We feel how dependencies can hurt

There is a lot of talk about digital sovereignty. Being able to act as a state or as a company is obviously important. But there are real dependencies, and given the current geopolitical dynamics, there are real risks. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. Digital sovereignty matters, but so do stability, efficiency, and innovation. Fortunately, there are options and some good examples of how to deal with it. I collected some material in an awesome list on digital sovereignty.

While it is complex at the state level, it is merely complicated at the personal level. Reaching something like personal digital sovereignty is possible. If you are informed about the technical landscape, you probably already have a good intuition about it. You feel the pain of having to stop using a service because the provider decided to discontinue it without you having a say. You can decide whether it feels right to upload your personal diary to a server in a jurisdiction you do not control.

Free Software provides a path

There is a clear path to personal digital sovereignty. The goal is nicely expressed in KDE's mission: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy." The path is provided by Free Software. The freedoms to use, study, share, and improve give you exactly what you need to be in control.

For software you run yourself, this works well. Running Free Software on your personal computer gives you control. It feels good. It becomes more complicated when you use services you do not and cannot run yourself. The software freedoms do not transfer easily. There are a lot of services, which are mostly based on Free Software, but only the service providers enjoy the freedoms, not their users. I have written about this before when working on my Fair Web Services project.

A good testament to personal digital sovereignty is the Blue Angel for software. Its focus on resource and energy efficiency is one side of responsible software use. Maybe even more important is its emphasis on user autonomy: being able to use software without ads being forced on you, being able to choose what to install, and having transparency about what you run. These are the ingredients of personal digital sovereignty.

Finding the balance

Freedom is one side, but convenience is another. Sometimes it is easier to just use something a vendor has invested heavily in providing, even if you pay with your data and some independence. It is also a question of where you spend your time: do you build something for yourself, or do you use something that already exists? And sometimes it is about the limits what you can do yourself. Powerful tools can give you leverage so you can focus on your actual mission.

So it is also about compromise. One very important aspect for me is that I am still able to choose. That is the core of personal digital sovereignty. Sovereignty does not mean doing everything yourself. It means preserving the ability to leave, even if you choose not to.

Federated services make it easy to migrate. For git, for example, it does not matter so much where the server is or who runs it, because switching is as simple as changing the remote. For a proprietary note-taking service, this looks different. You may need special exports, format conversions, and you might lose functionality because it is not based on open standards. Choose your dependencies wisely.

It is important to remember that dependencies are not bad per se. We know this from Free Software. We know what it feels like to stand on the shoulders of giants. We rely on the collective strength of a global community. It is not about rejecting all dependencies or doing everything on your own. It is about creating alternatives and shaping an ecosystem based on openness, so that we can choose and act on our own terms.

My personal stack

I am quite happy with my personal stack, which gives me the control I need. My 12-year-old desktop runs Linux and KDE. I pay to host my own email, Nextcloud, and git services. One project I particularly like is GitJournal, which gives me control over my note-taking across all my devices. This covers the core of my computing needs, with my family, my friends, and what I decide to keep private.

To stay connected to the wider world, there is no way around being present on large networks. GitHub and LinkedIn are the compromises that give me reach without requiring me to abandon all my principles. I would not publish my writing only on LinkedIn, though, because I want to own what I produce.

AI is a difficult question right now. It is easy to switch between services, and with rapid development it is changing quickly what the best choice is. And it can provide tremendous leverage. So it remains an evolving compromise. An ideal future would offer open models powerful enough to serve your needs and that you can run locally.

Building digital sovereignty

On a personal level, you can decide for yourself. There are limitations, and you will have to build on the environment available to you. But there are alternatives, and you can choose to build your personal digital sovereignty.

At the corporate and state level, it is more difficult. The systems are more intertwined, but the pain of dependencies you cannot control and the risks of others making decisions for you are just as real. Alternatives exist there as well, often the same ones available on a personal level. It can be worth taking bold decisions.

Digital sovereignty at the state level is about national security. At the personal level, it is about personal freedom. Free Software provides a powerful path to maintaining control over our digital lives.

I am not arguing for tools. I am arguing for agency.

While wiring up the missing editor actions over the last two weeks, I left bookmark_edit for later. Just adding a simple menu trigger wasn't going to be enough.

The existing bookmark system in Lokalize was pretty limited, you could toggle them on or off, and jump between them. That’s fine for quick marks, but in a massive .po file with dozens of flagged lines, there was no way to actually see a list of what you had bookmarked to review or clean them up.

My goal for Week 6 was to build a dedicated ui where translators could manage all their bookmarks at a glance.

I looked at how other KDE apps handle this. KWrite, for example, just lists bookmarks in a right-click submenu. I decided against that for Lokalize. In a huge translation file, a dropdown menu would get ridiculously long. Plus, a submenu usually only gives you a "Clear All" option-if you wanted to remove just one specific bookmark, you'd have to jump to that exact line and manually untoggle it.

Instead, i took inspiration from Qt Assistant’s bookmark manager and built a standalone Qt dialog. It drops all the bookmarked entries into a list, complete with a quick text preview. I added a checkbox next to each one so translators can just uncheck the ones they want to remove and hit OK.

• Merge Request: editor: add edit bookmarks action and dialog

While testing this, I realized Lokalize completely forgets all bookmarks the second you close a file. Since other KDE apps persist bookmarks across sessions, I think i will fix this issue in the future so it persists them just like other KDE apps do.

It’s been a busy few months for the development team! We’ve been focusing heavily on turning Marknote into a much more robust knowledge base while keeping the interface as clean and distraction-free as possible. Today, we're releasing version 1.5, and it’s packed with major additions and quality-of-life improvements.

Here is a rundown of what we’ve added to this release.

Source Mode

One of the most highly requested features is finally here: Source Mode. Thanks to some fantastic work from our Season of KDE (SoK) contributor, Siddharth Chopra, you can now bypass the rich-text WYSIWYG interface entirely. If you’re the type of person who prefers looking at the raw Markdown syntax while structuring your thoughts, you can now seamlessly toggle into a dedicated source editing view.

Note links

Notes are rarely isolated thoughts, so we’ve added internal wiki-style links with cross-notebook lookup. You can now easily link documents to one another, making it much simpler to build out a connected web of ideas.

Note management

We made it easier to manage your growing number of notes. Each notebook will now show you how many notes it contains. If you need to move notes between notebooks, it is now easy to do that via drag and drop. And finally, we added a new “Duplicate Note” action to make it simple to create templates and copy existing notes.

KRunner plugin

To help you get to those ideas faster, we also added a KRunner plugin. You don't even need to have Marknote open—just pull up KRunner on your Plasma desktop, type what you’re looking for, and jump straight into your note.

Search and replace

Full-text search and replace functionality is also here to make your life much easier.

UI polish and under-the-hood work

We added beautiful, all-new animations for note and notebook items, for the search bar, and brought back the smooth sidebar transitions to make navigation feel dynamic.

We added full Undo/Redo functionality to the Quick Sketch dialog.

We added several improvements to table formatting and actions to make managing grids much less frustrating.

On the technical side, we bumped our Kirigami Addons dependency to 1.11.0, fixed an annoying issue where opening a note updated its modification timestamp, and resolved a Flatpak bug that prevented notes from opening via file managers.

Try it out

Marknote 1.5 is rolling out now! You can grab it on Linux via Flatpak and Snapcraft. A massive thank you to everyone who contributed code, translations, and bug reports for this cycle. Happy note-taking!

I went to FOSSASIA Summit 2026 in Bangkok, and I took the time to write this report because of how much things happened in three days, also because I am not much of a blogger.

FOSSASIA is Asia’s big open source event and this year it took place at True Digital Park West - a rather exageratted shopping mall and convention center, which was great because whenever I was hungry I could just quickly go eat some lovely thai dishes, and back.

KDE had a community booth, and I spent a fair amount of time there alongside Pongsakorn, who held things down while I was off getting pulled into hallway conversations. We had a few devices on display running Plasma and I got to show off some recent Konsole work to anyone who wandered over.

Some people requested me to show what mattered more to me in KDE, why I was a KDE developer, or why don’t I use $software from a different provider. I explained that KDE is not just about the software, but about the community and the people who contribute to it, but also about the software. There is no other terminal that can do what konsole does (well, now it’s my second favorite terminal, my favorite one is https://ratty-term.org/).

The hallway track was, as usual, where a lot of the real conversations happened. One of the more interesting ones was with some developers from OpenKylin. They’re building a Linux distribution and they are using KDE Technology behind it. During our conversation we talked about how to better integrate the OpenKylin distribution with KDE Technology, and I ended up with an invitation to their HQ in shanghai - there will be another blogpost about this.

Bangkok itself was great, but also strangely familiar - all the streets, buildings, and the way people behave fit exactly in the city that I grew up in, Salvador, in Brazil. It was strange to see a country in asia to be so similar to my hometown. Coming back from a conference like this always leaves me with a mixed feeling: energized by all the conversations and connections, and slightly overwhelmed by the list of things I now want to go and implement or investigate. The OpenKylin conversation got me thinking more about how distributions handle the upstream relationship. And seeing what different communities are building with AI at the OS level was genuinely interesting, even if I’m skeptical of some of the grander claims in the space.

FOSSASIA remains one of the better events to go to if you want a view of what open source looks like outside the European and North American bubble, and we need to connect with other communities to learn from and collaborate with.

I’m happy to announce the new release of KPhotoAlbum, the photo management software for KDE/Linux – version 6.2.0!

Also, I’d like to introduce our new contributor Randall Rude (a.k.a. rsquared), who already worked quite hard on improving our beloved project – welcome to the team :-)

The following changes have been documented in the ChangeLog:

Added

• Display number of images on collapsed stacks (#223213)
• Add commandline option --find-new-files as a synonym for --search. In the future, --search may become deprecated at some point.
• Add support for QtMultimedia video backend
• Make default annotation mode in viewer configurable (#474317)
• Improved diagnostic messages for JPEG decoding errors
• Improved diagnostic messages for invalid file names in database

Changed

• Thumbnail cache and video thumbnail cache directories are now always ignored while searching for new images.
• Do not automatically select an image cluster on the map when moving the map if the mouse action started on an image cluster.

Fixed

• Allow large images up to an in-memory size of 2GB (#500200)
• Make "Clear form" button in search dialog actually clear all form fields.
• Allow setting keyboard shortcuts for "Clear Form" and "Options..." items in Annotation/Search dialog (#306044)
• Fix detection of KDcraw during build time
• Fix appearance of mouse cursor in the map view (i.e. indicate clickable items on the map)
• Fix display of EXIF date/time data (#511546)
• Fix several warnings in the console output (#505015)
• Use embedded 'creation_time' data in video files instead of file creation time (#472520)
• Allow saving the Annotation Dialog's layout either globally (as a template for all databases) or per-database (#513933)
• Prevent unnecessary entries in the block list (#512207)
• Prevent creation of .kim files over 4GB (mitigates bug #512199)
• Fix compilation without Marble
• Improved formatting of "time ago" texts

According to git log, the following individuals contributed code (in alphabetical order):

• Johnny Jazeix
• Tobias Leupold
• Randall Rude
• Andreas Sturmlechner
• Friedrich W. H. Kossebau
• Johannes Zarl-Zierl
• Justin Zobel

Thanks to everybody for putting work in this release!

— Tobias

Plasma Keyboard has interesting news to share!

Plasma Keyboard started out life as KDE's virtual / on-screen keyboard, and now it is evolving to also support tools and features for our physical keyboards.

FLOSS/Fund​

Plasma Keyboard was granted funding from the FLOSS/Fund program's second tranche, for which we are very grateful! This funding has ensured we will be able to put some sustained effort towards refining and improving the project — and I have been doing just that for the past couple of months.

I began by getting more familiar with the codebase, lists of open bugs, and feature requests. I also did some refactoring and cleanup, improved the CI and MR review process, etc.

Diacritics​

https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard/-/merge_requests/83

The first feature I tackled is the first one that is for physical keyboards rather than virtual/on-screen keyboards: diacritics — the variants of a character that indicate a difference in pronunciation, such as ç, ñ, or ü. Though it is more than just diacritics, because it also supports common/popular symbols, such as ™, — (em-dash), →, ¡, ‽, ¼, ≥, ≠, etc.

If you'd like an idea of which diacritics and symbols are currently included, you can check out the base mapping json. Further mappings are included depending on which language(s) you have enabled for Plasma Keyboard in your system settings.

This feature allows users to long-press a key on their physical keyboard to access a popup menu of diacritics and symbols related to that key, and select one to input it. This is a common feature on mobile keyboards, and I personally think this is a great improvement over using something like a compose key for the same purpose.

Selecting an option from the popup menu can be done multiple ways:

• Pressing the associated keyboard number key shown below the option
• Clicking on the option with the mouse
• Using the arrow keys to navigate to the option and pressing Enter

This was pretty challenging to implement; I previously had no experience with Wayland protocols or input methods, so it required a lot of research, reading, learning, and experimentation to figure it out. Difficult, but rewarding!

One of the really cool things about Plasma Keyboard is that it is available as a Flatpak — so if you are adventurous and want to try out the diacritics feature before it is released to the stable version, you can do so with the nightly Flatpak builds!

flatpak install --user --or-update https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/plasma-keyboard-nightly/org.kde.plasma.keyboard.flatpakref

Then simply enable Plasma Keyboard in System Settings → Keyboard → Virtual Keyboard! 🤯 If you already have a version of Plasma Keyboard installed, a quick restart or log out/in might be needed for the new version to take effect.

Future Plans​

In addition to the diacritics feature itself, I also laid the groundwork with it for future features that will make use of the same overlay/popup system and physical keyboard integration — stay tuned for more news on that! 😉

There are a bunch of other plans for features and improvements that we'd like to work on, for example: swipe typing, voice typing, making the on-screen keyboard movable and resizable, adding tests and improving performance and reliability, etc.

There is a lot of work to be done, and we are excited to keep improving Plasma Keyboard and making it even more powerful and user-friendly — just like the rest of Plasma! 🚀

If you are interested in contributing, please check out the project on KDE's GitLab: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-keyboard

In two sessions, the Krita developers discussed what they want to work on in 2026, after Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0 are released. That is, actually, one release, but one version is built with Qt5 and one with Qt6. The release is planned for March 24.

Krita Sketch User Interface

Last year, Timotheé created a prototype for a mobile user interface for Krita (there is an APK you can install to play with). At the same time Wolthera finished her work on the new text shape and text tools. Both projects use the QML and QtQuick features of Qt to implement the user interface.

This year, we intend to work on replacing the tool option dockers with QML so we can use those both in the mobile and in the desktop version of Krita.

Alvin Wong experimented in 2025 with embedding an OpenGL based canvas inside a QML application. Dmitry and Carsten will continue that work and see whether we can use Krita's canvas to show an image inside Timotheé's prototype.

Agata has already started work to make the current user interface more suitable for tablet use.

Working with Files

There are a couple of plans we have with regards to file handling. On Android, working with the file sandboxing is seriously complicated, and we're looking into a solution for that.

The Krita .kra file format is pretty old by now (not 25 years, since it came into being a few years after Krita started being developed). It can, obviously, load and save everything Krita can handle, but it is not a particular fast file format. Carsten proposed to look into an SQLite based file format. This could potentially mean that we could save the image after every change without the user noticing, making saving completely transparent.

Agata is already working on improving the autosave dialog. There is already a mockup for this.

Ivan is looking into sharing settings and resources across a user's devices, ideally in a cross-platform way.

Color Management

While Krita supports HDR displays, there are issues with the user interface. Wolthera wants to start improving there.

Now that Qt 6 includes support for color management, CMYK and higher-bit depth images, it should be possible to add color management to Krita's vector layers, and that's something we are eager to implement.

We also discussed Wayland. We now support color management on Wayland on Linux, but there are plenty of problems there. We decided to only support the KWin Wayland compositor that comes with KDE Plasma for now.

Performance

Dmitry wants to work on "region based updates", and has already started on that: this will make working with large images faster.

Ivan and Wolthera are interested in using vectorization in filters, possibly replacing the use of LittleCMS for color transformations.

Continuous integration

Continuous integration is how we build Krita: after changes, Krita is built automatically for every platform. Now that we've access to Windows ARM hardware, we need to find a way to extend our builds to Windows ARM, but the CI factory doesn't have an ARM builder, so we'd need to cross build.

We also intend to update all Krita's dependencies to the latest version, but only after we release Krita 5.3 and Krita 6.0. And of course, we intend to keep releasing bugfix and feature releases this year! For now, Krita 5.3 is the standard release, and 6.0 is considered experimental, but that should have changed by the end of the year.

The last maintenance release of the 25.12 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include small interface refinements such as better dock widget behavior, improved shortcut handling in fullscreen mode, logically grouped marker menu items, and a new option to disable timeline effects in the hamburger menu. The release also brings improvements to multistream clip handling and ripple editing, as well as fixing small memleak in the render widget and a crash in the curve editor. See the changelog below for more details.

The macOS versions will be available at a later time due to technical issues while generating the packages.

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.

New Glaxnimate release, source mode in Marknote and S3 support in Dolphin

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.

Office Applications

Marknote Write down your thoughts

It's been a busy week in Marknote again. Valentyn Bondarenko extensively reworked tables to fix rendering issues (office/marknote MR #143 and office/marknote MR #169).

Valentyn Bondarenko also added a new dialog to add note links more easily (office/marknote MR #161) and added subtle animations to various parts of the UI (office/marknote MR #162 and office/marknote MR #168).

Shubham Shinde extended the search function of Marknote to also be able to replace text (office/marknote MR #154).

Siddharth Chopra added a source mode to Marknote, for people who prefer to edit Markdown using a plain text editor (office/marknote MR #118).

Carl Schwan improved the context menu, making it appear directly underneath the button and fixing some accessibility issues (office/marknote MR #166).

Finally, there was quite a bit of polish and refactoring done by the whole team in preparation for the release planned next week.

KMyMoney Personal finance manager based on double-entry bookkeeping

Ralf Habacker added a way to list all your unsaved reports and to delete multiple reports at the same time (office/kmymoney MR #322).

PIM Applications

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Yuki Joou redesigned the schedule view to be less crowded and more concise (pim/merkuro MR #573).

Yuki made it possible to set a start date also for tasks and not only for events (pim/merkuro MR #611). She also fixed the sort button state in the todo view (pim/merkuro MR #612), among other various small issues (pim/merkuro MR #579, pim/merkuro MR #609, pim/merkuro MR #610).

Zhora Zmeikin fixed a crash when editing or creating a new event (pim/merkuro MR #608).

Merkuro Mail Read and write emails

Yuki Joou also worked on Merkuro Mail and fixed various issues when sending emails (pim/merkuro MR #615).

Merkuro Contact Manage your contacts with speed and ease

Finally, Yuki added a way to copy phone numbers from a contact book entry easily (pim/merkuro MR #614).

KMail A feature-rich email application

Albert Astals Cid refactored how temporary files are stored so they are no longer stored in /tmp. This mostly helps in case multiple users use the same machine (pim/messagelib MR #334).

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Thomas Friedrichsmeier changed the font used by plain text email signatures in the Kleopatra and GpgOL.js email viewers to be monospaced, as many signatures depend on that (pim/mimetreeparser MR #91).

Creative Applications

Glaxnimate Vector Animation Editor

This week we celebrated the first release of Glaxnimate as part of KDE. Welcome to the family! The big highlights of this release are better integration with KDE in terms of theming, improvements in the animation timeline, and better SVG export and import. Read more in the full announcement.

In the development branch, Mattia Basaglia continued to improve Glaxnimate. This includes a brand new rendering engine based on ThorVG (graphics/glaxnimate MR #84). This means the rendering is now hardware accelerated, which is faster than the old QPainter-based renderer. Additionally, Mattia improved the backend (graphics/glaxnimate MR #86) and built an experimental WASM renderer based on it for the web (graphics/glaxnimate MR #87).

Multimedia Applications

KPhotoAlbum KDE image management software

Randall Rude updated the documentation (graphis/kphotoalbum MR #73).

Developers Applications

Kate Advanced text editor

Leia uwu fixed Kate so that when renaming a file, any open tabs with this file will also be updated accordingly (utilities/kate MR #2043).

KDevelop Featureful, plugin-extensible IDE for C/C++ and other programming languages

Martin Bednar added support for noexcept in the autocompletion model of KDevelop (kdevelop/kdevelop MR #858).

Network Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

James Graham continued working this week on improving and polishing the new rich text editor in NeoChat (network/neochat MR #2730, network/neochat MR #2729, network/neochat MR #2722, ...)

Joshua Goins disabled the search feature in encrypted rooms as the server is not able to search in them (network/neochat MR #2724).

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Melvin Keskin improved the usability of the emoji picker and mentioning participants in a group chat (network/kaidan MR #1522).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Albert Mkhitaryan added keyboard shortcut support for service menu actions (system/dolphin MR #1167). So now you can assign a shortcut to the context menu actions provided by other applications or user scripts. See doc

Nicolai Sehrt added an option for forcing all tabs in Dolphin to have the same width (system/dolphin MR #1154). Méven Car also updated Dolphin so that, by default, tab widths are automatically determined by their title length (system/dolphin MR #1170).

Méven Car also centered most settings pages to be a bit more consistent with System Settings (system/dolphin MR #1192).

Nekto Oleg improved support for the S3 protocol in KIO-enabled applications like Dolphin. While S3 is commonly associated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the implementation now also supports custom endpoints and is no longer limited to AWS-compatible services (network/kio-s3 MR #7, network/kio-s3 MR #8 and network/kio-s3 MR #9). Additionally, a new System Settings page makes it possible to configure multiple S3 providers at the same time (network/kio-s3 MR #9 and network/kio-s3 MR #10).

…And Everything Else

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

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and, in general, keep KDE continue bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.