Recently, I’ve worked on making certain “less obvious” system settings more accessible for Plasma Mobile users. The modules I’ve worked on fall just outside the typical mobile phone use-case, but can be important to users of other types of devices. Specifically, users that plug in or connect a keyboard once in a while and need to change its layout or language, or devices that are connected using an ethernet cable, as often is the case with embedded industrial devices.
Mobile keyboard settings
Wired network settings
These two settings module offer a subset of their “desktop companions'” settings and cater to simpler use-cases while sporting a leaner and more focused user interface. Most of the business logic and the more complex UI components are also shared with the desktop versions.
Reviewers needed!
The merge requests for both are currently under review and I’d appreciate if people could help ironing out issues so we can go ahead and merge the code:
With great power comes great responsibility, and your task is to depict an object to be worn by those with authority to physically or mentally remind them of that burden. Read the topic for further explanation, and find out how much you're power willing to take on.
Featured Artwork
Best of Krita-Artists - August/September 2025
This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 19 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:
Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!
Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.
Other Notable Changes
Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from September 24, 2025 - October 20, 2025.
Stable branch (5.2.14-prealpha):
Touch Input: Improve the behavior of long-presses. Sliders now enter edit mode when double-clicking, not long-pressing (bug 471473). Long-press now summons context menus instead of making a right-click (bug 506042, bug 510229), which can be toggled in settings under General->Miscellaneous. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
Touch Input: Make the Bezier Curve Tool's autosmoothing and double-clicking work with touch drawing. (bug report) (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
Android: Fix showing the Android supporter badge on the welcome page if previously purchased. Purchasing is still disabled pending replacement. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
Android: Fix a crash when failing to save a document. (Change, by Agata Cacko)
Nightly Builds
Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.
After four months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 8.8.0. This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency.
The digiKam team remains committed to providing a powerful, open-source digital photo management solution, continuously enhanced with new tools and optimizations for photographers and enthusiasts alike.
This week marks KDE’s 29th birthday, which is pretty special. Did you know KDE has been around longer than Google, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Tesla, Spotify, Uber, VMware, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Github? Seriously! That’s a long time producing high quality, autonomy-respecting, non-exploitative software.
And humanity needs and deserves it, so we’re gonna keep going! We’re celebrating KDE’s birthday by kicking off our annual end-of-year fundraiser: https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2025/
The money raised here will support the ability of KDE e.V. (the nonprofit behind KDE) to continue hosting Akademy, funding development sprints, affording server hardware and hosting, and employing engineers, marketers, documentation writers, and support personnel (but not board members; we’re unpaid volunteers).
There’s a big set of initiatives, and they’re growing all the time as KDE gains in prominence worldwide! We have extremely ambitious goals of spreading humane software throughout the world.
Looking at the kind messages people have written in their donations, it seems like we’re seeing some success. Here are a few recent examples:
Thanks for KDE Plasma, can’t wait for KDE Linux!!! HB
To the most consistently feature rich Desktop Environment and just generally awesome set of applications! Thanks for the hard work!
Happy Birthday! Thank you, the Plasma Desktop and the KDE family of applications have made my life so much better. Keep up the good work on the newly-minted KDE Linux.
I’m giving you guys the money that would have gone to Windows 10 ESL had I not switched to Kubuntu earlier this year!
This might sound dumb but the wobbly windows option convinced one of my friends to install Linux so you win
Plasma is the best, very excited for Bigscreen!
KDE’s really great for both enthusiasts and newcomers. Without it, I’d be worried about “the linux desktop” hehe.
Thank you for you great work! One day I’ll find the time to contribute!
I know it’s only the minimum amount, but I love using your DE and software and want to help out any way I can. Thank you!
Thank you for your work and contribution!
Keep up the kood kork!
With love from Spain!!
Keep up the great work!
thank you for a fine desktop
KDE is my daily driver for personal computing. It’s abundance of features and the distraction-free experience is great. Keep it going! I’ve been an on-and-off user since the KDE 1 Beta 3.
Thank you KDE team for your wonderful work. I use Neon daily and it’s truly a joy to use
Thanks for making the computing world a significantly better place.
Happy Bday, KDE has be rock solid this year!
VIEL ERFOLG von der Alten (84) !! (GOOD LUCK from the old folks (84) !!)
I love your work – thank you for everything! Greetings from Germany
Hope this helps you keep up the great work!
Thanks for the hard work! Keep it up! From a french user!
To many more birthdays to come.
Great work, KDE!
First time donating. I really love to use KDE.
Thank you, KDE developers & KDE application developers, for 29 years of FOSS-licensed desktop software for Unix.
Grazie mille per tutto quello che fate. Fedora KDE è fantastico!
Thank you for bringing Plasma and Kdenlive to the world. Keep doing what you’re always doing.
Just a small donation for now, more in December
I dunno why, but I really love what you are doing! I really enjoy KDE’s vibe overall and everything that you guys did!
We’ve set the comparatively modest goal of raising €50,000, and I’m happy to see that we’re already a quarter of the way there after only three days. But we need to keep up the push, as typically the first few days see the most donations. So please donate if you can, and spread the word far and wide!
The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects.
Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time,
be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant.
The same happens for our communication channels or web sites.
20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like discuss.kde.org or in our Matrix channels.
Unfortunately our community is not that good at cleaning dead stuff up or deciding that the zombie state of some things hurt.
Dead Web Sites
A no longer updated website might be a small issue, that just looks bad, but most people will see that stuff with news from 2010 will likely be not alive.
Still, I think it makes sense to remove such sites and just redirect them (if there is any follow up information online).
It is no good state if we have stuff up that rots away since a few years, at least if it contains no other valuable info, like documentation or howtos.
Zombie Git Projects
Worse than dead web sites are zombie Git repositories that still get merge requests but nobody takes a look as all people are just gone but the stuff is not clearly marked as archived.
People waste their time and will likely be upset their contributions are not even looked at.
If a project is really dead, that should be archived, one can still resurrect it with easy later on, it is not gone, just clearly marked as dead.
Blackhole Mailing Lists
Even worse are in my eyes dead mailing lists.
People will drop questions there, in worst case that will even already hang for days in moderation or then forever without answer on the list.
That turns away people, you have a question or contribution and it ends in a black hole? No good first contact.
Solutions? Gardening!
What can we do?
We not just need to create new stuff and maintain what we have, we need to do some house cleaning or gardening.
We did that in the past, we can do it again :)
If you want to help, or just turn up and tell that your old project, web site or list it dead, show up on one of these issues:
Sometimes an application can look kinda wrong due to very small details, few pixels can make or ruin the first impact. And since today a lot of monitors, especially laptop ones have to use fractional scaling, making things look sharp and pixel perfect is even harder.
Here is System Settings, on a screen scaled at 175%:
Here is zoomed, you can see some separators being one pixel, some other being two, usually blurred, making them appear of significantly different colors:
It was something that always annoyed me, so this is how System Settings will look with the next Kirigami that will come with the next Frameworks release in the beginning of November:
Here zoomed:
Separators are now 2 perfectly sharp pixels everywhere on 175%, giving the app a much cleaner look.
This will apply to every application which uses the Separator QML component. There are of course a lot of similar details fixes to do (and yes, I can see several ones still in the above screenshot), but sometimes small polishes can look like a big improvement
Stefano Crocco increased the quality of the exported PDFs (25.12.0 - link) and added support for the standard JS window.print() call to open a print dialog (25.12.0 - link).
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
Get Involved
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and
contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need
your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved.
Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog
in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things
you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them;
contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces;
translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your
local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary
contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries,
travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free
Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
I'm writing this blog in the very very early stages of development because I'm 50% sure someone will link me to some existing library that Google failed to find.
Varlink
Varlink is an IPC mechanism that is gaining popularity in a few places across Linux. It's very simple, JSON blobs over a socket terminated with a null byte. It doesn't have anywhere near the features of DBus, but the simplicity is the main selling point.
Ultimately when it comes to choosing IPC what matters is what the servers you want to talk to are already using and then things become forced.
QtVarlink
Interacting with C APIs is a horrible experience for all involved. We want something that looks and behaves likes a Qt developer would expect and used the inbuilt QtJson classes.
sebas
@christoph-cullmann:matrix.org
