Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

This week we look at the usability improvements landing in NeoChat, and KClock; important bug fixes in Akonadi; performance improvements in KTorrent and new features in Kate and KRDC.

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

Multimedia Applications

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

Christoph Wolk fixed an issue where lyrics were displayed on top of the metadata of a song (link).

Okular View and annotate documents

Albert Astals Cid fixed opening password protected files on builds without KWallet (link).

Travel Applications

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker Krause added support for MOTIS instances without OSM street routing capabilities (link). This is the case for the backup instance of Transitous.

Volker also upstreamed various parts of Itineray and KTrip to KPublicTransport to be able to reuse them in both applications. This include the vehicle layout view (link 1, link 2 and link 3) and the DelayRow (link).

In terms of ticket support, Joshua Goins improved the reliability when parsing american airlines tickets (link). Volker improved the Flixbus PDF extractor (link). Additionally, Volker also added onboard API support for Ouigo ES (link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Wolthera van Hövell added support for parsing and writing SVG title and description elements (link).

Kdenlive Video editor

balooii added a rotation capability to monitor and effect stack tooling (link). They also fixed some artifact issues in the vectorscope tool on high zoom levels (link).

Jean-Baptiste Mardelle added an option to show thumbnails in the markers list dialog (link).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Facundo Almeida fixed an authentification issue when connecting to a server with SFTP and a public key and a keyboard-interactive authentication method (link).

Whale

Carl Schwan continued working on Whale, a QML based file manager, and redesigning the header to look more closely to the current Dolphin design (link).

Journald Browser Browser for journald databases

Andreas Cord-Landwehr reworked the search integration and added a button to toggle between case-sensitive/insensitive search (link).

Educational Apps Applications

LabPlot Interactive Data Visualization and Analysis

Martin Marmsoler added the possibility to create nested plots (link).

Martin also improved the axis ticks with a new algorithm to determine the spacing and number of major axis ticks (link).

Finally Martin also fixed a few issues. The cursor dock can now be correctly added when the properties dock is hidden (link). Formulas are correctly updated after importing them (link).

Social Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins overhauled how NeoChat restores rooms on space switch (link). Now when you switch spaces, the last room in that space is stored and will be restored.

Joshua improved many dialogs (link).

Joshua also went bug hunting on the message delegates in the timeline and fixed many issues (link). Notably the location map and context menu for non-text messages work again and some wording was improved. Speaking of context menus, Joshua also added a new context menu when right clicking on an avatar (link), added a share action to the maximized delegate (link), and made it possible to access all emojis from the context menu (link).

Joshua also improved the UX for rooms that don't have a canonical alias (link), fixed running NeoChat on Android (link), and reorganized some elements in the room settings (link).

Tobias created a mock server implementation of a Matrix server to use for testing (link).

James Graham made the user id elide in the user detail dialog when it is too long to avoid overflow (link).

Browsers and Networking

KTorrent BitTorrent Client

Andrey Semashev optimized various hot spots in KTorrent. He reduced the number of allocations for each packet from 3 to 1 (link), optimized the storage of some lists (link), reduced the algorithmic complexity of the file cache from O(log n) to roughly O(1) (link) and fixed some Qt container detaching issues (link).

Andrey Semashev also added support for OpenSSL as the cryptography backend (link).

Philipp Kiemle fixed some UI strings to be HIG complient (link 1 and link 2)

George Florea Bănuș added support for showing the total amount of bytes uploaded or downloaded for a file in the current session (link).

KRDC Connect with RDP or VNC to another computer

Fabio Bas and Luke Dashjr added a button to toggle clipboard sharing in KRDC (link).

Christopher Chan added support for admin console session (link).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

lzwind fixed a memory leak issue when a device is disconnected (link).

KDE PIM

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Allen Winter updated the list of DAV providers, removing some defunct providers and adding new ones like Fastmail, SOGo, Citadel, Zoho, and Kopano (link 1, link 2, link 3, ...).

Allen also fixed a crash when trying to update an item (link).

Carl Schwan fixed three crashes related to fetching passwords from the system keyring found via Sentry (link 1, link 2 and link 3), and another crash when trying to load an account with an unknown authentication type (link).

Akonadi Console

Carl Schwan fixed a crash when editing or deleting a tag (link).

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Allen Winter removed the Get Hot New Calendar feature from Korganizer (link). It was only featuring school holidays and football season calendars from the 2006-2008 era.

Allen hid the todo list from the KOrganized sidebar when already using the todo view (link) and added an option to show/hide the week numbers in the date navigator (link).

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Tobias Fella improved the success message when uploading a key (link), added a warning when disabling a certificate (link), and added a plural variant to a UI string when verifying multiple signatures from the same file (link).

Games

Chessament - Chess tournament manager

Manuel Alcaraz started incubating Chessament, a chess tournament manager.

Utilities

Clock Keep time and set alarms

Kai Uwe Broulik put the stopwatch and timer time in the navigation bar when on a different page (link).

Kai also added some explanation about the keyboard shortcuts (link).

Han Young added the ability to change the default timer sound (link).

Kate Advanced text editor

Leo Ruggeri added an "Edit line" entry to the diff widget context menu (link). The action opens the file referenced by the diff at the selected line.

Konsole Use the command line interface

Luca Carlon optimized some code where we did some uncesserary copy (link 1 and link 2).

ISO Image Writer Write an ISO Image to a USB Disk

Philipp Kiemle fixed a word puzzle issue (link).

…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.

Introduction¶

I started writing this blog post in March, completely oblivious of Mozilla’s plans of getting rid of Pocket, but with life and work being in the way I never got around to finishing it. Now that we know that Pocket is being shut down on 8 July, I decided to speed things up – and what better day to blog about eReaders than Towel Day!

For a long time already I have been aware of Wallabag – in fact, since it was still called (In the) Poche¹. And have used it before, through its wonderful service https://wallabag.it.

But for equally long, I have also used Pocket (which used to be called Read-it-later). I found that some things worked better in Pocket and others in Wallabag. But the thing that ever so slightly tipped the scales in Pocket’s favour several times before for me was that it had a seemless integration with my Kobo² eInk reader.

I have also been keeping an occasional eye on alternative eReader software for many years, but never took the plunge for different reasons. One of the things that I was waiting to become brave enough to try out was also InkBox / Quill OS for Kobo devices. I was aware of KOReader and Plato, but was always betting a bit more on InkBox as a more “pure” full-blown FOSS OS as something I would eventually switch to.

Of course, I am using the venerable Calibre to manage my eBook collection. Lately instead of a local collection though, I have all my eBooks on my home server³ using the Calibre-Web for the whole family.

OK, with that brief introductory info dump over, here is how my first week (and at this stage, honestly, months) with KOReader + Wallabag went.

Day 1 – Braving up to flash my Kobo¶

At first, I was a bit scared and did not want to mess with setting up KOReader, as I heard it was very configurable and also I have had … mixed … experience with flashing devices so far.

So I decided this would be a weekend project and planned accordingly.

Long story short, after some searching and reading, I found on MobileRead forums the instructions for One-Click Install Packages for KOReader & Plato, so that is what I went with.

Honestly, it was pretty much as simple as it sounds! And it just installs alongside the official Kobo system too.

If you were even a bit curious, do not wait as long as I have – just go and try it. It really is dead simple!

I decided to use the archive that includes both KOReader and Plato, because I heard the former is very tweakable, but you need to put some effort into making it your own; and the latter has very pleasing defaults, but barely any options.

Day 2 – Install and first glance at KOReader and Plato¶

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the One-Click Install Packages was stupid-simple to do.

Essentially I ended up with an additional menu in the official Kobo firmware, where I can choose to launch either Plato or KOReader.

I later also had the opportunity to check that updating KOReader works from the device itself and is as simple as selecting “Update” from the main menu.

First, I tried Plato, and while I quite liked its æsthetics, the longer I used it, the more I wanted to tweak a few things here and there. I would say that if Plato does exactly what you want, it is a great option, though. Especially if you have a larger screen.

My very first exposure with KOReader turned out as expected – too many menus, too many options, too much stuff – I felt a bit overwhelmed. But after the inital shock, it took me just a few hours to get a good feel of everything. The KOReader user guide helped a lot here too.

At this point, I was hooked!

The previously overwhelming plethora of settings suddenly became a collection of options that I was looking forward to tame and make my eReader truly sing to my tune. A lot of hacks exist out there for Kobo’s official firmware – and I used a few already –, but what KOReader offered out of the box was on a different level.

What also helps a lot is that you can easily disable plugins and menu entries that you do not use or want.

By the end of the day, I essentially set up my KOReader to be like I wanted it to. Sure, it took some hours, but it was well worth it.

Day 3 – Renewed interest in Wallabag¶

Both Plato and KOReader include a Wallabag client, so that got rid of one of my main reason to continue using Pocket.

With that out of the way, I went ahead and installed Wallabag on my home server⁴.

Which, thanks to YunoHost, was, again, just a one-click install :)

The set-up on KOReader was a bit more involved than just entering the username and password, but nothing too taxing.

Once it was set up though, it was about as easy to use as the official Pocket app on the offical Kobo firmware. I was honestly positiely suprised!

The main difference is that KOReader stores Wallabag articles as ePUB in a separate folder and syncs (in both directions) those with the Wallabag server. Treating articles as any other book on the device has some benefits, like annotation support (more on that later) and being able to modify styles etc.

I did try WallabaKo – the hack that puts the Wallabag client into Kobo’s official firmware – before and it works in a similar way. But its method to sync the articles is (undestandably) a bit hacky and not as nice as KOReader’s and the integration is not quite as frictionless. That said, if you do want to simply continue to just use the official Kobo firmware, WallabaKo is a perfectly fine solution. I do recommend you use the NickelMenu launcher to trigger the sync in that case.

Day 4 – Advanced Wallabag use, some automation¶

Today felt like the right time to poke around my new Wallabag install a bit.

As I used Wallabag before, I was quite comfortable with its basics and decided to read about some more advanced features and try to make things easier for me.

One thing I quickly made use of was to “program” a few rules to automatically tag an article. This makes finding a specific article – especially month after I have added or even read it – easier.

For example⁵:

• if « domainName matches "kde.org" OR content matches "KDE" » then tag as « KDE »
• if « domainName matches "curia.europa.eu" OR content matches "CJEU" OR content matches "Court of Justice of the European Union" » then tag as « sodna praksa, eu »

Occasionally the automatic tags are not perfect. But those can be easily changed already when you add the new article either through the browser plugin or the mobile app. Of course, you can also do it through the main WebApp too.

Then I remembered having seen some RSS support existed. And since there are some feeds that I know I would always read through my eReader anyway, that was an awesome idea! Unfortunately it was not exactly what I remembered …

Wallabag does offer RSS feeds you can subscribe to, but is not what I was looking for.

This feature was requested before, but the core team decided against adding it. It seems that they did add this feature into their SaaS offering though, so that is a bit bitter. If you really want to easily get RSS/Atom feeds directly onto your eReader, you can either have an account on wallabag.it or use KOReader’s News plugin.

Personally, I prefer having all my long articles in Wallabag, so I decided to just continue manually saving them.

Day 5 – Exploration, integration, interconnection¶

At this point, I had pretty much everything going well and was looking for improving my reading workflows.

Articles¶

When I find a new article/page online that I want to read later on my eReader there are two options:

1. It is an article I found through the web browser.
   1. I save it using the browser plugin or the mobile app to Wallabag.
   2. In KOReader I sync with Wallabag and read the article on my eReader
2. It is an article in a RSS/Atom feed I am already subscribed to through Nextcloud News.
   1. As I typically browse my feeds on my mobile phone, when I scroll through an article in the Nextcloud News mobile app that if find too long to read right now, I share it with the Wallabag mobile app.
   2. In KOReader I sync with Wallabag and read the article on my eReader

eBook libraries and collections¶

When it comes to eBooks themselves, I have a shared Calibre Web library with my family and can browse that directly from my KOReader.

How does this magic work?

Fairly simple really. On my home server I mount my Calibre folder in Nextcloud as external storage (with appropriate file system permissions) and then in turn use KOReader’s WebDAV plugin to browse directly from my device.

There is also OPDS support but it currently does not work for my server. You can use it to browse public servers perfectly fine though!

Notes and marginalia¶

Since I started using a Zettelkasten(-like) method of taking notes in MarkDown, I was very happy to see that KOReader can export highlights and notes to MarkDown. Even better! It can push them to Nextcloud Notes, which I use to sync my notes between my phone and laptop anyway!

And this is where the “Wallabag articles are just ePUBs” coolness kicks in – because this means you can also treat highlights and notes the same as in any other eBook, export to Markdown and all.

That made me super happy!

Day 8 – Surprise of the day night¶

Something I spotted early on, was Night mode.

When I tried it it seemed to just invert the text and background colours to be white on black instead. Which I thought was pretty wasted on an eInk display, since it does not emit light anyway.

But no! It does make sense.

When I was reading late at night, as I usually do, I turned on the front-light and set it to the minimum, just to see a bit better.

And that is when it hit me – if you use Night mode when your front-light is on, you get even less light, because the black ink blocks it. That was such a delight to find out.

Day 9 – MOAR AUTOMATION … or not (yet)¶

I guess at this point it is safe to say I fully made the switch …

After being completely flabbergasted at the usefulness of Night mode, I noticed you can automate when it should turn on and off! So I did! So many options too!

Then I found and read up on Profiles and immediately my mind went buzzing with ideas:

• when I close a book, automatically export the notes (and upload them to my Nextcloud Notes)
• when I open an ePUB from (the) Wallabag (folder), apply the HTML5 CSS style
• when I open an ePUB that I generated from a webpage that contains legislation, apply certain style tweaks in order to make the structured articles and paragraphs actually palatable to the eyes

Unfortunately, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself.

The first one works, but I could not figure out how to get it to actually trigger automatically on book close. I have that option enabled, but it just does not fire. The trigger actually triggers and the export works in general too. Just the combination does not work. (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)

As for the other two, it seems KOReader does not allow for style and style tweaks to be set in a Profile yet. (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)

Next few weeks – end of honeymoon¶

In the days and weeks after the honeymoon phase I did start noticing some small issues:

• It is annoying that KOReader(’s Wallabag client’s) highlights and notes and the Wallabag highlights and notes are two completely separate things that have no idea about each other. My current solution is to try and annotatate books and articles only through KOReader, and ignore the fact that Wallabag has this functionality.
• In Wallabag you cannot search/filter for several tags at the same time (e.g. ”AI” and ”data mining” and ”copyright”). – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• In KOReader Wallabag does not parse HTML <abbr> tags. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• Wallabag articles do not show their length in KOReader unless you open them, which is not major, but a bit annoying when you are trying to find something to read suitable to your time available. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• When highlighting sentences in KOReader the end punctuation is not being included consistently. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• Wallabag does not translate footnote anchors into internal anchors (i.e. strip the URL when it is the same as the article’s), so clicking on a footnote tries to load a new page instead of just scrolling down. – (I will file a bug and link it here when I do.)
• I have not figured out yet how to sync book descriptions and star ratings from KOReader to Calibre-Web (or Wallabag).
• At some point exporting margialia to Nextcoud Notes started crashing – this is a known bug and should be fixed soon
• I have suggested some issues and improvements when it comes to the Markdown export of marginalia. There is some pushback, but also some workarounds offered. I need to look into it a bit more.
• It would be great if Wallabag tags could be used on KOReader too.

But ultimately, if I am completely honest, these are all issues I could only dream of having before I went on this adventure.

I hope they get fixed at some point, as that would make my little old eReader ever so closer to being the wonderful box the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was imagined to be.

But even if not, this switch was well worth it!

Interesting related tidbits¶

When using a third-party WebDAV client (including your operating system’s built-in client), you should use an application password for login rather than your regular password. In addition improved security, this increases performance significantly. See Nextcloud documentation on Third-party WebDAV clients.

hook out → whelp, now to find a replacement batteries for Kobo Aura and Kobo Aura One

As hinted here before, in October this year there will be the first dedicated conference for the Open Transport community, and the Call for Participation for that has just been published.

Open Transport Community Conference

In 2024 the Railways and Open Transport track at FOSDEM kick-started Transitous, and it looks like its 2025 edition also got something rolling: A dedicated multi-day conference for the Open Transport community.

Given the interest in that subject at various other events demand for that seems to be high, and following a discussion at FOSDEM an offer for a venue came in a few weeks later.

That sorted the logistical part, leaving us with the task of getting interested people together and come up with content. (And yes, after successfully dodging event organization for many years I misclicked on a meeting invite and am now part of the team organizing this…)

Time and location

The Open Transport Community Conference will happen on October 17th and 18th at ÖBB’s Open Innovation Factory in the middle of Vienna, Austria.

Participation is free, but you have to register.

Who is this for?

We want to create an event that is useful for everyone interested in, contributing to or working on Free Software and Open Data around public transport and shared mobility.

And while I have little doubt that putting people involved with routing engines (MOTIS, OpenTripPlanner, OpenRouteService, etc), applications (GNOME’s Maps and Railways, KDE’s Itinerary and KTrip, Transportr and Öffi, Träwelling, etc) and public transport data and data formats (OSM, MobilityData, transport operators, etc) together in a room for two days will be valuable, a bit more of an agenda probably helps to convince more people of this.

The event will be organized as an Unconference, so somewhere between a conference with pre-planned talks and a Hack Weekend without any pre-defined structure. We felt that the main gap left by very packed events such as FOSDEM is time for people to talk to each other and exchange more in-depth on a subject, so that’s what we are trying to focus on.

We also want to provide a forum for regional Open Transport communities to network and connect. A lot of things are happening locally and somewhat separate from each other, while often facing similar challenges that would benefit from more exchange and collaboration.

Call for Participation

We deviate from a pure Unconference approach a bit by already collecting possible session topics ahead of time. Spontaneous suggestions of course remain possible, but the idea here is to give people a better understanding of what to expect, given we are running this event for the first time.

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

• Schedule data, including data formats, data quality, tooling, QA as well as uses and lobby/outreach work for getting more data published.
• Shared and on-demand mobility data.
• Routing for all kinds of modalities, including engines, algorithms and APIs.
• Accessibility in public transport, including routing profiles, indoor routing, data standards and modeling and elevator status data.
• Passenger-facing applications around public transport and mobility usecases.
• Transit data analysis and research supporting passenger-facing usecases.
• Operations of open source public transport routing services.
• Digital tickets beyond proprietary platforms.
• Open source solutions for community-run mobility services.
• Geocoding.
• OpenStreetMap (OSM), including tagging schemas, data importing and upstream collaboration.
• Collaboration between public transport operators/agencies and the Open Transport community.
• Community work, such as local events/meetups.

See the Call for Participation for more information.

See you in Vienna!

Register for the event, propose session topics, join the event Matrix channel and spread the word!

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in Plasma”! Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week we really ramped up the focus on bug-fixing in preparation for Plasma 6.4’s release in three weeks. But we also managed to squeeze in a huge feature for the next release too: time-of-day wallpapers! Plasma now supports automatically changing compatible wallpapers between their light and dark versions based on the day/night cycle, and also features some visual polish to make the previews of these dynamic wallpapers look better and be more clearly indicated as dynamic. This was done by Vlad Zahorodnii; thanks a lot Vlad!

As with last week, don’t worry too much about the high-priority bugs list gaining items, as we’re using this to prioritize fixes during the Plasma 6.4 beta period.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

Discover no longer includes wallpapers and other add-ons in its search results unless you initiate the search while on the “Add-Ons” page. This should make most search results much more relevant! (Ismael Asensio, link)

Did a few rounds of visual polish on the Audio Volume widget, which can get quite complicated-looking when multiple audio devices are present. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

Plasma 6.5.0

Made major UI improvements to the Sticky Note widget to support the use case of having it in your panel: now you can resize them to be much smaller; change the background color from the context menu; and when you choose the “Transparent” background color, the colored sticky note background disappears entirely, tightening up the outer margins significantly if you want to save space. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

If you choose a font with the text “Display” in its name as one of your global fonts, System Settings now warns you that this isn’t a good idea, because these fonts are not intended for display on digital screens. (Nate Graham, link)

The first time you launch Emoji Picker (launchable via to the Meta+. keyboard shortcut by default), it now opens to a page showing everything, rather than the “Recent” page which of course would be empty. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

In the Networks widget, the “Hotspot” button is now always visible, but disabled when not available, and hovering over it tells you why it can’t be used right now and what you can do to change that. (Nate Graham, link)

All the debugging effects on System Settings’ Desktop Effects page have been removed from there and moved to the KWin debug window instead. Not sure how to access it? Search for “kwin debug” in Kickoff or KRunner! (Oliver Beard, link)

Improved accessibility and general keyboard navigation in the Audio Volume widget, Flatpak page in System Settings, and Updates page in Discover. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, and link 5)

Frameworks 6.15

Opening the “Advanced Options” window from the properties dialog for an item on the Plasma desktop no longer freezes Plasma completely until it’s closed. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Improved accessibility and keyboard navigation throughout System Settings, particularly around the topics of passing focus between page content and the window’s sidebars and footers. (Christoph Wolk, link)

When navigating Kirigami-based apps and System Settings pages using a screen reader, it will no longer rather pointlessly announce “LAYERED PANE ZERO ITEMS” all the time. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.6

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when you disconnect multiple KVM-connected screens. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a bug that could cause per-widget Edit Mode to not exit properly. (Yu Wang, link)

Opening the “Add Action” window from the clipboard configuration dialog no longer freezes Plasma completely until it’s closed. (Nate Graham, link)

Deleting (not trashing) files from Plasma notifications’ context menus now works. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Changing the screen tearing settings now takes effect immediately, rather than requiring a restart. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where junky graphical glitches could briefly be seen on the screen after logging in but before Plasma’s splash screen or desktop loads. (Xaver Hugl, link)

When XWayland-using apps deliberately ask to open on a specific screen, the screen they open on now more reliably matches the one they wanted. (Xaver Hugl and Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed a rare but severe issue that could allow bypassing the lock screen’s password prompt and unlocking without a password under certain circumstances. (Marco Martin, link)

Fixed a case where System Settings could crash right after you change a screen’s refresh rate. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when dragging cells from LibreOffice onto the desktop. Now it lets you create a media frame or sticky note out of the contents, as intended. (David Edmundson, link)

Fixed a bug that could cause WINE apps with custom window decorations to freeze when de-maximized. (Rémi Bernon, link)

Now the “Remote control requested” dialog will always tell you what is requesting remote control; at the very minimum, it will now give you the technical ID of the thing making the request if it can’t display a pretty name — rather than displaying nothing. (Stephan Seitz, link)

Fixed several cases where using a color picker to pick a screen color could return a very subtly wrong result when using certain combinations of Night Light, ICC profiles, HDR, 10-bit color, or any other features that globally change all colors on the screen. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a bug where the resize handles of a custom length panel could go off-screen when there was another panel on an adjacent screen edge. (Marco Martin, link)

In the System monitor app aid widgets, sorting by network speed no longer incorrectly puts processes with no network activity first, and now the “read/write” speeds are correctly displayed once more (Arjen Hiemstra, link 1, link 2)

Using the “Process Table” visualization for blank System Monitor sensor widgets no longer incorrectly makes them think they’re in need of configuration the next time you restart Plasma or the system. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a bug that caused the colors of the “Horizontal Bars” graph type in System Monitor Widgets to not be set properly the first time you added a widget using it to a panel or desktop. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a regression that caused the list of file types in a dialog on System Settings’ Default Applications page to overflow when it’s really really really long. (Nate Graham, link)

Row heights in System Monitor table views are once again perfectly identical, after a Qt issue caused this to stop being the case. (David Redondo, link)

When clicking the “Global Theme” Button on System Settings’ Quick Settings page, after it takes you to the Global Themes page as you asked, it also expands the sidebar to show all the child pages, just as if you had navigated there manually. (Marco Martin, link)

Previews in the wallpaper grid view now adjust their aspect ratio in real time if the screen’s own aspect ratio changes — for example due to a change in rotation or resolution. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Frameworks 6.15

Fixed a regression in the new Kirigami icon shader code that caused app-provided system tray icons to sometimes look visually squished. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 very high priority Plasma bugs (down from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 27 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 22 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.3.6

Adaptive Sync is now disabled by default for new installations (not existing ones), because it exposes too many bugs in graphics drivers to offer a good enough experience for everyone. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Made the clipboard popup window you can access using Meta+V faster to appear. (Fushan Wen, link)

Choosing a screen resolution that wasn’t one of the display’s native resolutions no longer incurs a steep performance penalty. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Massively improved scrolling performance in Plasma’s wallpaper grid views. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Qt 6.9.2

Implemented delegate recycling for Qt grid views, which offers the potential for improved performance in grid views throughout Plasma and QtQuick-based KDE apps. (Vlad Zahorodnii, 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:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Here we are in the year 2025 and every company that wants to grab your money now peddles AI.

Even most search engines will now start with some “AI powered” summary.

Unfortunately, what they give you is just some deep learning intelligence fake.

Just imagine, you don’t read the links yourself, but you pass that to some friend/colleague/… that might be a nice person but is known to, if in doubt, not to tell that he did not understand what he should do, but just returns some random stuff that sounds like it could be true.

That is the state of AI.

Naturally one has trained the models to death on standard questions and problems, ask a semi new model why the sky is blue and you get the same answer as on the Wikipedia, more or less.

But try it different: Ask something that for sure is no training question.

My self serving question, just to see if the standard models know something about Kate (and perhaps me). Naturally not just ‘me’ invented Kate, but let’s roll with that.

Who invented the Kate editor?

Let’s ask the gemma3 model:

The Kate editor was primarily developed by Michael Hofmann.

Here’s a breakdown of the key figures and the evolution of Kate:

Michael Hofmann (Lead Developer): Hofmann started working on Kate as a personal tool for editing and exploring Markdown. He initially created it as a command-line tool and gradually built out the features we see today. He’s the driving force behind the project and continues to actively maintain and develop it. Other Contributors: While Hofmann is the central figure, Kate has benefited from significant contributions from a community of developers and designers. Important contributors include: Matt Butcher: Made significant contributions to the UI design and the editor’s overall look and feel. Daniel Wani: Was instrumental in the early development and testing. Key Timeline:

2013-2015: Initial development started by Michael Hofmann as a personal tool. 2015: Kate was released as open-source. 2016: The first desktop version was released. In short, Michael Hofmann is widely considered the inventor of the Kate editor, but it’s a product of a collaborative effort.

You can find more information about the development history on the Kate editor’s website: https://katex.app/

Ok? No idea where that stems from.

Next try, ask llama3.2:

I couldn’t find any information on who specifically “invented” the Kate editor, but it was primarily developed by Michael Hofmann.

The Kate editor is a command-line text editor that was first released in 2005 and has since become popular among programmers and developers. It’s known for its speed, efficiency, and customization options.

If you’re looking for more information on the history of Kate or its development, I’d be happy to try and help!

A bit better, at least some hint that the answer could be useless. Half contradicting the first, given there the same person seem to have invented that close to one decade later.

Next try, ask deepseek-r1:

The Kate editor was not invented by a single individual but is instead an open-source project that was primarily developed and designed by Michael Hofmann in 2005. Since then, it has been actively maintained and improved by a community of contributors who have added features, enhanced its functionality, and worked on its documentation.

Kate is known for its simplicity, speed, and ability to perform complex text transformations quickly. It is widely used in development environments and is often bundled with modern IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) like JetBrains Rider for Java and .NET projects.

If you’re looking for more details about Kate or its history, feel free to ask!

Matching a bit the second answer with more interesting random pseudo facts.

Ok, then let’s try the Brave browser AI search:

Kate Editor Inventor The KDE community developed the KDE Advanced Text Editor, or Kate. It has been a part of the KDE Software Compilation since version 2.2, which was first released in 2001.

That looks at least reasonable.

Let’s put the first sentence of one of the answers in the Brave browser AI search to see what happens then:

The Kate editor was not invented by a single individual but is instead an open-source project that was primarily developed and designed by Michael Hofmann in 2005.

You get back:

The Kate editor is part of the KDE free software community and was not invented by a single individual. Development of Kate began in 2001 with the release of KDE Software Compilation version 2.2. Michael Hofmann is known for his contributions to the project, but he did not single-handedly create it. Kate is an advanced text editor that supports syntax highlighting, code folding, and multiple cursors, among other features.

Now you have Michael Hofmann back, as that was in your search prompt. None of the linked search results tell you a sentences about Michael Hofmann, this was just nicely hallucinated into the summary because it was in the prompt.

I don’t say that AI tooling is useless, deep learning is a very useful tool.

But I am afraid many people will just read the AI summary box above the search results and believe that is a real summary.

No, it is not.

If you rephrase the

The Kate editor was not invented by a single individual but is instead an open-source project that was primarily developed and designed by Michael Hofmann in 2005.

to something different, with a different name and perhaps not that nice achievement, you will likely just get a hallucinated confirmation of your query.

And voila: you asked if some thing you heard somewhere is true and more or less get it confirmed because you asked about it.

We then end up here:

I said it because it is the truth. It is the truth because I said it.

I hope that enough people understand that issue and don’t fall for the trap of only peaking at the AI summary and not actually looking at the search results. But as it is that convenient, and even I often just read that first, I am afraid that will not be the case.

Naturally the search results themselves were never the fully reliable source of information.

They are weighted and sorted via algorithms that will keep in mind a lot of things that might not be in your interest and even without that, perhaps just the found pages are full of half truths or lies (like this one :)

But the AI summary box just adds one level more that can introduce just any kind of error or bias on top of that.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-21.

Interview: Chief maintainer of Qt project on language independence, KDE, and the pain of Qt 5 to Qt 6

Tags: tech, c++, qt

Nice little interview showing what’s brewing in the Qt project and how the relationship with KDE is important.

https://devclass.com/2025/05/16/interview-chief-maintainer-of-qt-project-on-language-independence-kde-and-the-pain-of-qt-5-to-qt-6/

Coding Without a Laptop - Two Weeks with AR Glasses and Linux on Android

Tags: tech, linux, android, ar, mobile

This is a funny setup. It’s not very expensive either.

https://holdtherobot.com/blog/2025/05/11/linux-on-android-with-ar-glasses/

For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time

Tags: tech, algorithm, complexity, research

Interesting new proof on the relationships between P and PSPACE. Let’s see where this leads.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/for-algorithms-a-little-memory-outweighs-a-lot-of-time-20250521/

We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, energy, ecology, economics

That’s a good overview of the energy demand, it doesn’t account for all the resources needed of course. Now of course like most articles and studies on the topic, it’s very inaccurate because of the opacity from the major providers in that space. The only thing we know is that the numbers here are likely conservative and the real impact higher. Mass use of those models inferences is already becoming a problem, and it’s bound to get worse.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/

ChatGPT Heard About Eagles Fans

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

Those hosted models really exhibit weird biases… The control of the context is really key.

https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/05/21/chatgpt-heard-about-eagles-fans.html

I got fooled by AI-for-science hype—here’s what it taught me

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, science, research

Or how the current neural networks obsession is poisoning scientific fields. There was already a reproducibility crisis going on and it looks like it’s been getting worse. The incentives are clearly wrong and that shows.

https://www.understandingai.org/p/i-got-fooled-by-ai-for-science-hypeheres

After months of coding with LLMs, I’m going back to using my brain

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, learning, programming, quality

Somehow not surprising… There’s an area where it works OK. That said, I think we don’t have the right UX to exploit it safely and productively. The right practices still need to be found. This isn’t helped by all the hype and crazy announcements.

https://albertofortin.com/writing/coding-with-ai

The Copilot Delusion

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, quality, learning, hacking, culture, criticism

This is a good rant, I liked it. Lots of very good points in there of course. Again: the area where it’s useful is very narrow. I also nails down the consequences of a profession going full in with those tools.

https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

The efficiency trap: Why obsessing over AI productivity will destroy your engineering culture

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, engineering, quality, architecture, problem-solving

You can’t be in the backseat when using those tools. Otherwise you might feel productive by cranking out code but it can’t do the essential tasks for you (most notably actual problem solving or architecture thinking). The quality would clearly suffer.

https://siliconangle.com/2025/04/13/efficiency-trap-obsessing-ai-productivity-will-destroy-engineering-culture/

Is Winter Coming?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, reliability, business

If the funding dries up… we’ll have another AI winter on our hands indeed.

https://www.datagubbe.se/winter/

Leeks and leaks

Tags: tech, networking, tor

Feels a bit like bad coordination on the Tor project side this one.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/05/16/leeks-and-leaks/

Postman is logging all your secrets and environment variables

Tags: tech, networking, tools, security

Seriously… Developers should be ashamed to produce such invasive tools.

https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your-secrets-and-environment-variables-9c316e92d424

Detecting malicious Unicode

Tags: tech, encodings, unicode, programming, security

Unicode in source code can come with unwanted consequences. Tooling might be required.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/05/16/detecting-malicious-unicode/

Dividing an array into fair sized chunks

Tags: tech, programming, multithreading

Nice approach, especially useful if you need to split work to distribute it to threads.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/05/22/dividing-an-array-into-fair-sized-chunks/

C++ encapsulation for Data-Oriented Design: performance

Tags: tech, data-oriented, architecture, c++, performance

Or how it’s possible to expose an object-oriented like API for a data oriented framework without sacrificing on performances.

https://bannalia.blogspot.com/2015/09/c-encapsulation-for-data-oriented.html

Returning several values from a function in C++ (C++23 edition)

Tags: tech, c++, programming

Friendly reminder that in C++ that case evolved quite a bit all the way to C++23. Please use the more recent constructs in new code. This definitely leads to better patterns.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/05/18/returning-several-values-from-a-function-in-c-c23-edition/

Using unwrap() in Rust is Okay

Tags: tech, rust, reliability, safety

I find the title misleading. Still, this is a good exploration of how to treat unwrap() and expect() in Rust code.

https://burntsushi.net/unwrap/

Don’t Unwrap Options: There Are Better Ways

Tags: tech, rust, programming

Another trick in Rust to avoid unwrap() calls. The let-else option is indeed particularly elegant.

https://corrode.dev/blog/rust-option-handling-best-practices/

async/await versus the Calloop Model

Tags: tech, architecture, rust, programming, pattern

Apparently this needs pointing out but there’s more than async/await out there. Sometimes what you want is a simple event loop. Here illustrated in the Rust ecosystem.

https://notgull.net/calloop/

Particle Life simulation in browser using WebGPU

Tags: tech, webgpu, gpu, physics, biology, simulation

Nice in depth article on how to run particle simulations using WebGPU. This one has a very life like rendering.

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/particle-life-simulation-in-browser-using-webgpu.html

Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

Tags: tech, programming, game

There are options indeed. Some of them can be maybe surprising. It of course depends the type of game you’re making.

https://noelberry.ca/posts/making_games_in_2025/

The Door Problem

Tags: tech, game, programming, design

This is indeed an excellent way to understand all the roles and the work behind creating a game.

https://lizengland.com/blog/the-door-problem/

Good Performance for Bad Days

Tags: tech, tests, performance, complexity, system

Or why it’s hard to truly evaluate performance in complex systems. We often test things in the optimistic case.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/05/20/icpe.html

Circuit Breaker

Tags: tech, distributed, design, pattern

Good explanation of an important design pattern as soon as you have remote calls.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html

Introduction to the Architecture Decision Canvas

Tags: tech, architecture, collaborative, organization

Another way to approach Architecture Decision Records. A different format to try to foster a more collaborative approach.

https://www.workingsoftware.dev/introducing-the-software-architecture-decision-canvas/

An example of preparatory refactoring

Tags: tech, programming, refactoring

Good reminder that refactoring isn’t necessarily the end of a cycle. It can also be before you add a feature.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/preparatory-refactoring-example.html

Test Desiderata

Tags: tech, tests, tdd

A quick summary of the different properties you want in tests. In practice you’ll likely have to find a tradeoff among them.

https://testdesiderata.com/

The Cycles of TDD

Tags: tech, tests, tdd

This explains quite well how TDD is made of several cycles of different length.

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2014/12/17/TheCyclesOfTDD.html

3 Reasons Why Your Team Needs Rituals

Tags: tech, agile, management

Rituals are definitely important… if you understand why you’re going through them. If you just “go through the moves” they’re failing.

https://agileweboperations.com/2014/07/10/3-reasons-why-your-team-needs-rituals/

Paying the Cost for More Precise Estimates

Tags: tech, estimates, project-management

Don’t throw estimates out of the window. Keep in mind that the more precise they are the more expensive they become.

https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/paying-the-cost-for-more-precise-estimates

Agile and Predictability

Tags: tech, agile, forecasting, estimates, business

Interesting point of view. I’m not sure I fully agree with the classification but it gives something to mull over. For sure the less reliable your estimates the more padding is needed to have some predictability.

https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2014/agile-and-predictability#_949792

Relationship of Cycle Time and Velocity

Tags: tech, agile, scrum, kanban, estimates, forecasting

This is indeed two sides of the same coin. A good reminder that you need to pick the right approach depending on the context.

https://blog.gdinwiddie.com/2014/12/10/relationship-of-cycle-time-and-velocity/

Bye for now!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 17 Beta2.

We're actually going to be using the Do Not Disturb feature in Plasma 6.4.

I say that because previously we had a hack that simply allowed notifications to display over top of fullscreen windows, and do not disturb was only ever used if:

• Screens are mirrored
• During screen sharing
• The user invoked it manually

This was a little odd, and led to some inconsistencies. Plus only Plasma knew about the user's preference to see notifications in fullscreen, and despite notifications being inhibited reading org.freedesktop.Notifications.Inhibited would return false.

I changed this to actually use do not disturb when a fullscreen window is focused. This is more predictable and in-line with what the user would expect, enhancing the UX and communication with other parts of the system and apps.

As a result, we've discovered several bugs that had gone unnoticed! So far:

• Notifications not being marked read
• Showing a summary for unwanted notifications
• Showing a summary every time the user leaves DND
• Not showing critical notifications in DND when we should
• Disabling app-specific notification history also prevents it from participating in DND summaries

My impression is that these bugs were not evident before because few people were actually using the do not disturb feature, thanks to the way we previously handled notifications with fullscreen applications. Everyone has been hard at work getting these fixed and hopefully DND will be more useful, predictable, and reliable! 🎉 😄