Plasma's login experience is an area that we know requires some improvement — it works OK in the basic case, but it's very barebones and doesn't handle anything beyond that.

As a complete desktop experience, it's our job to provide support for the edge cases too.

What we want

• Great out-of-box experience in multi-monitor and high DPI and HDR
• Keyboard layout switching
• Virtual keyboards
• Easy Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese (CJK) input
• Display and keyboard brightness control
• Full power management
• Screen readers for blind people (which then means volume control)
• Pairing trusted bluetooth devices
• Login to known Wi-Fi for remote LDAP
• Remote (VNC/RDP) support from startup

A brief history

In Plasma 5, we retired our own bespoke display manager KDM, in favour of SDDM. A display manager started for multiple lightweight Qt Desktops. It was modern at the time making use of new QML for the front and as a big selling point at a time when Plasma was also making use of it.

SDDM's Big Architecture Problem

We ran into a problem, though. SDDM is designed to show a single greeter window, loading arbitrary QML from the specified theme.

Whilst this all sounded great for Plasma, the abstraction is at the wrong level — for our wishlist we need a lot more tight integration from our login screen than just a window showing sessions and users.

With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can't integrate with Plasma's network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend.

SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we're left maintaining it.

The Competition

GNOME's GDM is the gold-standard of display managers, and it achieves this higher level of quality by running half of a Gnome session.

SDDM got closer when it added Wayland support — it had to use a compositor such as KWin. But because the project tries to be agnostic between desktops, it has to support any compositor. There aren't compositor-agnostic ways to do even simple things like set the keyboard layout, so in the end this compositor agnosticism goal simply didn't work.

Theme Problems

A major mistake we made throughout Plasma 5 was conflating "writing UI in a high level scripting language" with "it's themable" as the same thing — they are not. QML does make it easy to modify and iterate without programming skills, but it still contains business logic. It should not be the primary method of customisation that we expose to users.

Ultimately, this was poor for end users. We pushed back on adding support for configurable theme options, because building a theme engine within a theme was wasteful! But often people want to just change a few things. Choosing a theme meant finding a combination that had everything. The store filled up with themes that are 99.9% identical code-wise; most are just wallpaper mods.

It was also poor for theme developers. Not only do they have to modify the visuals, but also re-implement focus handling, accessibility, and the same boring logic again. They can't benefit from widespread testing so regressing these functionalities is common. Reddit is full of screenshots of broken SDDM themes.

Finally, it's poor for us Plasma developers: theme support holds us back from adding new features or tidying code; if we want to add a new feature that in any way affects existing UIs, the situation get very messy very fast. The end result is that features just don't land, and the end user is the one that misses out.

So, what's the plan?

It's worth stressing nothing is official or set in stone yet, whilst it has come up in previous Plasma online meetings and in the 2023 Akademy. I'm posting this whilst starting a more official discussion on the plasma-devel mailing list.

Oliver Beard and I have made a new mutli-process greeter, that uses the same startup mechanism as the desktop session. It doesn't have all the features that we propose at the start of the blog, but an architecture where features and services can be slowly and safely added.

For customisation we intend to expose the same familiar settings that exist in Plasma and bring the design more in-line with the existing screenlocker where we also dropped arbitrary QML years ago. We'll make the wallpaper configurable with any existing wallpaper plugins, and expose the existing plasma theme and colour settings. Syncing will be a case of copying files, not re-inventing things.

The backend

When starting work on this, I tried to explore all alternative backends out there even with fully working implementations, however in practice nothing was maintained that matched our requirements. SDDM has been proven in the real world, so we have taken that and stripped it down to cover what we want moving forwards. I also aim to incubate it into the KDE ecosystem to have full autonomy over the project and merging stuck patches.

Current State

All of this has been implemented as two new repositories. Plasma Login Manager a continuation of SDDM and Plasma Login for front end and KCM (settings) code. These might be merged at some point.

The new code all works, and is at roughly feature parity with what we're replacing. A screenshot looks roughly the same as a stock Plasma SDDM setup. Whilst this is at a state where developers can opt-in, I would not want distros to be packaging things at this point.

Please do reach out if this sounds interesting, either directly or in the Plasma Matrix room - or with merge requests!

It’s been several years since I announced Plasma’s 15-minute bug initiative, and you can see the weekly numbers in every week’s “This Week in Plasma” post. Today I thought I’d share a high-level recap of where we’re at as of the first quarter of 2025.

In short: really good. We dipped below 20 bugs for the first time today, with the number currently standing at 19! This is good progress; it was at 32 during last year’s update.

But wait a minute… 13 bugs in a year? That actually sounds pretty pathetic.

Well here’s the thing: we’re adding more bugs to the list all the time. So it’s basically a “oh wow, we’d better fix this soon before people notice it” list, and newly-discovered significant issues in git master are commonly marked as HI priority and fixed before they reach users — otherwise known as “QA”.

Last year, the total number of lifetime fixed 15-minute bugs was 231. Today, it’s 413. So actually, we fixed 182 15-minute bugs in the past year or so, and reduced the total number of outstanding 15-minute bugs by 13. With only 19 left, that means we’ve fixed over 95% of all 15-minute bugs ever!

If you look at the remaining bugs, some patterns emerge:

• Hardware-specific issues (e.g. only certain ASUS laptops, or only certain screens)
• Use of common though non-default settings (e.g. changing the scroll speed, hiding tray icons of Electron-based apps)
• Intensive use of the system (e.g. filling the entire panel up with icons-only Task Manager icons, docking and un-docking a laptop to an external screen with carefully-curated window arrangements)
• Random and unreproducible crashes (if they were reproducible, they’d have been fixed ages ago!)
• And some egregious bugs that just need to be fixed! (we’re working on them)

How you can help

As always, help work on the existing 15-minute bugs if you can! If not, it’s always useful to work on bug triaging, so that more of those issues that will eventually become 15-minute bugs can get discovered earlier. Another impactful way is to donate to KDE e.V., the nonprofit that supports KDE on a ridiculously small budget. Prior donations have allowed KDE e.V. to recently start the process of hiring a Plasma developer, so it’s not a black hole!

KdeGuiTest (previously called KdeEcoTest) is an automation and testing tool which allows one to record and simulate user interactions with the GUI of an application. It is being developed as part of the KDE Eco initiative to create usage scenario scripts for measuring the energy consumption of software. The main goals in Season of KDE 2025 are (i) to debug remaining issues, and (ii) to make KdeGuiTest more user-friendly by creating a Graphical User Interface so it is easier to create, edit, and run emulation scripts.

Progress of the KDE season so far:

• Creation of a 4-cross PDF to be used for testing shift coordination.
• Detection of the issues affecting shift coordination.
• Fixed “Platform supported” error due to pynput.
• Integration of KdeGuiTest with its own newly-built Graphical User Interface.

SHIFT COORDINATION ERROR

There is a difference between what is recorded when creating a script and what is played when running the script.

How I planned to fix this:

• Identify the root of the shift error by creating a script to click on four target crosses, and then running the script to locate and solve differences.
• Develop and implement a correction mechanism to accurately map recorded coordinates to playback positions.

My progress so far on the shift error:

1. Creation of the 4-crosses PDF to test shift error: A target PDF is created with 4 crosses horizontally and vertically opposite each other.

CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.)" src="https://eco.kde.org/blog/images/Target_pdf.png" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" />

2. Created a test script on the target PDF to detect shift error: I created a test script that clicks on the four crosses. I tested the KdeGuiTest tool on the target PDF and identified the issues affecting the shift error, namely:

   • Difference in mouse coordinates when scripts are created and playback
   • Screen position
   • Screen resolution

I am still working on a fix for this. See my comments at the end of this post for more.

FIXED “PLATFORM NOT SUPPORTED” ERROR DUE TO PYNPUT

While creating a script with KdeGuiTest we encountered the error “Platform not supported”. It was not recognizing the pynput backend in the code, which is the main technology used in KdeGuiTest to simulate user interactions in software applications. pynput is a Python library that allows you to control and monitor input devices. It is used for interacting with your keyboard and mouse through Python code. Read more from Mohamed Ibrahim in SoK23 here, Athul Raj K in SoK24 here, and Amartya Chakraborty in SoK24 here.

The error was fixed by installing the pynput package from https://github.com/krathul/pynput and other packages like Rust.

GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR KDEGUITEST USING PyQt5

One of the main goals in Season of KDE 2025 is to make KdeGuiTest more user-friendly and have it be easier to create, edit, and run final scripts using a Graphical User Interface.

To better understand the idea of the interface Emmanuel had in mind, I presented a prototype in one of our weekly meetings. Fortunately, it fit the proposed idea! To implement the prototype, I built the GUI from scratch with some feedback from my mentor Emmanuel. PyQt5 is used for creating graphical user interfaces with Python. It's a powerful and versatile toolkit that allows developers to build desktop applications that look and feel native on various operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and GNU/Linux.

The GUI has the following features:

• Create script interface
• Buttons for the following commands:
  • dw - define window
  • ac - add clicks
  • sc - stop add clicks
  • ws - write to the screen
  • wtl - write test timestamp to log
  • wmtl - write message to log
• Action buffer widget
• Final script widget
• A run script interface
• File dialog

You can see the current version of the scripting interface below.

CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.)" src="https://eco.kde.org/blog/images/Create_script.png" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto" />

LOOKING TO THE FUTURE OF KDEGUITEST

First, fixing the shift error: The main shift error identified is due to differences in mouse coordinates. The mouse coordinates are recorded in the GUI in order to track them. I will then develop and implement a correction mechanism to accurately map recorded coordinates to playback positions. Second (time-permitting), developing three test scripts in collaboration with KEcoLab to compare energy consumption of PDF readers:

1. GNU/Linux + Okular Script:

• Open PDF document
• Simulate typical reading patterns (scrolling, page turns)
• Test PDF search functionality
• Change to different view modes (single page, continuous)
• Measure annotation and highlighting features
• Document energy consumption metrics

2. Windows + Okular script:

• Replicate testing scenarios from GNU/Linux + Okular script
• Adapt window management code for Windows environment
• Collect equivalent energy consumption data points

3. Windows + Adobe Acrobat Script:

• Mirror the same testing scenarios as Okular script for a direct comparison
• Account for Adobe Acrobat's specific UI elements and behaviors
• Test comparable features (navigation, search, annotations)
• Measure energy consumption patterns

Interested In Contributing?

KdeGuiTest is hosted here. If you are interested in contributing, you can join the Matrix channels KdeGuiTest, KDE Eco, and Measurement Lab Development and introduce yourself. Thank you to the Season of KDE 2025 admin and mentorship team, the KDE e.V., and the incredible KDE community for supporting this project.

Please feel free to contact me here: <@oree_x:matrix.org>

Stability improvements in KDE PIM-land, and polls in NeoChat

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.

We had a busy week in PIM land with various stability improvements. We also did a small mini sprint on Saturday in Carl's kitchen where we worked and discussed about online accounts, KDE PIM, Itinerary, and Transitous, among others.

Due to a personal vacation, during which I will enjoy a three-week break from computers, this is my last "This Week in KDE Apps" blog post until April 20.

General

Stefan fixed several memory issues in the KDE mobipocket support library, which is used in Baloo and Okular. (Stefan Brüns, 25.04.0. Link)

Personal Information Management Apps

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Krzysztof fixed a crash when opening an email with a calendar invitation. (Krzysztof Nowicki, 25.04.0, Link)

Krzysztof also fixed the reauthentication and OAuth credentials storage of the EWS support in Akonadi. (Krzysztof Nowicki, 25.04.0. Link)

Carl hid the mail-specific caching options from calendar and contact folder options. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

A new contributor, Pablo Ariño, fixed a bug in which double-tapping in the calendar failed to open the event creation dialog. Pablo also fixed a bug that occurred when clicking on the "New Event" button on mobile. (Pablo Ariño, 25.04.0. Link 1 and link 2)

Tobias ported the dialog that lets you see and edit the calendar settings from QWidgets to QML, redesigning the whole dialog at the same time. This is currently only available in the Calendar app, but also expected to be added to the Contact and Mail app soon. (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link)

Tobias improved the text of various UI elements, for example when addings tags, todos or using proper American English spelling when using the app in American English.

We also fixed numerous recent and less recent regressions to Merkuro Calendar. (Carl Schwan and Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link, link 2, link 3)

Merkuro Mail Read and write emails

Tobias and Carl worked on preventing the user from removing the "local folder" resources, which Merkuro Mail requires to work correctly. (Tobias Fella & Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2 and link 3).

Tobias also fixed a crash when trying to open some folders. (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link)

Merkuro Contact Manage your contacts with speed and ease

Carl reworked the list of contacts; similar to the email list in Merkuro Mail, the contact list now supports multiple selection as well as applying actions to all selected contacts. The code was also cleaned up a bit, and the avatar of the icon is now displayed at higher resolution. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Allen added a new date picker that allows navigating faster to a selected date. (Allen Winter, 25.08.0. Link)

Allen also improved the tooltip of the search fields. (Allen Winter, 25.08.0. Link)

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Volker fixed the display of coach/seat numbers when having a separate seat reservation or multiple travelers with different seat reservations. (Volker Krause, 25.04.0).

Carl added support for events' ticket emails from Universe (e.g. Lollapalooza) in English. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. Link)

System Apps

Dolphin Manage your files

The "Open Terminal" and "Open Terminal Here" actions will now use the icon of your default terminal instead of the generic utilities-terminal icon. (Angus McLean, 25.08.0. Link).

Two weeks ago we announced a new style for the location bar. As with most very visible changes, the response to this was mixed. We are currently working on options that will hopefully make everyone happy.

Kup Backup scheduler for KDE's Plasma desktop

Kai excluded the state configuration folder (i.e. $XDG_STATE_HOME) from the set of files to back up, as this only includes machine-specific settings. (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.08.0. Link)

Social Apps

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Melvin fixed deleting and sending voice messages. (Melvin Keskin, Link)

Melvin and Linus also made the QXmpp library used by Kaidan part of KDE. (Melvin Keskin and Linus Jahn, Link)

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

James fixed a few issues related to viewing polls in Neochat, and, more notably, made it possible to create them! (James Graham, 25.08.0. Link)

Educational Apps

WordQuiz Flash card trainer

Andreas fixed a crash when trying to open a broken or missing document. (Andreas Cord-Landwehr, 25.08.0 but a backport request was created for 25.04.0. Link)

Artikulate Artikulate Pronunciation Trainer

Andreas also finished porting Artikulate to Qt 6, building on earlier work started by Grigoris Pavlakis. (Andreas Cord-Landwehr and Grigoris Pavlakis, 25.08.0. Link)

KHangMan Hangman Game

Dimitrios Los added support for the Greek alphabet. (Dimitrios Los, 25.08.0. Link)

Utilities

Gwenview Image Viewer

Gwenview now uses the standard Qt-provided QtMultimedia library instead of the older Phonon library. (Lukas Kahnert, 25.08.0. Link)

Kate Advanced text editor

Arnd added the configuration that makes fish-lsp work out of the box in Kate. (Arnd Diestelhorst, 25.08.0. Link)

KTrip Public transport navigator

Carl adapted the query page from Itinerary to be used in KTrip, significantly improving the UI while also exposing the mode of transportation. More UI sharing between Itinerary and KTrip is also planned. (Carl Schwan, 25.04.0. 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.

Here are some more notes on getting KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD up and running on a Framework 13 AMD laptop. This follows up on previous notes about getting the hardware together and installing FreeBSD.

First off, I think it’s hard to express how high the DPI is on the screen in this laptop. I have been using 27” 2560x1440 monitors for a couple of years, which I feel is fine for regular desktoppy-office-coding work. I’m not a monitor junkie by a long shot. I can’t even fit a screenshot from the laptop, on my desktop monitor at 100% scaling.

Getting to KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD

I’m sure I have written it down before, but here’s the quick steps to a working KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD:

• pkg install kde sddm
• sysrc dbus_enable=YES sddm_enable=YES
• Add suitable values (e.g. 65536) for net.local.stream.recvspace and net.local.stream.sendspace in the file /etc/sysctl.conf

Step 1 there is “get the software” and step 2 is “enable the software”. I can get behind that choice, since FreeBSD doesn’t come with the assumption that installing KDE means you want a graphical login. Step 3 is kind of regrettable. There’s no convenient tool for this, but without those tweaks, Akonadi (and hence KMail) are crap on FreeBSD.

Reboot or service sddm start, and you get the well-known SDDM greeter. On this machine, make sure to pick KDE Plasma X11, because Wayland doesn’t work.

My Own List of First-Run Customizations

• Focus follows mouse (in KDE System Settings, under Window Behavior, Focus; searching for Focus finds it)
• Put the control key where it belongs, to be to the left of the letter A (in KDE System Settings, under Keyboard, then click the weirdly-named and -placed Key Bindings button, enable Configure keyboard options, then search for Swap Ctrl and Caps Lock)

The X11-keyboard-options code seems to have been (or become) broken, at the very least on FreeBSD, so here’s a little script to do it by hand; you do need to pkg install setxkbmap for this:

#! /bin/sh
setxkbmap us
setxkbmap -option ctrl:swapcaps

Customizations for this Laptop

• Set global scale to 175% (in KDE System Settings, under Display Configuration, value of Global Scale; changing this value requires log-out and log-in again to make it take effect, and doesn’t seem to influence KWin decorations or cursor size – but this is X11, which is basically abandoned upstream)

Things that are Cool

• KDE Discover detects updates. I have no idea how it decided that I have 16 things installed (devel/apr and editors/kate are listed, but not KDE Plasma itself) to display in the list of installed applications, but they did need updates today.

Things to Investigate and Fix

On the KDE side:

• Plasma 6 Wayland (on this specific GPU model) is the big-ticket item.
• Keyboard options, for instance all the options related to what-does-caps-lock-do. (This already applies to Plasma 5 on FreeBSD)
• Konsole starts in / rather than in my home directory. (This also)
• KDE Discover’s Home page just displays a “no internet” warning.
• After first logout, KWin lost whatever keybinding it had. I have managed to get alt-tab to switch windows again, but not found where alt-F4 binds to Close Window.

On the FreeBSD or hardware side:

• Figure out how to make F-keys default, rather than the media controls (so I don’t have to hold the Fn key to, say, reload a web-page with F5).
• Figure out how to make the media keys work at all (e.g. brightness, which is on the F7 and F8 keys).
• Figure out WiFi, since a laptop with a bright red ethernet cable sticking out the side is less portable than I might like.

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 Plasma 6.4 continued to take shape, with a number of additional user-visible modernizations and improvements — in particular some nice progress on the topics of keyboard navigation, accessibility, and customizing apps' presentation in launcher menus.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.3.4

Added keyboard navigation and interaction to the User Switcher widget's popup. (Marco Martin, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

KMenuEdit has received a UI modernization, including a simplification of the default toolbar contents, showing a well-curated hamburger menu by default, and adopting modern-style tool view tabs. (Oliver Beard, link 1 and link 2)

When installing apps in Discover, progress feedback now appears right in the place you were just looking, rather than in the opposite corner of the window. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma's Calculator widget now announces the calculated result using the screen reader, if one is active. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Improved keyboard navigation for Plasma's Calculator widget; now navigation wraps around on the same row or column. (Christoph Wolk, link)

In System Monitor's table views, you can now press Ctrl+A to select everything, as you would expect. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

After editing a page in System Monitor, the app now scrolls to show a newly-added row if it would otherwise appear out of the visible area. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

KWin's "Dim Screen for Administrator Mode" plugin is now on by default, helping to focus attention on authentication prompts so you're less likely to miss them or lose them, especially with a cluttered desktop full of stuff. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

OSDs are now consistently referred to as "OSDs" in all the places you can disable them. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Frameworks 6.13

System Monitor now displays something more user-friendly when asked to report the battery charge level of a device whose battery technology it can't determine. (David Redondo, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.4

Narrowed the range of data that the Plasma clipboard accepts to be more in line with what it did in Plasma 6.2 and earlier. This prevents Plasma form crashing when copying certain types of content in certain apps. (Fushan Wen, link)

Triggering the system bell a zillion times in rapid succession (e.g. by holding down backspace in an XWayland-using GTK app; don't do that) no longer freezes the entire system. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a bug in the Weather Report widget that caused it to fail to save its settings (size, position, even its existence) under certain circumstances when placed on the desktop, rather than a panel. (Marco Martin, link)

The User Switcher widget now lays out text for the username more sensibly, neither getting too big with huge horizontal panels, nor overflowing with not-huge vertical panels. (Marco Martin and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a regression in the new spatial quick tiling code that made global actions to instantly quarter-tile the active window not always work correctly the first time they were invoked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a regression that broke pasting numbers into Plasma's Calculator widget. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a regression that caused the icons of Folder View popups in list mode to be displayed with too much transparency. (Nate Graham, link)

Fixed a bug that caused KMenuEdit to be unable to save changes you made to systemwide-installed Flatpak apps that had previously been customized using the properties dialog. (Oliver Beard, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed several minor issues affecting the Media Frame widget, including flickering on image change and not remembering customized popup sizes when living in a panel. (Marco Martin, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 3 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 2 last week). Current list of bugs
• 21 15-minute Plasma bugs (down from 23 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.3.4

Non-full-screen screen recordings taken in Spectacle now have significantly higher visual quality when using a fractional screen scale factor. (Vlad Zahorodnii and Noah Davis, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5)

Plasma 6.4.0

Continued the project of cleaning up Plasma's log output. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, link 7, link 8, link 9, link 10, link 11, link 12, link 13, link 14, link 15, link 16, link 17, link 18, link 19, link 20, and link 21)

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.

I made a change to the KURLNavBar according to old mockup, since we hoped it would be easier to use.

This was a bad idea and made many people angry, at least on Reddit.

Seems to be a recurring theme with my visual changes, though this time wasn't nearly as bad as that was.

Anyway, I wanted to go over the process around it. Maybe someone else than me can learn something from this.

So, what happened

When implementing this mockup, I was expecting this was something people had been waiting for. It looked good to me, and since we've been wanting to freshen up Dolphin a bit, it felt like a good way to start. (This change wasn't to Dolphin, but our framework, so any apps that would use this navbar would get the changes.)

Another reasoning for changes was that there has been many many instances where people didn't even know this field could be clicked! They didn't know these items are buttons, for example on touch devices. That's where the background idea came from. And then make the folders look like clickable items, so people know that, well, they're not there just to look pretty.

The work started well enough, though I spent tons of time refactoring and trying to understand the old codebase. On top of that, we wanted to make sure it was as close to perfect as possible.

So I added a background first, which was relatively easy, then started modifying the buttons.

I wanted to use chevron > style separators between the folders, but there was no easy way to create a button with this shape. Sure, we could do it well for Breeze but any other Qt theme might render it weird and wrong, and that will just cause people report more bugs. So I settled with regular separators. It was a compromise, but I admit it was a rather bad one in the end.

I worked so much on this part, trying to figure out a good way to make the new buttons work, following the mockup as close as possible, and I couldn't see the usability issues. This was because I was so entrenched in the work I couldn't practically "see the forest for the trees."

I had tons of good feedback, from visual designers and the like. I wanted to follow everyones advice, but had to make compromises at some places.

Eventually I got somewhere where we all just liked it enough to push it out to the world.

And yeah, the whole process took ~1 month. You would think this is a simple change, but it never is that simple.

The feedback

I was expecting some pushback, as it always happens with visual changes, but I didn't expect it to be this.. energetic?

Sadly, most of the feedback was "it ugly" which gives me nothing actionable to work on!

Saying "it looks bad" doesn't help me work on it. It doesn't help me fix anything. I think that frustrated me the most: I wanted to help to fix the situation, but this kind of feedback just makes me wonder endlessly how to fix it.

Then I saw some actually actionable feedback:

• The arrows showed the hierarchy better than the separators
  • I actually agreed with this afterwards, but I couldn't get the chevron thing working as mentioned above
  • I opted for separators because I wanted to keep the button look.
• Some thought they were tabs and kept misclicking them instead of tabs
  • This was very good feedback and made me rethink the situation

I am glad I saw those two things in the sea of "it ugly." It helped me to restructure the whole thing in my mind and start fixing.

So yeah I do read your feedback. :P

Out with the new, in with the new but old

Here's the new iteration: KUrlNavigatorButton: Use arrow as separators

I saw the value in the old navbar with the arrows, so I brought them back. I wanted to keep the icons, because I liked the visual flair they added, but they also added clutter. If I could have had the chevron style buttons as shown in the mockups, I would have likely kept the icons.

Instead of reworking the old code, I decided to refactor it to best of my abilities: There was some things we didn't need anymore, and some things were a bit buggy due to miscalculations, so I changed things around and got them into good place.

I wanted to remove some items I thought people wouldn't use, but in fact I was told quickly that these are very good things to have, so I kept them around. And this is also the kind of feedback I like to see!

We're creating custom button components here, so we couldn't utilize more "standard" buttons. That's why there was a lot of math and tinkering with padding involved. I did try to utilize the QStyle methods here though so that it would look okay on any theme, not just Breeze. There will likely be cases where it won't look perfect in custom themes, but utilizing QStyle allows us to at least try.

After the refactoring, it got easier to work on this and I started to wrap it up with rapid pace. Instead of a month, it took me around a week.

It's not merged yet, but hopefully will be soon. I've been daily driving this iteration on my system and haven't had issues so far.

So what's the big deal?

Yeah, so, why the big deal? Why write a blogpost about this?

I didn't expect this change affect so much to my psyche, so I wanted to talk about this. Maybe some other FOSS devs can relate. I think it's something we should discuss more often, than just the raw results.

I like to think I am good at taking feedback. But after working on something for a month, then having to throw it all away even I was told it was ok.. It hurt! It was a lot of time spent on a thing that I hoped would make people happy.

I care about the stuff I do. A lot. So yeah, I'm gonna feel hurt when my work is disliked. And that's okay. Anyone who tells me otherwise can pound sand. Rejecting emotions like these just gets you in worse state over time. I speak from experience here.

It's easy to say "just ignore the negative feedback" but I literally can't. I am so into working on these things, I love working on KDE applications.. So it does hurt when something that has become such an extension of my own creativity and passion gets disliked... Even when I haven't directly worked on it!

Sure, this all is my problem to work on and I don't expect anyone to treat me with silk gloves and pat my head. Just wanted to explain it, that's all. Maybe someone can relate to this and doesn't feel so alone with the problem. I had the same thing when my games got insulted, where I was even more emotionally attached to the things, because I had made them myself completely.

Sadly, I kept dwelling on it a bit longer than I wished.. But working on the new version was a great outlet. I noticed old problems, fixed them and the new version is better in many ways.

I've noticed that I am not annoyed/upset about negative feedback itself, but how it's conveyed. Negative feedback will always be demotivating and bothersome, but when the negative feedback is written politely and has actually actionable items, it can be rather motivating as well. The "it ugly" feedback has stronger demotivating feedback, because it's not actionable.

I think the key takeaway from all of this is that mockups can get stale! If people like some older mockup, then you change to it suddenly, people may get very frustrated about it: They either forgot the old mockup, had never seen it, or they ended up disliking it in actual use.

So it's good idea to freshen the mockup before iterating on it: Ask the visual designers about it one more time, maybe share it with the users and ask their opinion on it. Sure you can't gauge everyone's opinion on it, but at least it shouldn't be that sudden to everyone.

This whole ordeal has been very tiring, but that's my own fault for not really allowing myself to take a break from it. I get hyperfixated easily, but again, that's my own problem.

So yeah, slight burnout by all of this. I'm sure I'll be fine, especially after this is merged so it can stop living rent free in my head.

I'm not blaming anyone for anything. Not even myself. Things happened and we all need to chill.

Hopes for future

There will be many many other times where I or someone else will get it wrong the first time.

So, share your feedback, but don't immediatelly go for the nuclear option of removing it all. With FOSS stuff, we don't have these huge QA teams that go yay/nay for something.. But everyone is welcome to join help in that regard!

Help us help you with actionable, polite feedback.

And thank you so much for everyone who has done so!

Now I'm going to try to just let go of this all. It's weekend anyway and I got bunch of games waiting to be played.

Thanks for reading as always!

Professional update

I had joined MBRDI in June 2021, after almost 4 years, I decided to part ways with MBRDI this January 2025 and decided to pursue new adventure, more on that when time comes, but for now I am keeping it under wraps. I hope you can respect that! 🙂

However this is not the only professional update I want to talk about, I want to talk about another exciting opportunity,

NGI0 Core grant

I am very happy to announce that I will be working on improving Plasma Mobile (and in general, Linux Mobile) power management through funding support from the NGI0 Core Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet program. You can find very thin details on this page. Though this is not the only project that is being funded through NGI0 Core fund, There are total 56 projects being sponsored as part of October call.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-12.

Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism

Those bots are really becoming the scourge of the Internet… Is it really necessary to DDoS every forge out there to build LLMs? And that’s not even counting all the other externalities, the end of the article make it clear: “If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?”

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html

FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism

More details about the impacts of the LLM companies acting like vandals… This is clearly widespread and generating work for everyone for nothing.

https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

Careless people – Aral Balkan

Tags: tech, facebook, politics, law, gdpr, surveillance, attention-economy

I guess more reviews of that book will come out. It looks like Meta and some EU politicians are even more rotten to the core than we ever suspected…

https://ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-people/

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 - Ars Technica

Tags: tech, amazon, privacy, surveillance

Now is the time to wake up and get those surveillance devices out of people’s homes…

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road

Tags: tech, tesla, safety

In case it wasn’t clear yet that not relying on Lidar was a stupid move for self-driving cars.

https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot

Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids

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

Still so reliable… could we confine this to NLP uses please? Should never had been used for anything looking remotely like search.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/chatgpt-falsely-claimed-a-dad-murdered-his-own-kids-complaint-says/

It’s all hallucinations

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

Words are important, I’m dismayed at how the marketing speak around generative AI is what people use… that completely muddies the thinking around them.

https://tante.cc/2025/03/16/its-all-hallucinations/

“Vibe Coding” vs Reality

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

Despite the marketing speak… it’s definitely not there yet. So far all the attempts at using LLM for coding larger pieces end up in this kind of messy results. It helps kickstarting a project indeed but quickly degenerates after that.

https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-03-19-vibe-coding-vs-reality.html

My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster | www.bentasker.co.uk

Tags: tech, security, scam

Fascinating exploration of the techniques scammers are using to hook their victims

https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-romance-scammer.html

Introducing Orpheus Speech - Canopy Labs

Tags: tech, speech, ai, machine-learning

Impressive new models for text to speech.

https://canopylabs.ai/model-releases

HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere

Tags: tech, http, quic, community

The picture is a bit to bleak I think, but there’s indeed currently a divide in terms of HTTP/3 adoption. This is fairly aligned with the big players vs long tail creators divide. Hopefully this will get solved at some point.

https://httptoolkit.com/blog/http3-quic-open-source-support-nowhere/

Were multiple return values Go’s biggest mistake?

Tags: tech, programming, go

With the little Go I wrote, I admit that the multiple return values feature is… odd. Worse though, it has bad ramifications.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/03/multiple-return-values-in-go/

I don’t think error handling is a solved problem in language design

Tags: tech, programming, language, exceptions

Indeed, it’s something where we lack consensus across languages and sometimes within the same ecosystem.

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

The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time

Tags: tech, c, standard, memory, safety

This could be a big improvement for C. We’ll see how far this goes.

https://thephd.dev/c2y-the-defer-technical-specification-its-time-go-go-go

Speeding up C++ code with template lambdas – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, c++, programming, optimization

Definitely ugly in the end. Still it does the the trick.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/03/15/speeding-up-c-code-with-template-lambdas/

Our interfaces have lost their senses

Tags: tech, gui, ux

Beautifully crafted post. So much of it is true as well, having several modalities available is better for interactions. We’ve been loosing this overtime, it’s time to reintroduce it… there’s so much to do in the HMI space.

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses

Xenographics – Weird but (sometimes) useful charts

Tags: tech, data-visualization

Need new ideas for data visualization? This seems like a good resource.

https://xeno.graphics/

Passive Voice Considered Harmful · Refactoring English

Tags: tech, documentation, writing

Good explanation of why the passive voice should be avoided. Also it gives a few cases where you want to favor the passive voice.

https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/passive-voice-considered-harmful/

Why I’m No Longer Talking to Architects About Microservices

Tags: tech, architecture, microservices, criticism

Interesting piece… why talking about microservices generally leads nowhere. This is a too loosely defined term and we’re often confusing means and ends.

https://blog.container-solutions.com/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-architects-about-microservices

Who are your teammates?

Tags: tech, leadership, management, team

Interesting way to frame the question for leadership roles.

https://ntietz.com/blog/who-are-your-teammates/

Why “Normal” Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams - IEEE Spectrum

Tags: tech, organization, team, culture, productivity

We should definitely put the 10x engineer myth to rest. Let’s focus on setting up the right organisation and culture instead.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/10x-engineer

Battery breakthrough as 99.99% of lithium extracted from old cells

Tags: tech, battery, ecology

If it can be done at scale this would be very good news.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/battery-recycle-lithium-ion-environment-b2713723.html

Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Days

Tags: science, cognition, neuroscience

Nice video which gives a glimpse on how our brain constantly tries to build a coherent picture of the reality around us. This is quite a feat since our senses are ill equipped to produce such a picture. Of course we don’t even notice all those processes when we go about our days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8

Bye for now!

Kaidan 0.12.0 looks and behaves better than ever before! Chats can now quickly be pinned and moved. In addition, the list of group chat participants to mention them is placed above the cursor if enough space is available. With this release, OMEMO can be used right after migrating an account and migrated contacts are correctly verified.

Have a look at the changelog for more details.

Changelog

Features:

• Use square selection to crop avatars (fazevedo)
• Use background with rounded corners for chat list items (melvo)
• Remove colored availability indicator from chat list item (melvo)
• Display group chat participant picker above text cursor in large windows (melvo)
• Do not allow to enter/send messages without visible characters (melvo)
• Remove leading/trailing whitespace from exchanged messages (melvo)
• Ignore received messages without displayable content if they cannot be otherwise processed (melvo)
• Allow to show/hide buttons to pin/move chat list items (melvo)

Bugfixes:

• Fix style for Flatpak (melvo)
• Fix displaying video thumbnails and opening files for Flatpak (melvo)
• Fix message reaction details not opening a second time (melvo)
• Fix opening contact addition view on receiving XMPP URIs (melvo)
• Fix format of text following emojis (melvo)
• Fix eliding last message text for chat list item (melvo)
• Fix unit tests (mlaurent, fazevedo, melvo)
• Fix storing downloaded files with unique names (melvo)
• Fix overlay to change/open avatars shown before hovered in account/contact details (melvo)
• Fix verification of moved contacts (fazevedo)
• Fix setting up end-to-end encryption (OMEMO 2) after account migration (melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan requires KWindowSystem and KDSingleApplication now (mlaurent)
• Kaidan requires KDE Frameworks 6.11 now
• Kaidan requires KQuickImageEditor 0.5 now
• Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.10.3 now

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution: