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Sunday, 7 December 2025

A week full of fixes

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

Our End of the Year fundraiser is still going on and we’ve raised more than €140,000 so far this month. Thanks to everyone who donated!

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

PIM Applications

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Tobias Leupold fixed a compatibility issue with MariaDB 12.1 (25.12.0 - pim/akonadi MR #310)

Carl Schwan optimized some maintenance routines from Akonadi; this also fixes an issue when running on SQLite (25.12.0 - pim/akonadi MR #299).

KMail A feature-rich email application

Andreas Hartmetz fixed a bug where mail filters would be deleted in some situations (25.12.1 - pim/kmail MR #164).

Graphics Applications

Photos Image Gallery

Noah Davis added a setting that allows enlarging small images. Without this option the minimum zoom level is 100% (26.04.0 - graphics/koko MR #251).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Luna Lovecraft fixed a crash that occurred when the window was too small to fit a selection actions panel (graphics/krita MR #2548) and also fixed the selection panel blinking when making a new selection (graphics/krita MR #2551).

Wolthera van Hövell split the character and paragraph properties, making it more intuitive to apply text transformations to just one character or to a whole paragraph (graphics/krita MR #2470).

Joshua Goins fixed a crash in the Krita plugin manager when using Python 3.14 (graphics/krita MR #2451).

Utilities Applications

Calculator A feature rich calculator

Devin Lin cleaned up the sidebar and removed some custom code.

MobileDesktop

Recorder Audio recorder

Tobias Burnus made his first contribution to KDE and fixed an issue where the list of audio input sources contained duplicated entries (25.12.0 - utilities/krecorder MR #62).

Kate Advanced text editor

Leia uwu fixed a crash in the project tree view (25.12.0 - utilities/kate MR #1950).

Keysmith Two-factor code generator for Plasma Mobile and Desktop

Shubham Arora fixed an issue where the account name could overflow when it was too long (25.12.1 - utilities/keysmith MR #171).

BeforeAfter

…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.

Friday, 5 December 2025

A new version of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings have been released

We have a new release of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings!

Plasma Camera changes:

  • Fix compile with libcamera 0.6.0 (MR)
  • New translations

Plasma Settings changes:

  • Fix issues with loading pages in some KCMs (MR)
  • Respect kiosk restrictions in modules model (MR)

Visit /info/independent-releases-25-12 for the tarballs.

Please note: most Plasma Mobile software is now shipped under the Plasma or KDE Gear release cycles.

Wednesday, 3 December 2025

KStars v3.8.0 is released on 2025.12.03 for Windows & Linux. MacOS release is expected in one week due to build issue on KDE CI infrastructure.

For Linux users, it's highly recommended to use the official KStars Flatpak hosted at Flathub. You can install the stable flatpak or try out new features by downloading the KStars Nightly Flatpak for x86_64 and arm64 architectures.

Live Stacker: LRGB Stacking

John Evans implemented generation of RGB and LRGB images from individual mono subframes. Watch R, G, B and optionally L directories and combine the individual stacks into RGB or LRGB images.


Add directories for R, G, B and optionally L subs. These are monitored and a single color image is displayed.


RGB images are combined with a Linear Fit type algorithm.  LRGB images are combined with a LRGB Combination type algorithm. SNR algorithm has been rewritten. Appears to work better but is more resource intensive.

Live Stacker: ImageMM Stacking Method

John Evans added an implementation of the ImageMM stacking method. This implementation strikes a balance between speed (it needs to be a Live Stacker) and fidelity.



To use: select ImageMM as the stacking method and play with the available controls. This method is considerably more resource intensive than "regular" stacking because it uses an iterative approach.

Live Stacker: Live Stacker Monitor

John Evans implemented the Live Stacker monitor. Live Stacking Monitor window is a popup from Live Stacker that shows a table of subs that match the chosen directory in Live Stacker.


The purpose is to allow analysis of Live Stacker, for example to allow investigation of bottlenecks in the stacking process.

When a sub is added to the watched directory, the sub is added to the Monitor's table. As the sub is processed by each step of the process information is updated in the table:
  • Waiting to load. The sub is in the queue to be processed but Live Stacker is busy with other subs.
  • Loading. The sub is loaded into memory.
  • Plate solving. The sub is undergoing plate solving (if appropriate).
  • Waiting to stack. The sub is waiting to be stacked (e.g. currently there are insufficient subs loaded to start a stack).
  • Calibration. Dark / Flat calibration.
  • Alignment.
  • Stacking.


Table columns and sort order are configurable. Changing cells can be highlighted (or not)

Task Queue system

Observatory startup and shutdown steps are now replaced by the new highly configurable Task Queue system. The Task Queue System is a modern, flexible automation framework that replaces traditional startup and shutdown scripts with a template-based, configurable task execution system. It provides a visual interface for building sequences of automated operations that can control your observatory equipment through INDI. It is accessible from Ekos Scheduler.


Why use it? The Task Queue system offers several advantages over traditional scripting:

  • Visual Management: Build and monitor task sequences through an intuitive graphical interface
  • Reusability: Use pre-built templates for common operations without writing code
  • Error Handling: Built-in retry logic and configurable failure responses
  • Device Compatibility: Automatic matching of templates to available devices
  • Progress Monitoring: Real-time status updates and detailed execution logs
  • Collections: Pre-defined task sets for startup, shutdown, and other common scenarios
  • Flexibility: Combine templates or create custom variations without programming

Safety Monitor

KStars scheduler now fully supports INDI Safety Monitor driver released part of INDI v2.1.7. A standalone driver may be used (independent of the equipment profile) that is running on a different INDI server to provide 24/7 safety monitor updates to the scheduler. No observatory operations shall take place unless it is deemed safe by the safety monitor.



The INDI Safety Monitor can listen to any number of sources including weather stations, UPS (uninterruptible power supply) monitors, and any auxiliary device that support the INDI's standard SAFETY_STATUS property.

Push-To Assistant 

Wolfgang Reissenberger added an incredibly useful tool for users with manual mounts: Push-To Assistant. Just attached a camera to your dobsonian and use this tool to center the target in the eyepiece. This tool assumes that both the camera center and eyepiece center are already aligned.

The new push-to assistant is intended as plate solving support for mechanical mounts in combination with a digital camera on a finder scope.


Setup: Create an optical train with the Telescope Simulator as mount and configure your combination of finder scope and digital camera.

Usage

  • Start Ekos
  • open the Push-to Assistant located in the Tools menu
  • move your scope as good as possible to the target you want to find
  • select the target from the catalog or enter its coordinates manually and press "Select target"
  • press "Solve position" to determine the position your scope is currently pointing at
  • as soon as the position has been solved, the assistant displays hints in which direction you should move your mount to be closer to the target
  • correct your mount position and press "Solve position" again

if you want to automatically repeat plate solving, configure the delay and press the "Repeat" button.


Bug Fixes


Tuesday, 2 December 2025

Performance improvement in Krita, Trust and Safety in NeoChat and files actions in Photos

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

We are still doing our fundraisers and in the past 48 hours, thanks to the crazy support from our users we managed to raise more than €90,000. Keep it going and if you can afford it, donate at kde.org/donate! Any amount helps.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Travel Applications

Volker Krause published a blog post about the current progress of KDE Itinerary in October and November. This includes an improved journey search page, fine-grained deletion control of tickets, altitude information in the live status view, and more! You can read all of that on his blog.

Grapics Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Mohammad Kazemi added a “Copy Without Line Breaks” action to remove line breaks when copying text (26.04.0 - link).

Quinten Kock added native pinch gestures with a touchpad in Okular (26.04.0 - link).

Photos Image Gallery

Noah Davis added more standard file actions in Photos when viewing a picture (26.04.0 - link).

KPhotoAlbum KDE image management software

Randall Rude made the metadata extractor also extract the creation date and time for videos (link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Agata Cacko improved the performance of the Liquify Transform tool making it a lot more smooth to use (link).

Agata also added a knife tool prototype to Krita (link).

Joshua Goins removed the error dialog when cancelling an export (link).

Utilities Applications

Konsole Use the command line interface

Matan Ziv-Av added two keyboard actions in Konsole for focusing on the next/previous view in split view mode (26.04.0 - link).

Sune Vuorela added an option to enable or disable whether Konsole listens to zmodem terminal codes, which might happen accidentally when outputting a binary file. (26.04.0 - link)

Kate Advanced text editor

Héctor Mesa Jiménez added some default configuration for netcoredbg, a standalone debug server for .NET Core. (26.04.0 - link)

Alligator RSS feed reader

Oula V improved the feed group feature of Alligator. Now when creating a feed group, you will get an error if another one exists with the same name. They also cleaned up the list of feed groups (26.04.0 - link).

Oula also fixed some crashes in Alligator after editing a feed (25.12.0 - link) and Stephan Seitz fixed some conformance issues with the OPML export feature (25.12.0 - link).

Salvo Tomaselli reordered the buttons in the menu, and now opening the current article in an external browser is the first button (25.12.0 - link).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Alex Hermann made KIO-powered applications like Dolphin keep the permissions of files copied from an SFTP server (link 1, link 2, link 3).

Social Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins continued efforts to improve Trust and Safety in NeoChat and added support for reporting rooms and users (26.04.0 - link).

"renner 03" fixed the KRunner integration of NeoChat when running the application in Flatpak (25.12.0 - link)

Browsers

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Stefano Crocco added a configuration page to configure Speed Dials in Konqueror. These speed dials are buttons that allow you to quickly open pre-configured links (26.04.0 - link).

Falkon Web Browser

Juraj Oravec added support to add items in the sidebar menu to the Falkon plugin API (link).

Angelfish Webbrowser for mobile devices

Rinigus Saar fixed an issue with retrieving the last visited entries (25.12.0 - link)

PIM Applications

Trojitá IMAP E-mail Client

Sandøy Hustad started pushing some work to make Trojita support Qt 6 (link).

Third-party Applications

Deskflow - Keyboard and mouse sharing app

Chris Rizzitello released Deskflow 1.25.0! The main changes are support for a symbolic tray icon which is recolored correctly even when using Plasma's Twilight theme; support for changing the application's language without restarting it; and initial support for the wl-clipboard Wayland protocol.

EasyEffect

Giusy Digital continued working on unifying the wording of the various physical units (e.g. dB, Hz, ...) all over the application (link).

Wellington Wallace ported some overlay sheets to Kirigami dialogs (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.

Monday, 1 December 2025

Boosting PySide with C++ models

In a recent series of blog posts, we have demonstrated that Python and Qt fit together very well. Due to its accessibility, ease-of-use and third-party ecosystem, it is really straightforward to prototype and productize applications. Still, Python has one significant disadvantage: It is not necessarily the most performant programming language.

Continue reading Boosting PySide with C++ models at basysKom GmbH.

Saturday, 29 November 2025

The Kdenlive 25.12 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We made several changes to the user interface to improve your workflow, including a new widget docking system that makes rearranging panels much easier and more powerful, an enhanced audio display in the clip monitor with a waveform overview for faster navigation and zooming, and a new Startup and Welcome screen allowing to easily select a few options when launching the program.

image

Other highlights:

  • Added an editing layout and safe areas for vertical formats
  • Reordering of the menus to make them more logical
  • Introduction of markers with a time span (GSoC 2025)

Feedback Needed

Now is your chance to test it and let us know if you encounter any bugs or have suggestions to help us polish the final release. Share your feedback either in the comments below or directly with the team during our online Café, where we’ll be discussing this upcoming release. Join us next Wednesday, 3rd of December at 21:00 CET, on meet.kde.org

Update 30th of November 2025

The original RC Appimage for Linux was broken on X11, we have now fixed it and the download link will give you the RC2 version.

Download the binaries from below and give it a spin!

Pre-release binaries can be downloaded here.

Wednesday, 26 November 2025

Its been quite a while since I attended the IndiaFOSS 25 event late September. I have been meaning to write the blog post for a while but didn’t get time. A lot has happened since then, I have moved continents and am now in Germany pursuing my masters at Philipps University of Marburg. I’ll write lot more about my new experiences in Germany in upcoming blog posts but for now back to IndiaFOSS 25. This was a very exciting event for me since this was the first time I was representing KDE booth at a conference. This event occurs yearly in the city of Bangalore which is also known as the Silicon Valley of India. I discovered IndiaFOSS after watching a talk by Kovid Goyal, creator of Calibre and Kitty - two programs I have used heavily in my day to day life so regardless to say I was excited about the conference.

Day 0

Nearby area of bangalore airport as seen from the sky

I arrived a day before the conference in Bangalore and met with Bhushan at the airport as we continued our journey towards the city. The Kempegowda International Airport is located outside the city about 40km north of Bangalore’s city center. It took us around 2 hours to reach the airbnb I was sharing with the my friends who were also attending the event. After encountering the much dreaded city traffic jam I took a much needed rest and spent my rest of the day exploring the area of Jayanagar and Indiranagar.

Day 1

I spent most of my time at the booth and met a lot of people who were already using KDE software, specifically from the state of Kerala. It was made popular through the ICT initiative. I have to be honest here, I did hear about this initiative from Subin earlier this year at cki25 but didn’t know it was this widespread.

Booth photo with Bhushan and Advaith with Raspberry Pi running KDE Plasma powering the TV screen behind them.

There was general amazement among the booth visitors when we showed them KDE powered Laptops, mobile phones, steamdeck and even a rasberry pi powering the giant tv screen at our booth. The steamdeck was the most popular device at the booth since its still not officially available in India. Some people already knew about the steamdeck while others who didn’t were amazed to find out that gaming on handheld that too on a linux powered device had come such a long way.

Booth photo with me and Advaith

Some of the people who we met at the booth were also interested in helping us spread the word and gave us testomonials which I have forwarded to Aniqa. Additionally we were able to help few people with creating their invent profiles and there were others who showed interest in helping out with code contributions and translation support. Few also asked about India specific KDE events and we were happy to tell them about Conf KDE India (cki 25).

Booth attendee doodling with Krita

We also connected with James Reilly from AlmaLinux (can be reached on Matrix), who is looking for a KDE Community member to create a KDE bootc-image built on CentOS base and has also offered to mentor a new contributor in tackling this project.

KDE x Inkscape

Our booth was also located right next to Inkscape’s booth and seeing Rishi make Konqi on Krita led them to battle it out to see who can make a Konqi faster. It was a friendly battle ofcourse and all of us enjoyed the drawing contest complete with cheer and laughter. It was a pretty eventful day and we met a lot of users of KDE software at our booth.

Day 2

The second day of the conference saw the attendance dwindle a bit but this also gave me a chance to checkout the other booths. Some of the most interesting ones that I found were (in no particular order):-

Mecha Comet

Mecha Comet Internals Breakdown

It is a handheld modular Linux computer. It has a magnetic snap interface powered by a standard GPIO serial port which allows hardware extensibility. Additionally Its made up of repairable and recyclable parts. The particular distro that it runs is called Mechanix OS, which is based on Debian. It packs in a PCIe 3.0 M.2 B-Key, Wifi 6, a dedicated Secure Element (CC EAL 6+) for security with a 3.92 inch screen. The project is still in Kickstarter phase but its definitely one of the most exciting projects I found at the conference. You can find more about the project here.

SFLC India

SFLC Logo

Software Freedom Law Center, India is a donor supported legal services organization that promotes Open access to knowledge, Free Speech, Online Privacy, Innovation and Equality. It was because of them, I became aware of the dubious practices surrounding DigiYatra’s mandatory biometric data collection in India. Unfortunately, at the time I had already surrendered my data as I was forced to comply, otherwise the airport staff denied me entry. SFLC India at the time had started a huge social media campaign against this and had even gathered huge media attention to bring a change against this. Sadly, the DigiYatra gates still exist but are atleast no longer mandatory. If you wanna know more about them, you can visit them here.

Absurd Shop

CoryDora DIY keeb assembled by my friend Manik Rana

I found their CoryDora DIY Kit to be an interesting project, a fully opensourced 3x3 macropad with hotswappable switches. You can use it to control media, set-up scripts and write macros. A nice project if your just starting with soldering and still getting the hang of things. You can find the CoryDora DIY kit here.

PCB CUPID

They provide opensource pcb and sensors at affordable prices and also have guides and tools for you to test and play with. Growing up I always wanted to tinker with pcb boards and build with them but always found the boards out of budget so seeing them change this, is definitely for the positive.

OpenstreetMap India

OpenStreetMap India logo

I was happy to see a thriving presence of openstreetmap indian community, I have volunteered in two of their Delhi meetups previously where I got to know how to map data and mapped areas around lesser known of parts of Delhi so it was nice to see some familiar faces.

and there were many more… unfortunately I can’t cover all the interesting booths that were there at the conference but regardless to say there were plenty!

Final Thoughts

KDE India users, contributors and booth volunteers together

All in all, I enjoyed my stay at Bangalore and was happy to meet the oss enthusiasts from all over India. I was lucky to get a chance to represent KDE at IndiaFOSS and meet with its diverse users and hopefully future contributors. I would also like to thank KDE for making this possible by sponsoring my travel for the event.

Well folks, it’s the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included.

For most users, this will have no immediate impact. The vast majority of our users are already using the Wayland session, it’s the default on most distributions, and some of them have already dropped — or are planning to drop — the Plasma X11 session independently of what we decide.

In the longer term, this change opens up new opportunities for features, optimizations, and speed of development.

Because we’re certain that many people will have questions about this change, the Plasma team has prepared the following FAQ:

Plasma 6.8 means the X11 session will be supported by KDE until…?

The Plasma X11 session will be supported by KDE into early 2027.

We cannot provide a specific date, as we’re exploring the possibility of shipping some extra bug-fix releases for Plasma 6.7. The exact timing of the last one will only be known when we get closer to its actual release, which we expect will be sometime in early 2027.

What if I still really need X11?

This is a perfect use case for long term support (LTS) distributions shipping older versions of Plasma. For example, AlmaLinux 9 includes the Plasma X11 session and will be supported until sometime in 2032.

Will X11 applications still work?

Outside of rare special cases, yes, they will still work using the Xwayland compatibility layer. It does a great job of providing compatibility for most X11 applications, and we provide several additional compatibility features on top, namely improved support for fractional scaling and (opt-in) backwards compatibility with X11 global shortcuts and input emulation.

In certain cases, 3rd-party applications doing specialized tasks like taking screenshots or screencasting need to be adjusted to work as expected on Wayland. Most have already done so, and the remaining ones are making progress all the time.

Does X11 forwarding still work?

Yes, Xwayland supports it. Waypipe exists for similar functionality in Wayland native applications as well.

Can I still run KDE applications on X11 in another desktop environment?

Yes. There are currently no plans to drop X11 support in KDE applications outside of Plasma.

This change only concerns Plasma’s X11 login session, which is what’s going away.

What about gaming?

Games run better than ever on the Wayland session! Adaptive sync, optional tearing, and high-refresh-rate multi-monitor setups are all supported out of the box. HDR gaming works with some additional setup, too!

What about NVIDIA GPUs?

While Wayland support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver was quite rocky a few years ago, it has matured tremendously. Graphics cards still supported by the manufacturer work just fine nowadays, and for very old NVIDIA GPUs, the open source Nouveau driver can be used instead.

What about accessibility?

Accessibility is a very broad topic, so it’s hard to make any definite statements, but we’re generally on par with the X11 session. All the basics already work as expected, including screen readers, sticky & bounce keys, zooming in, and so on.

Some things are better, like touchpad gestures for adjusting the zoom level, and applying systemwide color filters to correct for colorblindness. And even more improvements are expected by the time Plasma 6.8 rolls around.

However, accessibility features provided by third-party applications may be worse in some aspects. Please open a bug report if you have any special requirements that we don’t cover yet! This is an active topic we’re very interested in improving.

What about automation?

Many tools can be used for automation in the Wayland session; for example wl-copy/wl-paste, ydotool, kdotool, kscreen-doctor, and the plasma-apply-* tools. Generally Plasma is extensible enough that you can add what’s still missing yourself, for example through KWin scripts or plugins.

What about the Significant Known Issues?

While we can’t promise all problems will be completely gone (some depend on application support), we’re actively working on addressing the last stragglers on that Wiki page.

Some of them are really close to being fixed; for example, the issues around output mirroring will be gone in Plasma 6.6. Session restore and remembering window positions are also being actively worked on.

What about Plasma on the BSDs?

FreeBSD is already shipping a working Wayland session, so there should be no upstream problems on that front. If there are any remaining issues we can help with upstream, please reach out to us!

What about the kwin_wayland and kwin_x11 split?

In Plasma 6.4, we split KWin into separate X11 and Wayland versions. This allowed KWin to go all-in on Wayland earlier, without being held up so much with legacy support for X11. For users with remaining edge-case requirements for X11, we put in the extra effort to keep X11 support for the rest of the desktop since then.

While the split helped a lot, KWin is only one piece of the puzzle. The Plasma desktop as a whole has many places where development is held back by the need to support the lowest common denominator of the two window systems.

The bottom line

This is happening because we believe that eventually dropping the Plasma X11 session will allow us to move faster to improve stability and functionality for the majority of our users — who are already using Wayland.

If we want to keep producing the best free desktop out there, we have to be nimble enough to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with many opportunities, without the need to drag forward legacy support that holds back a great deal of work.

The Wayland transition has been long, and at times painful. But we’re very close to the finish line. Passing it will unlock a lot of positive changes over the next few years that we think folks are going to appreciate!

Sunday, 23 November 2025

There have been a few discussions about what Flathub should do to push developers to maintain their apps on the latest versions of the published runtimes. But most of those lack important details around how this would actually happen. I will not discuss in this post the technical means that are already in place to help developers keep their dependencies up to date. See the Flathub Safety: A Layered Approach from Source to User blog post instead.

The main thing to have in mind is that Flathub is not a commercial entity like other app stores. Right now, developers that put their apps on Flathub are (in the vast majority) not paid to do so and most apps are under an open source license.

So any discussion that starts with “developers should update to the latest runtime or have their apps removed” directly contradicts the social contract here (which is also in the terms of most open source licenses): You get something for free so don’t go around making demands unless you want to look like a jerk. We are not going to persuade overworked and generally volunteer developers to update their apps by putting pressure on them to do more work. It’s counter productive.

With that out of the way, how do we gently push developers to keep their apps up to date and using the latest runtime? Well, we can pay them. Flathub wants to setup a way to offer payments for applications but unfortunately it’s not ready yet. So in the meantime, the best option is to donate to the projects or developers working on those applications.

And make it very easy for users to do so.

Now we are in luck, this is exactly what some folks have been working on recently. Bazaar is a Flathub first app store that makes it really easy to donate to the apps that you have installed.

But we also need to make sure that the developers actually have something set up to get donations.

And this is were the flatpak-tracker project comes in. This project looks for the donation links in a collection of Flatpaks and checks if there is one and if the website is still up. If it’s not, it opens issues in the repo for tracking and fixing. It also checks if those apps are using the latest runtimes and open issues for that as well (FreeDesktop, GNOME, KDE).

If you want to help, you can take a look at this repo for apps that you use and see if things needs to be fixed. Then engage and suggest fixes upstream. Some of this work does not require complex technical skills so it’s a really good way to start contributing. This is probably one of the most direct way to enable developers to receive money from their users, via donations.

Updating the runtime used by an app usually requires more work and more testing, but it’s a great way to get started and to contribute to your favorite apps. And this is not just about Flathub: updating a Qt5 app to run with Qt6, or a GNOME 48 app to 49, will help everyone using the app.

We want to build an App Store that is respectful of the time developers put into developing, submitting, publishing, testing and maintaining their apps.

We don’t want to replicate the predatory model of other app stores.

Will some apps be out of date sometimes? Probably, but I would rather have a sustainable community than an exploiting one.

Friday, 21 November 2025

FAQs 🔗

digiKam 00:00 +00:00
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🟠 Skill Level: INTERMEDIATE