchmark

Tags: tech, amd, intel, hardware, simd, performance

Clearly AMD is now well above Intel in performance around AVX-512. This is somewhat unexpected.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/11/16/amd-vs-intel-a-unicode-benchmark/

Memory is slow, Disk is fast

Tags: tech, memory, storage, performance, system

No, don’t go assuming you can use disks instead of ram. This is not what it is about. It shows ways to get more out of your disks though. It’s not something you always need, but sometimes it can be a worth endeavor.

https://www.bitflux.ai/blog/memory-is-slow-part2/

Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++

Tags: tech, c++, security

Good list of hardening options indeed. That’s a lot to deal with of course, let’s hope this spreads and some defaults are changed to make it easier.

https://best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-Options-Hardening-Guide-for-C-and-C++.html

The problem with inferring from a function call operator is that there may be more than one

Tags: tech, c++, type-systems, safety

The type inference in C++ can indeed lead to this kind of traps. Need to be careful as usual.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251002-00/?p=111647

There’s always going to be a way to not code error handling

Tags: tech, programming, safety, failure

Depending on the ecosystem it’s more or less easy indeed. Let’s remember that error handling is one of the hard problems to solve.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/AlwaysUncodedErrorHandling

Disallow code usage with a custom clippy.toml

Tags: tech, rust, tools, quality

Didn’t know about that clippy feature. This is neat, allows to precisely target some of your project rules.

https://www.schneems.com/2025/11/19/find-accidental-code-usage-with-a-custom-clippytoml/

The Geometry Behind Normal Maps

Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, shader

Struggling to understand tangent space and normal maps? This post does a good job to explain where this comes from.

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/geometry-behind-normal-maps/

Know why you don’t like OOP

Tags: tech, object-oriented

I don’t get why object oriented programming gets so much flack these days… It brings interesting tools and less interesting ones. Just pick and choose wisely like for any other paradigm.

https://zylinski.se/posts/know-why-you-dont-like-oop/

Ditch your (mut)ex, you deserve better

Tags: tech, multithreading, safety

If you’re dealing with multithreading you should not turn to mutexes by default indeed. Consider higher level primitives and patterns first.

https://chrispenner.ca/posts/mutexes

Brownouts reveal system boundaries

Tags: tech, infrastructure, reliability, failure, resilience

Interesting point of view. Indeed, you probably want things to not be available 100% of the time. This forces you to see how resilient things really are.

https://jyn.dev/brownouts-reveal-system-boundaries/

Tech Leads in Scrum

Tags: tech, agile, scrum, tech-lead, leadership

Interesting move on the Scrum definitions to move from roles to accountabilities. The article does a good job explaining it but then falls back into talking about roles somehow. Regarding the tech leads indeed they can work in Scrum teams. Scrum don’t talk about them simply because Scrum don’t talk about technical skills.

https://www.patkua.com/blog/tech-leads-in-scrum/

How to Avoid Solo Product Leadership Failure with a Product Value Team

Tags: tech, agile, product-management

I wonder what the whole series will give. Anyway I very much agree with this first post. Too often projects have a single product manager and that’s a problem.

https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2025/11/how-to-avoid-solo-product-leadership-failure-with-a-product-value-team-part-1/

Bye for now!