Friday, 16 October 2026

Web Review, Week 2026-42 🔗

Kevin Ottens ervin 11:09 +00:00
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Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-42.

The importance of communities around software

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, community, ethics, governance

Good reminder that licensing is only one signal. The governance is what matters for Free Software communities. This means looking at more than just the license to pick your folks.

https://lumi.codeberg.page/blog/software-community.html


The RSS Universe — Readers, Tools & Standards

Tags: tech, rss, self-hosting

Nice resource listing many tools available around RSS. Plenty to choose from including self-hostable options (but not only).

https://toolbox.rss.here.now/


WING COMMANDER III to get a surprise remaster

Tags: tech, gaming, culture, history

OK, now that’s a blast from the past. I liked this game.

https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2026/10/wing-commander-iii-to-get-surprise.html


Triple-A Minesweeper

Tags: tech, gaming, satire

OK, that’s a funny one. You thought there was no back story to minesweeper? Time to see it differently.

https://minesweeper.mikelacher.com/


How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet

Tags: tech, amazon, business, criticism

Or how Amazon manages to enshittify things even outside of its platform…

https://www.not-ship.com/how-amazon-pushes-up-prices-all-across-the-internet/


‘Unprecedented’ Cyberattack cripples supermarket fridges across Europe

Tags: tech, iot, security

Looks like connecting everything isn’t the best idea after all.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supermarket-fridges-across-europe-as-hackers-activate-automatic-defrosting-delivery-and-store-prices-also-impacted-by-incident


How Technology Empowers—and Imperils—Dictators

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, fake-news, surveillance, politics

Interesting opinion piece on how autocracies benefit greatly from the current AI arm race. But the short term benefit will also create new weaknesses.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/10/how-technology-empowers-and-imperils-dictators.html


AI agents aren’t ‘going rogue.’ Frontier labs are skipping security basics

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

Between this and the scrapers behavior… the disregard for infrastructure and best practices is obvious. It’s just another externality those so called “labs” don’t want to deal with. And well, it makes for a marketing stunt each time isn’t it?

https://www.csoonline.com/article/4234854/ai-agents-arent-going-rogue-frontier-labs-are-skipping-security-basics.html


Steering AI Beyond Automation

Tags: tech, ai, economics, research

I’m not agreeing with some of the points in here. That said the core position of “it should be about collaboration not automation” I’m very much aligned with. It’s after all at the center of how we designed AI systems in my team twenty years ago. We really wanted systems helping the user in their task. It was about co-constructing the result with the support of the machine rather than answers from some kind of “oracle”.

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/steering-ai-beyond-automation


My self-hosted infrastructure with Incus OS

Tags: tech, infrastructure, incus, self-hosting

Looks like a very neat setup. Probably a few good ideas to borrow in there.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2026-10-15-selfhosting-infrastructure-incus-os.html


Branches in branch-free code

Tags: tech, cpu, compiler, security

Interesting case of the compiler not generating the code you’d expect on some platforms. The problem is that it can bring security implications you don’t want.

https://00f.net/2026/10/09/llvm-compiles-branch-free-code-into-branches-on-risc-v/


Lifeguard is a static analyzer to detect Lazy Imports incompatibilities in Python

Tags: tech, python, linting, tools

Early days but this could help better use lazy imports in Python. It’s not exactly a transparent process.

https://github.com/Facebook/lifeguard


2D Vehicle Physics Prototype

Tags: tech, game, physics, simulation

Nice! A recreation of the 2D physics simulation used in the very first GTA. Loved that game and it had a very nice feel in its simulation at the time.

https://patkerr.co.uk/2d-vehicles/


CSS for underlines

Tags: tech, html, css

This is finally a solved problem. No more ugly border workaround.

https://www.rubenerd.au/css-for-underlines/


The Boots Theory of Software Architecture

Tags: tech, architecture, business

Unexpected metaphor but it kind of works. Indeed, architecture work is expensive, that doesn’t make it unnecessary.

https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-boots-theory-of-software-architecture-e18cf0fa5a1b


The geometric model of maintenance

Tags: tech, maintenance, estimates

The article equates effort with lines of code a bit too much for my taste. That said I think this model can be useful to describe how maintenance works in a given project.

https://entropicthoughts.com/geometric-model-of-maintenance


How To Sound Smart When Talking About Charts

Tags: tech, data-visualization

Aphorisms and ideas on how to treat data visualization properly.

https://graphpaper.substack.com/p/how-to-sound-smart-when-talking-about


You Can’t Change Your Boss

Tags: management, work

Unfortunately it’s true. Terrible bosses are generally the one who can’t handle feedback and so won’t change.

https://jacobian.org/2026/oct/12/you-cant-change-your-boss/


Bye for now!

Help us test Kdenlive 🔗

Kdenlive 08:30 +00:00
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Kdenlive development for the 26.12 release is very active, and we would like to request some feedback regarding two of the upcoming features.

Title Editor

One of the feature is related to the title editor. Our title editor has always been functional but rather limited. A new feature was recently implemented by klg that allows having different font styles in a single text block.

Note that several other great improvements were made by other contributors, like: Undo/redo support, implemented by Jaimukund Bhan, and Copy/paste support, implemented by chocolate image.

Relative paths for projects

The second large change is the switch to relative paths in project files. This means that if your videos or images are in the same folder as the project file (or a subfolder), you can easily move your work to another drive and reopen it without issue. This should really improve the experience for people editing projects on several computers, or switching between different operating systems. And this should also fix issues for teams doing collaborative work with projects on network drives or removable drives.

How you can help

We did some regression testing and have some unit tests for both these new features, of course, but some real-life scenarios may not be covered, which is why having feedback from testers is very valuable to us. Download the binaries from the link below and use this development version (26.11.70) to test the steps as described below, then report your findings in the comments section.

To test the title editor changes

The goal is to ensure existing titles display exactly as before and that there are no changes to the position or attributes of the titles.

  1. Open your project files, ensure your existing titles display and render correctly.
  2. Save your project to a new file, try to reopen and ensure it still displays and renders fine.

To test the relative paths changes

The goal is to ensure that all files in existing projects are correctly found, that you can render, save, open again, and all files are still correctly found.

  1. Open your projects, ensure that all files appear correctly.
  2. Check in the project settings that the project folder is correctly detected (default location, parent folder, or custom folder).
  3. Check that rendering works correctly (no missing images ore videos).
  4. Save the project with a new name (Save As), then repeat steps 1 thru 3.
  5. If you sometimes edit from multiple computers, save the project under a new name and ensure that you can open and save the project file correctly from your different computers.

Download

Linux Appimage can be downloaded from Kdenlive's unstable download folder. Make it executable from your file manager before running it.

Windows installer can be downloded from Kdenlive's unstable download folder.

Development Flatpak can be installed from KDE's cdn server.

KDE Plasma 6.6.7, Bugfix Release for October 🔗

KDE Community 00:00 +00:00
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Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.7.

Plasma 6.6 was released in February 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds three months’ worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

KDE today announces the release of Plasma 6.6.7: the first bugfix release in the Plasma 6.6 Long-Term Support (LTS) series, which will still receive bugfixes and backports for a period of 3 years. Plasma 6.6.7 includes numerous bug fixes, improvements, and backports, addressing issues reported by users and developers, improving the overall quality of the desktop.

View full changelog

Thursday, 15 October 2026

KDE Documentary 🔗

Sebastian Kügler sebas 14:32 +00:00
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For more than 20 years, I’ve been part of the KDE community, one of the largest and most impactful Free and Open Source software community world-wide. Yesterday, KDE turned 30 and this went accompanied with the premiere of the KDE documentary.
As former release manager, Plasma core developer and KDE e.V. board member, I’ve also been interviewed. A fairly prominent NPC role went out to Skippie, my cat.

Lately, I have been back into Free Software development, working on two apps that are closely related to hobbies of mine. Watch this space for news! Something nice has been cooking!

Tagoross releases its first open content package on AI openness 🔗

Agustín Benito Bethencourt toscalix 11:00 +00:00
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Tagoross published its first open content package, one day after KDE turned thirty. Two good days in a row Yesterday was a great day for me. KDE turned thirty years old. The KDE documentary, published to celebrate the anniversary, was delightful. Today is no less special for me. The first Tagoross package This morning, Tagoross … Continue reading Tagoross releases its first open content package on AI openness

Qt Creator 21 Beta2 released 🔗

Qt Dev Loop 08:49 +00:00
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We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 21 Beta2.

Wednesday, 14 October 2026

Thirty Years of KDE 🔗

Cornelius Schumacher 12:28 +00:00
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When I joined KDE in 1999 I already thought of it as a mature project. I used the KDE desktop every day, and I was delighted with what it could do and how it felt. I had no idea that this would be one of the most impactful decisions of my life, or where it would lead me.

Today we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original announcement of KDE. The project is still alive and kicking. I still use it every day, just like millions of other people. Not only because it's great software, but because of the values it embodies.

KDE stands for freedom and being able to shape your own destiny. As the KDE vision says: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy." While I originally joined for the technology, this is what made me stay.

One of my favorite pictures illustrating the spirit of the community is the group picture of Akademy in Dublin in 2006. Brilliant people having fun working towards a shared purpose of digital freedom.

KDE gets a wonderful present for its birthday. The KDE documentary is premiering today. It tells the story of the founding, the rapid early development, and the license conflicts. How it became a solid product used by many people, and then put it all at risk with KDE 4. How we learned from that and turned it into this extremely resilient and lively community it still is today. I'm happy I could contribute to this story, and that I'm one of the people telling it in the documentary.

For me, KDE shaped my career and my life, and gave me the opportunity to grow and learn. It led to things I would never have expected when I started: my code running on millions of computers, talking to hundreds of developers at conferences, sitting at the negotiation table with Nokia in Helsinki, consulting as an expert in the German parliament. And much more.

Today, KDE is maybe stronger than ever. We reached a lot of new users with the Steam Deck. The Sovereign Tech Fund is investing more than a million euros in KDE. With the strategic goals the community set this year, we are addressing enterprise, documentation, and styling. It shows how much the project has matured, beyond what I could ever have imagined. It also shows in its contributors. While contributors leave over time, new generations come in every year and keep the community growing over the long run, combining stability and rejuvenation.

I'm proud and grateful. Proud of what the KDE community achieved. Grateful that I could be part of this amazing group of people. A team nobody could have hired.

Happy birthday, KDE.

Some room to play 🔗

Nuno Pinheiro pinheiro 09:34 +00:00
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So... a bit of news. 🙂

KDAB have just published a video featuring me talking about design, QML, and something I keep coming back to: what happens when the tools we use to make software become more capable, while the interfaces we build with them seem to get increasingly predictable?

This started with me playing around with QML, trying to see how far I could push some ideas about the look and behaviour of an interface.

Things that are perhaps a little excessive, things that might be annoying in everyday use, things that are difficult to justify in a design review.
The sort of things you might want to try before somebody with more of a brain than you explains why you shouldn't. 🙂

And its something I have been thinking about for some time, the place we leave for this kind of work, particularly in open source.

OSS has a rather unusual relationship with creativity. We can inspect how things work, modify them, share our experiments, and build on each other's work.
There is room for someone to follow an idea simply because it interests them, it does not require a market research, there is no need to demonstrate that it will appeal to the largest possible audience before writing the first line of code or in my case drawing the first squigly line in inkscape.



And yet, sometimes our projects can be surprisingly cautious about appearance.
We globaly spend a great deal of effort making software coherent and predictable, which is understandable and a good thing when you have to maintain it for years and support a wide range of users.
But those concerns can also make it difficult to explore alternatives. The existing conventions gradually become the boundaries of what we consider reasonable.
Trust me I was that guy shooting down what I believed were bad ideas. because of all the work that it would create, or because it was just 2 insane etc....



BUT

Now as a designer, I find that a little frustrating. Especially when the technology itself offers so many possibilities. I don't expect every application to become an animated art installation, and I certainly don't want every interaction to demand my attention (expect the ones I create ;)) . But I'd like to see more people curious about what an interface could be, rather than starting from what an interface is supposed to look like.



Which brings me to OxygenLabs.

We started a new repository under KDE in the playground area, intended as a space for exploring visual ideas and seeing where they lead.

https://invent.kde.org/libraries/oxygen-labs.git



What interests us is the willingness to put care into visual details, to explore a particular character or mood, and to take the appearance of software seriously enough to question the usual answers.

We would like OxygenLabs to give that process somewhere to happen. Not every piece of work needs to arrive as a finished feature, actually the opposite and not every experiment needs to graduate into a product. Sometimes it is useful just to make something, live with it for a while, and find out what you learn from the experience.



For now it just has 2 things I was playing with, one of them a request people have for a long time to be able on only use colourful icons . on the plasma panel via giving the icons KCM area a specific configure option per theme...



Anyway, that's the thinking behind it. The video goes into some of the questions that led me here, and OxygenLabs is a small, practical way of exploring them.


Have a look at both, and let me know what you think. I'm curious to see what comes out of this. 🙂



P.S. we also have a "new" site https://oxygen-design.org/

Plasma 6.8 🔗

KDE Community 00:00 +00:00
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Celebrating thirty years of KDE

Plasma 6.8 is released on a very special day: KDE’s 30th birthday. Today we celebrate three decades of the KDE community providing the world’s greatest free and open-source software.

Plasma 6.8 is no exception, offering enhancements across much of the user experience and beneath the surface.

6.8 is all about launching Plasma into the future: adding changes you’ll notice right away, combined with major but subtle improvements designed to set the stage for decades of service to come.

Dive in and find out what the desktop environment of tomorrow looks like!


Join KDE’s 30th anniversary celebrations!

Watch the KDE Documentary The Story of Free Software Underdogs,
tonight, October 14th at 19:00 CEST.

Thumbnail for the KDE documentary

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.
A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

Improvements you can use today


Better accessibility

Part of our continued effort to bring digital control to everyone, a new “dwell clicker” feature can send a mouse click when the pointer stops moving. Designed especially for users with mobility issues, an external app is no longer required to use your system in this way; now it’s built right in!

Serving more users worldwide

Plasma 6.8 gains support for the Bikram Sambat calendar in the Digital Clock, and the Amharic language in the on-screen keyboard. These are just two more additions of the dozens incorporated into Plasma over recent versions in our effort to make Plasma a truly universal desktop.

Bikram Sambat calendar Bikram Sambat calendar
Amharic on-screen keyboard Amharic on-screen keyboard

System monitoring

Gain an extreme level of control over your system with Plasma’s System Monitor. In Plasma 6.8, you can assign compute-intensive tasks to only the CPUs of your choosing from directly within the monitor, and keep your machine running smoothly.

System Monitor app offering the possibility to change the CPU affinity for the plasmashell process

You can also monitor your VRAM more easily, as it now shows the load as an easy-to-read percentage.

Remote desktop

We’ve invested a great deal of time into polishing the experience provided by Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server. In Plasma 6.8, you’ll be able to enjoy the following improvements — with more in the pipeline:

  • Much better performance and quality that prioritizes latency and responsiveness by adapting to slow networks and rapidly-updating screen content.
  • Exclusive mode optionally locks the server’s screen and provides the client with a virtual screen that exactly matches its window size.
  • Bi-directional clipboard synchronization makes it easier to exchange content between the server and client.
Plasma’s Remote Desktop settings and the KRDC application in use

Screen casting and recording

Spectacle can now optionally include both system audio and microphone input in its screen recordings, making it possible to narrate a recording or accurately record everything that’s going on.

Plasma’s screen sharing portal dialog lets you create a virtual screen to share, instead of an existing display. In Plasma 6.8, you can now specify the resolution of the virtual screen instead of being limited to only 1920 × 1080.

The screen sharing portal window showing the ability to select a custom resolution for the virtual display

In addition, the quality of screen recordings and screencasts has been improved.

Nicer-looking third-party app windows

We’ve added support for window rules that add desktop shadows, outlines, and rounded corners to client-side-decorated windows that can’t provide these visual niceties themselves. Plasma 6.8 ships with one such rule for Steam, making it feel more at home in Plasma.

Before
After

Window management

We’ve added new global shortcuts to help power users manage their open windows with the Task Manager widget. By pressing Meta + Ctrl + Page Up or Page Down, you can cycle between the previous and next tasks. By also holding Shift, you can move the active task backwards and forwards.

Setting the stage for decades to come


Theming

Four months ago, Plasma 6.7 included an alpha release of the new Union theming system, demonstrating its ability to style Qt Quick applications.

Plasma 6.8 builds on this with a beta release of Union, including not only refinements for Qt Quick theming, but also the ability to style Qt Widgets applications! This includes KDE’s more traditional desktop applications, such as Dolphin, Kate, and Konsole.

Dolphin themed with Union’s Breeze style. Can you tell the difference?

While Union is not quite ready to be used by default, Plasma 6.8 brings it ever closer to being a single source of truth for styling all of KDE’s products, and more. To learn more about the current state of Union, read the blog posts from Arjen and Akseli.

Wayland

30 years is an impressive milestone for a community like KDE. But even older is the venerable X Window System (or “X11”), first released in 1984! After 42 years of faithful service, support for starting X11 sessions in Plasma is being retired, in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system.

Compared to X11, Wayland offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively developed.

The small number of individual apps that still require X11 will continue to work via the “XWayland” compatibility layer.

KDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future.

Performance, colors, and graphics

As part of the backend improvements included in Plasma 6.8, we’ve made changes to help Plasma load faster and use less memory. Discover’s update notifier now uses less memory, too.

With KWin, NVIDIA GPUs now use triple buffering by default, and all users will have better-looking HDR when using an ICC color profile. We’ve also added support for the HLG transfer function, which means that certain media and applications that did not previously work in HDR are now working as expected.

But that’s not all…

Plasma 6.8 is chock-full of smaller changes, including:

  • A new kscreenctl tool makes managing displays from the command-line easier and also offers the potential for scripting and automation.
  • Kup, the KDE backup tool, has been polished up and is now released as a part of Plasma.
  • We have added EAP-TTLS authentication support for StrongSwan VPNs.
  • You can enable and disable auto-starting apps without having to delete and recreate their entries.
  • Use the arrow keys to move screens pixel-by-pixel in Display Configuration.
  • The system shows a warning notification when trying to print using an unavailable printer.
  • Copying secrets such as passwords to the clipboard now clarifies why they are not included in history.
  • Emojis in the Emoji Selector can now be shown at different sizes.
  • …and countless bug fixes and small tweaks to make Plasma better than ever!

To see a high-level overview of all user-facing changes, see the Plasma 6.8 wiki page.

To see the full list of all changes, read the complete changelog.

Tuesday, 13 October 2026

Kdenlive 26.08.2 released 🔗

Kdenlive 18:45 +00:00
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The second maintenance release of the 26.08 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include improved project handling and ability to set the frame count to start at 1 in the Dynamic Text filter which is useful for animation workflows. This release also fixes several issues in proxy clips, titles, and audio levels.

Kdenlive needs your support

Our small team has been working for years to build an intuitive open source video editor that does not track you, does not use your data, and respects your privacy. However, to ensure a proper development requires resources, so please consider a donation if you enjoy using Kdenlive - even small amounts can make a big difference.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.