Friday, 9 January 2026

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.22.0.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version

December was quite an eventful month for me, with over 4,000 km travelled by train. This was in part caused by the holidays and visiting family, but also by the KDE PIM sprint in Paris and the 39th Chaos Communication Congress.

KDE PIM sprint in Paris

From the 12th to the 14th of December, I was in Paris. It was actually my first time there for more than a day trip, so I arrived a day earlier to explore the city a bit. I went on a walk across the city with Tobias and Nicolas, and I took some photos.

The weekend was also very productive. We advanced our goal of making KMime a proper KDE Framework; made Message-IDs in emails more privacy-conscious; and discussed various important topics such as the retirement of the Kolab resource and the switch to SQLite as the default backend for Akonadi.

Huge thanks to enioka Haute Couture for having us in their office in Paris.

The sprint being in Paris also allowed me to afterward go visit my grandma, 350 km further south of Paris, so this was particularly convenient.

39th Chaos Communication Congress (39c3)

Another event I went to was 39c3, which is the third year in a row that I attended, and this year again we had an assembly as part of the Bits und Bäume umbrella, thanks to Joseph.

I love the vibe of this event. It’s not very dry or only tech-focused, but also has a big artistic and political aspect to it. And while the number of attendees is very large, at the same time it’s very chill and I don’t feel overwhelmed, unlike at FOSDEM.

At the KDE assembly, we met a lot of interested users, some GNOME friends, and since a bunch of KDE devs were there, we managed to work on a few productive things, like switching the map backend from Itinerary to MapLibre.

And this year, I even managed to go on national TV for a few seconds to speak about Nextcloud. My German grandma called me the day afterward, very happy to have seen me.

Over 180 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

• dolphin: Allow migration for users with the old session file format (Commit, fixes bug #513466)
• kate: Fix a tree view crash in the Project plugin (Commit, fixes bug #513753)
• skladnik: Ignore the mouse release event at the end of a drag action (Commit)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 25.12 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 25.12.1 source info page
• 25.12.1 full changelog

With the start of the new year, I am very happy to announce the release of version Kraft 2.0.0.

Kraft provides effective invoicing and document management for small businesses on Linux. Check the feature list.

This new version is a big step ahead for the project. It does not only deliver the outstanding ports to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and tons of modernizations and cleanups, but for the first time, it also does some significant changes in the underlying architecture and drops outdated technology.

Kraft now stores documents not longer in a relational database, but as XML documents in the filesystem. While separate files are more natural for documents anyway, this is paving the way to let Kraft integrate with private cloud infrastructures like OpenCloud or Nextcloud via sync. That is not only for backup- and web-app-purposes, but also for synced data that enables to run Kraft as distributed system. An example is if office staff works from different home offices. Expect this and related usecases to be supported in the near future of Kraft.

But there are more features: For example, the document lifecycle was changed to be more compliant: Documents remain in a draft status now until they get finalized, when they get their final document number. From that point on, they can not longer be altered.

There is too much on the long Changes-List to mention here.

However, what is important is that after more than 20 years of developing and maintaining this app, I continue to be motivated to work on this bit. It is not a big project, but I think it is important that we have this kind of “productivity”-applications available for Linux to make it attractive for people to switch to Linux.

Around Kraft, a small but beautiful community has built up. I like to thank everybody who contributed in any way to Kraft over the years. It is big fun to work with you all!

If you are interested, please get in touch.

A new whiteboard app, Vector-based map rendering in Itinerary, and new releases

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

We kick off the year with everything that's new in the KDE App scene. Let's dig in!

Travel Applications

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Jonah Brüchert added a MapLibre-based backend to Itinerary maps views. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. Another advantage is that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #454)

Carl Schwan ported multiple dialogs to a convergent dialog/bottom drawer style (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #413 and pim/itinerary MR #464).

Volker Krause added support for marking reservations as cancelled in your timeline, so that these reservations are not counted in your yearly statistics (26.04.0 - link).

Luca Weiss updated the KLM boarding passes extractor to also extract the boarding group (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #205). Thomas Arrow added an extractor for KLM's "Ticket for your trip" emails (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #206).

Tobias Fella added support for extracting GOMUS annual tickets (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #207).

PIM Applications

KMail A feature-rich email application

Albert Astals Cid made KMail's system tray icon also work when KMail is run inside Kontact (26.04.0 - pim/kmail MR #187).

Office Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Cody Neiman fixed the extreme downscaling of custom stamps, which resulted in pixelated stamp annotations (25.12.1 - graphics/okular MR #1280).

Creative Applications

Drawy Your handy, infinite brainstorming tool

Thanks to Prayag Jain, KDE has a new whiteboard app called Drawy! It combines a simple interface with an infinite canvas, giving users the freedom to think and draw without limits.

Some of its features are:

• An infinite canvas with no drawing constraints
• Support for drawing tablets and touchscreens
• Tools to group and ungroup items on the canvas
• A text tool for typing notes

Drawy is still under development, but you can already download a nightly flatpak. You are invited to test the app and share feedback to help shape Drawy as your handy, infinite brainstorming tool!

Since the incubation started, Prayag Jain has been fixing various performance issues (graphics/drawy MR #108 and graphics/drawy MR #115), and Laurent Montel did a lot of code cleanup to follow KDE best practices more closely (link).

Utilities Applications

Konsole Use the command line interface

Leonardo Malaman added a new "Force New Tabs" option to Konsole. This forces Konsole to open a new tab in an already open Konsole window instead of opening a new window (utilities/konsole MR #1112).

Kate Advanced text editor

Christoph Cullmann added out-of-the-box support for neocmakelsp, an LSP server for CMake (26.04.0 - utilities/kate MR #1974).

KAIChat AI Chat

Laurent Montel released KAiChat 0.6.0. This release introduces Wikipedia and weather integration, the capability to copy block code to the clipboard, and a quick search widget.

Network Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Károly Veres unified the space selection logic, so that using the quick switcher or clicking on a notification to jump to a room will now switch to correct space (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2551).

Nate Graham improved the hamburger menu button. Now the menu opens right beneath the button, the button has a pressed state while the menu is open, and the menu will close when clicking on the button again. (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2553)

Azhar Momin added a button to cycle through unread highlights (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2552).

Joshua Goins re-arranged the profile dialog and grouped similar actions together (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2544). And he made it possible to view the profile dialog when receiving an invitation (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2548).

Tobias Fella added some fixes for the new version of Matrix rooms (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2550).

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Melvin Keskin released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release allow you to resend failed messages via the context menu, cancel and restart uploads, join group chats or add contacts by their XMPP URIs, and improves compatibility for servers using LDAP.

System Applications

KCron Task Scheduler

Alexander Wilms fixed running commands containing spaces in their path (26.04.0 - system/kcron MR #46).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.

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.

A few days ago I attended the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg, Germany, as part of the KDE presence there.

KDE

Like at 38C3 in the previous year we had a small KDE assembly as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat.

There were two talks with KDE contributors in the main program:

• Bettina, Caro and Joseph from KDE Eco presented their work on the “End of 10” campaign.
• Shinjo spoke about security breaches at South Korean telco operators.

The End of 10 campaign also had organized a meetup and a install party.

As Jonah has already reported we got very positive feedback from attendees about KDE’s work.

Itinerary

Itinerary was a frequent discussion topic for me, both with the KDE team and attendees in general.

• The MapLibre-based vector tile map integration got pushed over the finishing line (see also Jonah’s report).
• Reaching the end of the year and people being interested in their travel wrap-up, a few issues regarding handling of cancelled reservations in the statistics got fixed. And as people’s trip lists are growing longer and longer that also got a better grouping.
• We talked about possible ways to improve the stop picker, in particular the country selector which is becoming increasingly annoying to use as it gets longer and longer as Transitous coverage keeps expanding.
• Ideas for a better first-start onboarding page.
• We need to investigate whether we handle Zügli’s ticket revocations correcty that were mentioned in the Deutschlandticket fraud investigation talk.

Android

I also had the opportunity to talk to developers of F-Droid and other FOSS Android applications, who share a lot of the pain we are also dealing with in bringing KDE applications to Android.

A big concern especially for people not associated with a bigger umbrella organization is the upcoming requirements by Google for developer verification. While KDE might be less affected by this directly, any negative effect on the larger FOSS ecosystem is of course also bad for us. The continuous close-down of AOSP development is also not helping, making it significantly harder for Google-free Android variants.

None of that is entirely surprising, and it increases the pressure on fully open Linux systems becoming a viable alternative on more mobile devices. Both that as well as collaboration on adjacent infrastructure such as fully open push notification infrastructure has been making good progress in 2025 fortunately.

Transitous

We had a Transitous meetup on the last day at Wikimedia’s assembly, hosted by Jonah, Julius and myself. We should organize and announce this earlier next time, but the space was nevertheless full. Meeting notes are in the wiki.

We had quite a few conversations around Transitous beyond this as well:

• It looks like we should be able to get SIRI-FM data for a number of operators in Germany in Q1 2026. That’s facility monitoring information such as current or planned elevator outages, something highly relevant for wheelchair routing.
• We talked about finding better ways to maintain data augmentation than the currently used MOTIS Lua scripts. While there’s options on where to store such information (e.g. Wikidata or OSM), the main challenge is matching GTFS data lacking stable identifiers to such an external data set.
• We met with the team behind esel.ac, a community-run bike sharing system in Aachen. It’s using OpenBike and produces a GBFS feed that we now also have in Transitous. Community-run mobility services and a community-run routing service are of course the perfect match, and I’d like us to use those cases to showcase what the whole stack of open standards, open hardware and open software can do together. We discussed possible extensions to the GBFS feed such as booking links, geo fencing zones and return constraints for this.
• There was some prototyping towards using Wikidata as a source of “temporary POIs” for Transitous. That’s events that are tied to a specific location (e.g. a conference) which then can be used as a destination for routing. We managed to produce an abomination of a SPARQL query that resulted in a technically valid set of events. However we haven’t found a proper solution yet for reliably excluding events we would not want in there, such as those of fascist parties.
• There’s people working on implementing deck layouts in NeTEx. While motivated by accessibility and seat booking, this could provide us with train coach layouts as a byproduct as well. There’s public transport operators involved, so this is hopefully not just theory but also going into production in the not too distant future.

It also looks like we might have another iteration of the Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, next weekend already (January 9-11). That’s very short notice and not entirely finalized yet. If you are interested in joining please get in touch in the Transitous Matrix channel.

OSM

The OSM assembly was conveniently directly next to the KDE one, so I could easily drop into conversations about indoor mapping, indoor routing or indoor positioning there. Interest in all parts of this seems to be increasing, we probably should improve the introduction material for this a bit.

There’s also a plan to have an (offline) meeting in the next months to get some of the pending tagging proposals and open questions e.g. around “thick” walls, stairs and fractional levels sorted out and over the finishing line.

We also had the opportunity to discuss the FOSSGIS e.V. becoming a possible umbrella organization for Transitous and/or the Open Transport Community Conference. Especially the latter is becoming slightly more pressing as we got a few sponsorship offers while looking for a venue, and that’s something we can only make use of with an organization behind us that can actually handle money.

Weather and Emergency Alerts

I also met with FOSSWarn to discuss the next steps on the public alert distribution server:

• Better monitoring to notice system failures, task queue backlogs, source feed outages, increasing parser or push notification submission error rates, or suspiciously large subscription areas. As a byproduct this might also provide interesting insights in the alert data.
• Better ways to deal with rate limits on push servers. This needs to be ultimately resolved at those servers, as public alerts are very prone to produce notification bursts. This is also a blocker for scaling this up further and e.g. deploying this in a default KDE Plasma installation.
• Performance improvements for the alert area vector tile generation. That wasn’t a focus initially as this was meant purely as a diagnostic tool, but it has become popular to the point that FOSSWarn wants to integrate this directly into the app. This will probably require geometry simplification on ingested “inline” CAP geometry, which would benefit everyone by smaller and cheaper to parse/render CAP data.

You can help!

Events like Chaos Communication Congress are enormously useful for bringing together, connecting and enabling collaboration between people from different areas or initiatives. The sheer size and diverse set of attendees help a lot with that.

Attending events however incurs cost for travel, accommodation and entrance. Your donation to organizations like KDE e.V. or FOSSGIS e.V. support such activities.

This post will show the NixOS way of adding a custom package and explain the benefits of this approach in the context of system immutability.

Plasma Pass

KDE Ni! OS recently got a new package installed by default – Daniel Vrátil’s Plasma Pass applet.

Plasma Pass is a Plasma applet to access passwords from pass, the standard UNIX password manager. You can find more information about the applet in Dan’s blog post.

As NixOS doesn’t currently offer Plasma Pass in its repositories, the package is installed in Ni! OS from the sources as in some other BTW, I use … distributions.

In NixOS, this is easily done via overlays. We can create an overlay that defines the plasma-pass package so that it can be installed as if it were a real NixOS package.

Package definition

This is the overlay definition used in Ni! (ni/packages/plasma-pass.nix):

self: prev: {
  kdePackages = prev.kdePackages.overrideScope (kdeSelf: kdeSuper: {
    plasma-pass = kdeSelf.mkKdeDerivation rec {
      pname = "plasma-pass";
      version = "1.3.0-git-59be3d64";

      src = prev.fetchFromGitLab {
        domain = "invent.kde.org";
        owner = "plasma";
        repo = "plasma-pass";
        rev = "59be3d6440b6afbacf466455430707deed2b2358";
        hash = "sha256-DocHlnF9VJyM1xqZx/hoQVMA/wLY+4RzAbVOGb293ME=";
      };

      buildInputs = [
        kdeSelf.plasma-workspace
        kdeSelf.qgpgme
        self.oath-toolkit
      ];

      meta = with prev.lib; {
        description = "Plasma applet for the Pass password manager";
        license = licenses.lgpl21Plus;
        platforms = platforms.linux;
      };
    };
  });
}

Most of this file is self-explanatory (except for the strange looking syntax of the Nix language :) ).

Since Plasma Pass is a KDE project, we want it visible as a part of kdePackages collection, and as it uses the common build setup that all KDE projects use (or should use), it uses mkKdeDerivation to define the plasma-pass package. This defines some basic dependencies, commonly used by KDE projects and adaptations needed for them to work properly in NixOS. For non-KDE-friendly packages, you’d base your package on the standard mkDerivation instead.

The project sources are located on the KDE’s GitLab instance at invent.kde.org, therefore the package definition uses fetchFromGitLab to retrieve the sources. It is also possible to clone repositories on GitHub, fetch and use source tarballs, etc. All fetchers are described at NixOS Manual > Fetchers.

The rev field in the fetchFromGitLab command is the GIT revision that you want to install, and hash you can get by using the nix-prefetch-git command:

nix shell nixpkgs#nix-prefetch-git
nix-prefetch-git https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-pass \
    --rev 59be3d6440b6afbacf466455430707deed2b2358

The buildInputs part defines additional dependencies needed by Plasma Pass, and meta defines some meta information about the package such as the description and the license.

Using the definition

After defining the package, we have to add it to nixpkgs.overlays in any of our NixOS configuration files. In the case of Ni! OS, this is done in ni/modules/base.nix which defines the UI software that Ni! OS installs by default.

nixpkgs.overlays = [
    (import ../packages/plasma-pass.nix)
  ];

With this overlay, plasma-pass can be used as if it was a normal NixOS package.

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  ...
  kdePackages.plasma-pass
  ...
  ];

When plasma-pass gets added to the nixpkgs repository, the only action that will be needed in Ni! OS to switch to the official version is to remove the import...plasma-pass.nix from the overlays (this is the reason why we explicitly placed it in kdePackages collection – otherwise, we could have just put it top-level).

Custom packages and immutability

The main point of this post is not really to announce that a single new package is added to the Ni! OS setup. Even if it is a cool one like Plasma Pass.

The point is to show how a custom package that is not available in the vast collection of nixpkgs can be added to a NixOS-based system.

The custom package becomes a proper regular Nix package and gets all the benefits of Nix’s particular approach to immutability. If Plasma Pass gets broken after an update (either if new Plasma version breaks Plasma Pass, or if the new version of Plasma Pass no longer works as expected), you can always boot into the version before the bad update.

With distributions with immutable core and custom applications installed as Flatpaks, downgrading is possible, but a bit more involved and relies on 3rdparty keeping the old package versions still available for download.

With NixOS, all the previous versions remain on your system until you decide to remove them.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Plasma developers are starting to trickle back from their vacations, and are polishing up and merging work that was nearing completion late last year. Among them are some impactful accessibility features, plus lots more holiday goodies!

Also, allow us to thank everyone who donated to KDE’s 2025 end-of-year fundraiser. Thanks to all of you, we raised an additional €385,000 for KDE e.V. — a staggering, awe-inspiring sum of money! KDE e.V. will put it to good use keeping KDE financially and technically sustainable for years to come.

Finally, please welcome to TWiP John Veness, who has helped out with this week's post! Contributions here are warmly appreciated.

Anyway, let’s check out the work:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The “Slow Keys” accessibility feature has been implemented for Plasma’s Wayland session! (Martin Riethmayer, KDE bug #490826)

The Zoom effect now has a mode where the pointer never leaves the center of the physical screen. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE bug #513145)

The Emoji Selector app now lets you choose a preferred skin tone for emojis of hands and people. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3399)

It’s now possible to disable the visible timeout indicators on notifications if they stress you out. (Anton Birkel, KDE bug #411613)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.5

When Discover prompts you to search the internet for an app that it couldn’t find, the search string now includes the correct OS name if you’re not using a Linux-based OS. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE bug #513366)

Plasma 6.6.0

Using a game controller will now count as “activity”, stopping the system from automatically going to sleep or locking the screen. (Yelsin Sepulveda, KDE bug #328987)

When a laptop is plugged in or unplugged while asleep, it now wakes up being aware of the current state. (Nate Graham, KDE bug #507203)

System Settings’ Touchscreen page now hides itself when there are no touchscreens connected. (Nicolas Fella, KDE bug #513566)

The screen chooser OSD now has a button to open the full System Settings page if none of the built-in options are relevant. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kscreen MR #442)

Creating a sticky note on the desktop via middle-click paste now focuses the text area immediately, ready for editing. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kdeplasma-addons MR #967)

Subtly improved the appearance of overlay badges on Plasma widgets, particularly the ones in the system tray. (Noah Davis, plasma-workspace MR #6118)

In the Application Dashboard launcher widget, category highlights now span the full width of the area, making it more visually consistent. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3408)

The Large Icons Task Switcher style now does a better job of showing a large number of icons by wrapping them onto multiple rows rather than scrolling horizontally. (Christoph Wolk, KDE bug #513436)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed an issue that made some Plasma popups inappropriately stay open when they lost focus. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE bug #511187)

Plasma 6.6.0

Possibly fixed one of the most common panel-related Plasma crashes. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #6086)

Fixed an issue in Spectacle that could make some toolbars in Rectangular Region mode appear off-screen when using a multi-monitor setup where not all screens share a baseline. (Mario Roß, KDE bug #468794)

Fixed a bug that could make the “New!” badge on newly-installed apps in Kickoff overflow for apps with very long names. (Christoph Wolk, KDE bug #513272)

Fixed a weird issue that could make the Task Manager start a drag-and-drop operation when double-clicking a task right on the screen edge. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE bug #501922)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Improved and fixed support for OpenBSD in multiple places. (Rafael Sadowski, KPipeWire MR #229, KInfoCenter MR #284, Solid MR #228)

How You Can Help

“This Week in Plasma” needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

• Help put together the posts using the current mostly manual process
• Help automate the process

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. 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.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps 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

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

I made substantial changes in the KDE Developer Platform documentation over the years. I am effectively its docs maintainer and have the largest number of commits in the repository. This is due in large part because I started contributing to it in 2021, applied as a KDE documentation contractor in late 2023, and started officially working with KDE development onboarding docs in 2024. I’m one of multiple furries contributing to KDE. :3