Every time an AI agent searches the web for Qt documentation today, it receives full HTML pages loaded with navigation chrome, cookie banners, related-article sidebars, and search-engine snippets that have nothing to do with the answer - burning thousands of LLM tokens before a single line of useful content appears. Qt's new official Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool for Qt documentation solves this directly.
Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.5.
Plasma 6.6 was released in February 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a month’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
View full changelogRecently I went on the Linux User Space show to talk about KDE Linux, business, and everyone’s favorite topic: AI. It was a pretty interesting conversation; check it out:
So... while doing some work on Oxygen I noticed there was no camera-video icon.
No Oxygen one.
Wille there was already a recently done symbolic one.
Which honestly felt a bit odd considering cameras are one of those objects designers historically cant resist over designing heee... (but then again i got a bit 2 distracted about the future and forgot to look behind me at what was still pretty good)
So I ended up making both versions almost back to back.
Now... I already knew exactly what was going to happen.
I have been doing Oxygen style icons for long enough to know the amount of work involved. Big reflections, materials, shadows, details nobody consciously notices just to change how the icon feels. And to hide my incompetence as a simple designer
It was not just "camera" and realy not a video one but..... It was trying to be a camera. A object. Somthing with texture and personality. Still .... Probably 3 days of work.
The symbolic one on the other hand took minutes.
And honestly... I like symbolic icons. This is not one of those "flat design killed civilization" posts
But it did make me think again about something I keep repeating over and over:
"Less is a bore." as Robert Venturi said.
People usually read that as a attack on minimalism. But I don't.
Reduction is useful. Clarity is useful. Symbolic icons are useful. You also cant hide your design failures as easily, and they can work really well.
The problem for me starts when simplification becomes emotionally neutral. Copy of a copy of a copy of a nothing.
Because thats the thing I care about the most when designing anything. Not beauty exactly... beauty is subjective and honestly kinda impossible to define in any meaningful way.
What interests me more is emotional impact.
How does it make you feel?
Not stricly rationally. But mostly Emotionally.
The Oxygen/old\new/skeo\etc icon is probably excessive and maybe even a little ridiculous. Tiny fake reflections, fake materials, dramatic shadows... but then again thats also what gives it character I think??. It tries to create an "atmosphere" instead of just identifying a function.
And to me atmosphere matters.
Humans are not rationalist grid systems no matter how much "modern" design sometimes pretends we are. We remember things emotionally first. Movies, music, old game menus, interfaces...
Nowdays many interfaces and design languages just feel efficient. Functional. Fast. But also weirdly interchangeable.
And I think thats why so many modern interfaces evaporate from memory so quickly. Perfectly boring floating in UI space. Visually correct but emotionally silent.
Which to me always felt ironic because modernism originally was full of emotion. Optimism. Utopianism. The future as a aesthetic project. Somewhere along the way people kept the reduction but forgot the passion behind it.
Anyway... making these two icons back to back ended up being more interesting than I expected.
They will both be available in PlasmaShell near you....
P.S. welcome to my new home, I'm still alive 
I'm probably gona make a video with some crazy ideas for a over the top theme in QML, kinda as a exercise on the sort of things that should be possible in theme engines. Because even with QML giving us allot more creative freedom people still somehow end up making mostly the same thing over and over again.
Hey everyone! This is my first post and Week 1 status report.
I started this week by setting up:
The project and configuring jj, a local version control system that has been a lifesaver for testing, simulating, and keeping my commits organized.
The first step was to build and refactor Plasma NM in parallel while setting up a bare-bones folder structure. Here is the Commit I made.
After creating the initial folder structure, I started refactoring the main backend service for WifiSecurities, which includes creating separate components for the Enterprise section, authentication, and Wi-Fi security options.
This week, I learned a lot of new things about local version control, architecture for Qt Widgets, and QML.
Last weekend I joined parts of the FOSSGIS Community Meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, focusing on topics related to organizing this year’s edition of the Open Transport Community Conference.
Twice a year FOSSGIS e.V. (the German local chapter of OpenStreetMap) hosts a multi-day meeting at Linuxhotel, for people to work on primarily non-technical topics, such as organizing conferences, presence at events, public communication and outreach, lobbying and political activities around FOSS/Open Data, finances and fundraising, and operations of the FOSSGIS e.V.
I had been at Linuxhotel for a KDE sprint before, but only after looking up the group photo from back then I realized that this was already 18 years ago…
While the first edition of the Open Transport Community Conference last year was very successful and ran very smoothly overall, one important thing that had to change to make this long-term sustainable was moving this under the umbrella of some form of legal entity. We are looking at doubling the length, doubling the number of attendees and a 40x increase in budget this year, way beyond something you’d want to have individuals carry the legal and financial risks for.
I’m therefore very happy that with the FOSSGIS e.V. we have found a suitable organization for this. Besides the obvious overlap in domain and partially also in people, FOSSGIS e.V. has extensive experience in organizing conferences we can tap into, as well as infrastructure we can use.
This should allow us for example to handle sponsors this year, as well as offering (optional) paid tickets for people attending for their employers. And with that we could then (given enough income) provide some kind of travel support program for community attendees to soften the impact of the rather expensive location in Switzerland.
The weekend provided an opportunity to work out a number of legal, financial, organizational and operational implementation details for that. Some aspects have still to be resolved with the tax advisor though, given Switzerland isn’t in the EU, which should then unlock finally opening the registration for the conference.
Transitous is in a somewhat similar situation, although with less time pressure for now. To improve long-term sustainability we’d also need a legal entity to hold assets (such as the domain), handle money and sign contracts.
We are extremely lucky so far that the “big” servers doing the heavy lifting are provided to us for free, including all hosting cost. While there’s no indication that might change anytime soon, we at least want to have options ready should this change, or in case we need additional capacity.
Our current yearly budget is around 60€, if we’d have to pay market prices for our entire infrastructure we’d need to increase that significantly, 50x before the global madness in recent months, more like 100x now. Obviously not something we can do overnight, so starting to explore and ramping up fundraising options sooner rather than later makes sense.
And that’s just the direct cost for server operations, it would also be great to be able to support community members with travel costs for example.
Just as with the conference, the plan is to attach Transitous to the FOSSGIS e.V.. FOSSGIS e.V. is “gemeinnützig” in Germany, which allows receiving tax-deductable donations, something we’d be unlikely to achieve with a separate organization on our own.
With my KDE hat on, there were also a number of other relevant and interesting topics:
I think for all this we could benefit from building more bridges between the various communities and organizations affected by or interesting in those topics.
It’s foundations like FOSSGIS e.V. or KDE e.V. that provide all the boring legal, financial and operational infrastructure for Free Software and Open Data communities and initiatives to do their work, and keep doing that independently. Your donations enable this.
The first maintenance release of the 26.04 series is now available, with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements.
Thanks to an NLnet/NGI0 grant, we had a security audit provided by Radically Open Security. The audit found one serious vulnerability that can happen when opening a malicious project file, allowing remote code execution. This is fixed with Kdenlive 26.04.1. Thanks to Edoardo Geraci and Radically Open Security for helping us make our software safer!
We are not aware of the vulnerability being exploited so far. It is important to understand that this security issue is about a manipulated .kdenlive project file containing potentially malicious code. Therefore, it is only relevant if you open a .kdenlive project file that you received from someone else or downloaded from the internet. If you are working only with your own projects or with shared projects in collaboration with fully trusted partners, there is no security risk.
If you cannot upgrade, do not open a project file that was not created by you.
Although the vulnerability is fixed in 26.04.1, we have also implemented another layer of security checks for the upcoming 26.08.0 to warn the user if some other unexpected input is detected in a project file.
Head to our download section to get the latest binaries, or check the updates from your package manager. Please note that for Linux only AppImage and Flatpak are supported by the Kdenlive team.
For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week saw a lot of lower-level technical improvements made throughout Plasma’s software stack. Not super flashy, but super important.
Nevertheless, two color-related features did manage to sneak in! And as Plasma 6.7’s feature period comes to a close, expect more polishing and bug-fixing for the next month or so.
Without further ado:
You can now use an ICC profile while HDR mode is active! (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #514239)
You can now disable or control the intensity of the “adaptive backlight modulation” feature of many AMD laptops, which changes screen colors at low brightness levels to try to improve visibility. If you don’t like it, you can now turn it off! (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #511801)
Improved Discover’s ability to de-duplicate apps present in both system and user Flatpak installations. (Tobias Fella, Discover MR #1316)
The temperature values on Info Center’s Sensors page now reflect the units you have configured system-wide, rather than always using Celcius. (Chandradeep Dey, kinfocenter MR #294)
You can now remove apps from the Kickoff Application Launcher’s Favorites view by dragging them out of the view and over any part of the rest of the widget. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3662)
The Printers widget now shows badges indicating the number of active and queued print jobs on each printer. Useful for large institutional environments with a lot of printers! (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #324)
Fixed an issue that made the power buttons vanish from launcher menus for some people with version 260 of systemd, which changed around some things we were relying on. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518174)
Fixed an issue that caused periodic freezes and stutters on some systems with multiple discrete GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #519461)
Fixed an issue that could make Discover crash on some distros while changing the priorities of Flatpak repos. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1318)
The portal-based dialog to add launchers now actually works. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519631)
Using window rules to move a window partially off-screen using a negative position property no longer makes the window disappear and become unreachable. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #466119)
Fixed one source of a tricky issue that could make secondary screens inappropriately remain dimmed after waking from sleep. (Patryk Ludwikowski, KDE Bugzilla #513809)
Fixed a recent visual regression in the hover highlighting effects applied to the Printers widget. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518705)
Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause custom non-default global shortcuts to be reset during software updates on specific distros that uninstall and re-install apps as part of their upgrade processes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #484597)
Improved performance and power efficiency for software that uses CPU rendering, such as most QtWidgets-based Qt and KDE apps. Read more about this on Xaver’s blog! (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9178)
Improved KWin’s heuristics for when it can use the “direct scan-out” feature to improve performance and save power for full-screen windows. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #515784)
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.
Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!
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 keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Back from vacations, the reading offline was good… I managed to read some articles too, so let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-19.
Tags: tech, hacking, culture
It’s indeed a nice endeavour. I don’t have the appetite for it right now, but I wish more people would do this.
Tags: tech, attention-economy, literacy, health
This is good and sane advice to survive the attention economy and take care of your mental health. It’s not too hard to put in place if you’re not already doing it.
https://thetangent.space/2026/brain-rot/
Tags: tech, radio, music, culture
Yep, I like radio as well. Don’t judge me.
https://donthave2sting.bearblog.dev/radio-is-cool-actually/
Tags: tech, web, foss, knowledge, enclosure, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, politics
This piece is maybe a bit too much on the panic side… Which part of the Web are we talking about? The commercial stuff? Overall, the logic makes sense though. We see many examples of power plays in guise of “innovation” which lead to killing openly sharing (and so killing real innovation). It’s urgent to fight back and ensure things stay open.
https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/
Tags: tech, internet, culture, history
The Internet culture definitely changed at the turn of the 21st century. Before this it was a more civilized and hopeful place. I’d like to see the netizen etiquette make a strong come back.
Tags: tech, internet, web, social-media, messaging, culture
This could be a piece full of nostalgia. There is a bit of nostalgia of course, but it’s also a path to use what we got in a more valuable and humane way.
https://joshblais.com/blog/using-the-internet-like-its-1999/
Tags: tech, internet, web, culture, resilience, protocols, decentralized
This is a good point, unlike what some claims the Internet isn’t dying. The commercial land on top is thinning out and is getting filled with crap indeed. Still, what made the Internet and the Web are still here for people to use.
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet
Tags: tech, web, standard
Indeed, there’s no reason to not use .well-known for newer standard files.
https://www.vzqk50.com/blog/scraps/a-well-known-complaint/
Tags: tech, surveillance, politics, surveillance, defense, palantir
Better late than never I guess? Let’s just hope this becomes very costly for that evil company.
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/30/palantir-workers-are-finally-noticing-the-skulls-on-their-caps/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, business, economics, sustainability
This part of the industry is struggling more and more (or more likely silently taking more risks to hide the struggle). It has no path to sustainability and it starts to show.
https://www.404media.co/the-ai-compute-crunch-is-here-and-its-affecting-the-entire-economy/
Tags: tech, foss, community, ai, machine-learning, copilot
It totally makes sense. If you’re a FOSS project you have to invest in getting more long term contributors, which requires mentoring. The contributions themselves are not something to maximise. I wish more communities would follow that path.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/
Tags: tech, web, frontend, ai, hype, ux, simplicity
So many requests based on vanity and hype… I like the question “when you go to other websites do you use it?”, we should use it more. Maybe at some point we’ll realise that simplicity matters.
https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/all-my-clients-wanted-a-carousel-now-it-s-an-ai-chatbot.md
Tags: tech, foss, politics
Weird decisions, this is really backwards…
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/
Tags: tech, git, github, foss, self-hosting
This is indeed time to move away from GitHub if you’re still there. There are many viable alternatives.
https://dbushell.com/2026/04/29/github-is-sinking/
Tags: tech, git, github, tools, version-control, foss, self-hosting
Good first half of the post, there’s indeed more paths out of GitHub than jumping from a centralised system to another one (even though Codeberg and Forgejo are much saner from a governance standpoint). We’ll see what the future brings.
Tags: tech, git, github, foss, self-hosting, europe, politics
Looks like some governments noticed that they can move away from GitHub and are testing the waters. Good idea!
https://www.nldigitalgovernment.nl/news/soft-launch-for-government-open-source-code-platform/
Tags: tech, foss, community
Indeed, a reminder that the two concepts are not necessarily aligned. It kind of misses the point about corporate Open Source with no open contributions which can be easily captured as well. But indeed for the individual side project you might not need the whole burden of issues and contributions, you get to choose.
https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/04/open-source-does-not-imply-open-community/
Tags: tech, email, routing, security
Want a primer on email routing? This is pretty much it.
https://samkhawase.com/blog/email-is-crazy/
Tags: tech, text, config, editor, shell, scripting
It’s an interesting trick for personal tooling. Keeps things really simple to setup with limited code to maintain.
https://ratfactor.com/cards/text-editor-as-ui
Tags: tech, lua, dsl
This is a good illustration of how flexible and expressive Lua can be. Gives ideas to make DSLs.
Tags: tech, podman, containers, security
Worthwhile exploration on the impact of CopyFail in the context of Podman. The baseline security posture seems better and you can even improve things using older techniques. Definitely worth switching.
https://garrido.io/notes/podman-rootless-containers-copy-fail/
Tags: tech, virtualization, infrastructure, containers
Don’t think this piece really needed to talk about AI but oh well… I guess it’s the obsession of the moment. That said, it’s interesting to see how far the microVM ecosystem matured so far. The pieces are falling in place and that opens the door to interesting architectures.
https://emirb.github.io/blog/microvm-2026/
Tags: tech, c++, supply-chain, dependencies, security, satire
C++ too can have its own supply chain disasters with enough effort!
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/a-breakthrough-in-cc-dependency-management
Tags: tech, rust, failure, security, system, filesystem, memory
Straight from the uutils rewrite. This is interesting both for the class of bugs which made it (very system integration oriented, unsurprisingly) and the ones which didn’t appear at all (anything to do with memory).
https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/
Tags: tech, simd, performance
A good illustration that you can beat classical algorithms by taking into account how modern CPUs are designed.
https://lemire.me/blog/2026/04/27/you-can-beat-the-binary-search/
Tags: tech, text, codec, memory
When you look at the binary representation of those characters, things become clear. This opens the door to interesting bitwise operations.
https://tylerhillery.com/blog/why-dont-lowercase-chars-come-after-upper/
Tags: tech, game, graphics, performance
There is clearly a sweet spot around 60 fps. Beyond this… You quickly end up in cargo cult territory.
https://hooby.blog/posts/how-many-frames-per-second-do-you-need/
Tags: tech, history, career
It all changed so much! That’s quite a journey for our field. Of course it’s not over yet. At some point we’ll be real engineers I guess. 😉
https://forkingmad.blog/forty-years-in-tech/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, team, organisation, engineering, learning, satire
This feels a bit too realistic for my taste… and yet… Well this piece of satire is well crafted I’d say.
https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp
Tags: tech, team, organisation, productivity
A bit of a stretched metaphor in here, but indeed being individually faster doesn’t automatically make the team faster. Sometimes quite the contrary in fact.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/collective-speed-isnt-the-sum-of%20individual-speed/
Tags: tech, project-management, agile, metrics
Indeed I wish we’d see less fixation on burndown and velocity. There are superior alternatives and what matters if the full flow of work.
Tags: tech, hiring, interviews
Another post which shows that the right technical job interviews are the ones creating a real conversation. It’s the only way to have a chance to figure out what the candidate is made of.
https://dbarabashh.com/thoughts-and-experience/hire-for-the-conversation-not-the-code
Tags: politics, decision-making
Especially true for local politics indeed.
https://blog.mattglassman.net/notes-on-influencing-politics/
Bye for now!
ngraham
@tushar2005:matrix.org
GSoC
