This week I powered up the StarFive VisionFive v2 board that I have. I figured I would give FreeBSD another whirl on it, in the vague hope that RISC-V boards are a more cohesive family than ARM boards were five years ago. tl;dr: I didn’t get it to work as well as I want it to. Here are some notes.

I mentioned this board when it arrived and documented the serial pinout as well, but it has been languishing while I had other things to do.

F(reeBSD) Around And Find Out

This is what I did. The board is listed as partially supported on the FreeBSD RISC-V Wiki so I’m not entirely surprised it craps out. I’ll update the wiki if I get any further than this.

• Downloaded a FreeBSD -CURRENT snapshot. The ISO images live here for RISC-V. I picked up the GENERICSD image from May 15th.
• Wrote the uncompressed image to a micro-SD card with dd.
• Stuck it in the board, connected serial ports, and powered it up.

The board starts and spits out things over serial, like all SBCs seem to do.

Platform Name             : StarFive VisionFive V2
Platform Features         : medeleg
Platform HART Count       : 5

Note the HART (core) count of 5. That’s relevant later, because this is nominally a quad-core CPU. After a little bit of SBI, we get to a U-Boot layer of the boot process, which tells me this:

U-Boot 2021.10 (Feb 12 2023 - 18:15:33 +0800), Build: jenkins-VF2_515_Branch_SDK_Release-24

CPU:   rv64imacu
Model: StarFive VisionFive V2
DRAM:  8 GiB

That is still consistent with what I think is on my desk. The FreeBSD kernel loads! And then the usual message Hit [Enter] to boot immediately appears. If I go on to boot normally, it invariably fails like this:

sbi_trap_error: hart0: trap handler failed (error -2)
sbi_trap_error: hart0: mcause=0x0000000000000005 mtval=0x0000000040048060

It is remarkably unhelpful to search for this, since the error message is both all over the place, and rarely fully explained or diagnosed. I don’t have a good explanation either, but

• This post from 2023 describes some early efforts, and
• Links to this issue report which says
• “I have to run fdt prop /cpus/cpu@0/status disabled at the FreeBSD loader prompt to correct this in order to boot.”

That fifth core, hart 0, is a different kind of CPU, and is mislabeled in the FDT that is still being shipped. FreeBSD then tries to set up the CPU in the wrong way, and it dies. The issue is quite descriptive, after you read it like six times to figure out what it actually means. Anyway, instead of hitting \[Enter\], I press some other key, and then use the loader prompt:

OK fdt prop /cpus/cpu@0/status disabled
Using DTB provided by EFI at 0x47ef2000.
OK boot

This subsequently craps out with:

starfive_dwmmc0: <Synopsys DesignWare Mobile Storage Host Controller (StarFive)> mem 0x16020000-0x1602ffff on simplebus0
starfive_dwmmc0: No bus speed provided
starfive_dwmmc0: Can't get FDT property.
device_attach: starfive_dwmmc0 attach returned 6

Followed by:

Mounting from ufs:/dev/ufs/rootfs failed with error 19.

Not even close to workable. The board itself is fine, there is a Debian image for it which just boots on through, does useful things, but that just isn’t what I want to run on this board.

It Helps To Read The Documentation

There’s a long post – someone who wanted to run FreeBSD, hit snags, then tried OpenBSD instead – over here in a GitHub gist that describes most of the process that I went though. And there is a post on the FreeBSD Forum about progress.

So I looked at both, and then went over the instructions more carefully.

• Write the generic SD-card image to a micro-SD card.
• Mount the EFI partition from the micro-SD card. Use gpart list da0 to see what GEOM thinks of the card. The card is GPT-partitioned, and the EFI partition is third on the disk in the standard getup. Then mount -t msdosfs /dev/da0p3 /mnt/tmp , and copy “the DTB file” into, say, the root of that filesystem. Scare quotes explained later. I used target name s5v5.dtb to save typing later.
• Unmount, then move the card to the VisionFive board.
• Boot, and interrupt SBI. Having remembered that the third partition is the EFI partition, load the DTB and EFI from there:

  load mmc 1:3 ${fdt_addr_r} s5v5.dtb
  load mmc 1:3 ${kernel_addr_r} EFI/boot/bootriscv64.efi
  bootefi ${kernel_addr_r} ${fdt_addr_r}
  

• This, somewhat to my surprise, chugs right along to a login: . The default credentials are root and root.
• Along the way, ethernet is detected and DHCP happens and partitions on the SD card are resized.

The scare quotes around “the DTB file” are because there are many DTB files floating around for this, and lots of links to an email message attachment. I downloaded it and this one works for me, so now I have archived it locally under a slightly different name.

Why the different name? Well, investigation at the SBI prompt with env print -a showed a variable fdtfile=starfive/starfive_visionfive2.dtb. I moved the s5v5.dtb file to that location in the EFI partition, and now I don’t need to interrupt SBI because it loads the right DTB file directly.

The lack of eMMC (the controller seems to be found, but the 16MB eMMC module isn’t) and NVMe (there’s an M2 slot, and I have a WD stick in there) means that storage is rather constrained, still, and there’s nothing I would trust a write-heavy load to.

What Would OpenBSD Do?

Going through the same steps with OpenBSD (which suffers from the same kind of “there’s a gazillion ways to put together an SD card for this board”, and not one is canonical or step-by-step) is also successful. More successful, even, because all the storage options are found:

nvme0: WDC WDS240G2G0C-00AJM0, firmware 231050WD, serial 22465R472602
scsibus0 at nvme0: 2 targets, initiator 0
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 1 lun 0: <NVMe, WDC WDS240G2G0C-, 2310>
sd0: 228936MB, 512 bytes/sector, 468862128 sectors
gpiorestart0 at mainbus0
"clk_ext_camera" at mainbus0 not configured
scsibus1 at sdmmc0: 2 targets, initiator 0
sd1 at scsibus1 targ 1 lun 0: <Samsung, AJTD4R, 0000> removable
sd1: 14910MB, 512 bytes/sector, 30535680 sectors
scsibus2 at sdmmc1: 2 targets, initiator 0
sd2 at scsibus2 targ 1 lun 0: <Sandisk, SC32G, 0080> removable
sd2: 30436MB, 512 bytes/sector, 62333952 sectors

That is some serious storage for a tiny board like this.

Takeaways

It helps to read the documentation carefully. I need to update the FreeBSD wiki. The board is usable, but needs additional storage options to be a nice kind of machine for router-and-storage or NAS work.

Kirigami Addons is a collection of supplementary components for Kirigami applications. Version 1.8.0 is a relatively minor release, introducing two new form delegates along with various quality-of-life enhancements.

New Features

I added two new form delegates: FormLinkDelegate (!343) and FormIconDelegate (!355).

The first one is similar to FormButtonDelegate, but it’s used to display an external link. It’s already used on the About page:

The second one was upstreamed from Marknote and allows the user to pick an icon and display the selected icon.

I also added a password quality checker to FormPasswordFieldDelegate (!345). This is particularly useful when asking users to create an account:

Visual Changes

Kai Uwe Broulik improved avatar rendering. Initials are now always displayed consistently even on small screen (!363).

Kai also fixed an issue on mobile where library information on the About page was being ellipsized (!356).

Balló György fixed several issues when using Kirigami with the QtQuick software rendering backend (!350, !351).

I made the delegates provided by Kirigami Addons now have a slightly larger touch area on mobile (!349). Unfortunately, I also had to remove the small hover animations, as they occasionally caused visual glitches (1d6e84cd).

Convenient New APIs

Joshua Goins added an opened property to ConvergentContextMenu (!352), and I added a close method to allow closing the menu programmatically (!364).

I also added support for trailing items in FormTextFieldDelegate (f996fc6e).

Documentation

Thiago Sueto ported the entire library to QDoc (!354). QDoc provides much better support for QML.

Other Changes

“trapped-in-dreams” significantly improved the performance of the date picker (!360).

Volker Krause updated the project templates to reflect current best practices for Android support (!359).

Packager Section

1.8.0 had an issue with system not having QDoc, but a bug fix release is available as 1.8.1 with the fix for that.

You can find the package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with my GPG key.

We have moved the deadline for talk submission for Akademy 2025 to the end of the month. Submit your talks now! 

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2025q2/008217.html 

https://akademy.kde.org/2025/cfp/

I recently made a patch to Konsole terminal emulator, that adds to the current tab layout saving system couple more things:

• Working directory
• Size of splits
• Optional command to run

You can find the patch here: ViewManager: Save columns, lines and working directory to tabLayout (!1095)

It's a feature I've seen in other terminal editors, so I wanted to add it to Konsole as well.

Note that this is not in current version of Konsole, but it will be in the next one: 25.07. Unless it gets backported, of course.

Current tab layouts

In Konsole, you can even in current version save your tab layout:

1. Open Konsole
2. Split the current view into multiple ones
3. Go to Menu -> View -> Save tab layout...

This produces a JSON file like this:

{
    "Orientation": "Vertical",
    "Widgets": [
        {
            "SessionRestoreId": 0
        },
        {
            "SessionRestoreId": 0
        }
    ]
}

Now, as it is currently, it's not that useful. The split sizes won't be saved, for example.

My changes

My changes now allow you to save the size of the splits and the working directories, like this:

{
    "Orientation": "Horizontal",
    "Widgets": [
        {
            "Columns": 88,
            "Command": "",
            "Lines": 33,
            "SessionRestoreId": 0,
            "WorkingDirectory": "/home/akseli/Repositories"
        },
        {
            "Orientation": "Vertical",
            "Widgets": [
                {
                    "Columns": 33,
                    "Command": "",
                    "Lines": 21,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0,
                    "WorkingDirectory": "/home/akseli/Documents"
                },
                {
                    "Columns": 33,
                    "Command": "",
                    "Lines": 10,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0,
                    "WorkingDirectory": "/home/akseli"
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

As you can see, it saves the Columns, Lines, WorkingDirectory. It also adds empty Command item, which you can write any command in, like ls -la, or keep it empty.

You can try to use the columns and lines sections to modify the size manually, but I've noticed it's easier just to do it inside Konsole.

Now the old layout file will work too, if the field doesn't exist Konsole won't do anything about it.

Note about the command: Konsole basically pretends to type that command in when it loads, so the commands don't need a separate Parameter field or anything like that. You could make the command something like foo && bar -t example && baz --parameter. Konsole then just types that in and presses enter for you. :)

More concrete example

I made this change because I wanted to run Konsole in following layout:

{
    "Orientation": "Horizontal",
    "Widgets": [
        {
            "Orientation": "Vertical",
            "Widgets": [
                {
                    "Columns": 139,
                    "Command": "hx .",
                    "Lines": 50,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0
                },
                {
                    "Columns": 139,
                    "Command": "",
                    "Lines": 14,
                    "SessionRestoreId": 0
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "Columns": 60,
            "Command": "lazygit",
            "Lines": 66,
            "SessionRestoreId": 0
        }
    ]
}

With these items I can get the layout splits as I want, with any commands I want.

Then I have a bash script to run this layout in the directory the script is run at:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
konsole --separate --hold --workdir "$1" --layout "$HOME/Documents/helix-editor.json" &

Now when I go to any project folder and run this script, it will open the Helix text editor, lazygit and empty split the way I want it, without having to make these splits manually every time.

Sure I could use something like Zellij for this but they have so much things I don't need, I just wanted to split the view and save/load that arrangement.

In future

I would like to add a small GUI tool inside Konsole that allows you to customize these layout easily during save process, such as changing the WorkingDirectory and Command parameters.

But for now, you'll have to do it inside the JSON file, but chances are when you want to do layouts like this, you're comfortable editing these kind of files anyway.

I hope some others will find this useful as well, for things like system monitoring etc.

Hope you like it!

Are you using Kubuntu 25.04 Plucky Puffin, our current stable release? Or are you already running our development builds of the upcoming 25.10 (Questing Quokka)?

We currently have Plasma 6.3.90 (Plasma 6.4 Beta1) available in our Beta PPA for Kubuntu 25.04 and for the 25.10 development series.

However this is a Beta release, and we should re-iterate the disclaimer:



DISCLAIMER: This release contains untested and unstable software. It is highly recommended you do not use this version in a production environment and do not use it as your daily work environment. You risk crashes and loss of data.



6.4 Beta1 packages and required dependencies are available in our Beta PPA. The PPA should work whether you are currently using our backports PPA or not. If you are prepared to test via the PPA, then add the beta PPA and then upgrade:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kubuntu-ppa/beta && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Then reboot.

In case of issues, testers should be prepared to use ppa-purge to remove the PPA and revert/downgrade packages.

Kubuntu is part of the KDE community, so this testing will benefit both Kubuntu as well as upstream KDE Plasma software, which is used by many other distributions too.

• If you believe you might have found a packaging bug, you can use launchpad.net to post testing feedback to the Kubuntu team as a bug, or give feedback on Matrix [1], or mailing lists [2].
• If you believe you have found a bug in the underlying software, then bugs.kde.org is the best place to file your bug report.

Please review the planned feature list, release announcement and changelog.

[Test Case]
* General tests:
– Does plasma desktop start as normal with no apparent regressions over 6.3?
– General workflow – testers should carry out their normal tasks, using the plasma features they normally do, and test common subsystems such as audio, settings changes, compositing, desktop affects, suspend etc.
* Specific tests:
– Identify items with front/user facing changes capable of specific testing.
– Test the ‘fixed’ functionality or ‘new’ feature.

Testing may involve some technical set up to do, so while you do not need to be a highly advanced K/Ubuntu user, some proficiently in apt-based package management is advisable.

Testing is very important to the quality of the software Ubuntu and Kubuntu developers package and release.

We need your help to get this important beta release in shape for Kubuntu and the KDE community as a whole.

Thanks!

Please stop by the Kubuntu-devel Matrix channel on if you need clarification of any of the steps to follow.

[1] – https://matrix.to/#/#kubuntu-devel:ubuntu.com
[2] – https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/kubuntu-devel

Hi everyone!

I'm Derek Lin, also known as kenoi. I'm a second-year student at the University of Waterloo and really excited to be working on developing Karton, a virtual machine manager, this summer. This project will be a part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 program and mentored by Harald Sitter, Tobias Fella, and Nicolas Fella. Over the past few months, I've been contributing to the project through some merge requests and I hope to get it to a somewhat polished state towards the end of the program!

About Karton Virtual Machine Manager

Currently, GTK-based virtual machine managers (virt-manager, GNOME Boxes) are the norm for a lot of KDE users, but they are generally not well integrated into the Plasma environment. Although there has been work done in the past with making a Qt-Widget-based virtual machine manager, it has not been maintained for many years and the UI is quite dated.

Karton, as originally started by Aaron Rainbolt was planned to be a QEMU frontend for virtualization through its CLI. Eventually, the project ownership was handed over to Harald Sitter and it was made available as a GSoC project. My aim is to make Karton a native Qt-Quick/Kirigami virtual machine manager, using a libvirt backend. Through libvirt, lower-level tasks can be abstracted and it allows for the app to be potentially cross-platform.

If anyone is interested, I wrote a bit more in detail in my GSoC project proposal (although a bit outdated).

My Work so Far

I originally became interested in the project back in February this year where I tested out GNOME Boxes, virt-manager, and UTM. I also experimented on the virsh CLI, configuring some virtual machines through the libvirt domain XML format.

My first merge request was a proof-of-concept rewrite of the app. I implemented new UI components to list, view, configure, and install libvirt-controlled virtual machines. This used the libvirt API to fetch information on user domains, and wrapped virt-install and virtviewer CLIs for installing and viewing domains respectively. I had spent a big portion of this time getting know Qt frameworks, libvirt, and just C++ overall, so a big thank you to Harald Sitter and Gleb Popov, who have been reviewing my code!

A few weeks later I also made a smaller merge request building off of my rewrite, adding QEMU virtual disk path management which is where the main repository stands as of now.

In between my school terms in mid-April, I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Plasma Sprint in Graz where I was able to meet many awesome developers who work on KDE. During this time, I worked on a merge request to implement a domain installer (in order to replace the virt-install command call). This used the libosinfo GLib API to detect a user-provided OS installer disk image, getting specifications needed for the libvirt XML domain format. Karton is then able to generate a custom XML file which will make it easier to work off of and implement more features in the future. I had to rework a lot of the domain configuration class structure and shifted away from fetching information from libvirt API calls to parsing it directly from XML.

A libvirt domain XML configuration generated by Karton.

A Video Demo

Current Works in Progress

As virt-install is very powerful program, my installer is still hardcoded to work with QEMU and I haven't been able to implement a lot of the device configuration yet. I also am currently working on addressing feedback on this merge request.

Recently, I also started work on a new custom Qt-Quick virtual machine viewer. It connects to virtual machines through the spice-client-glib library and renders the frames on a QQuickItem with the images it receives from the active virtual machine. This is still very buggy and has yet to support user input.

a very cursed viewer...

Warning: Karton is still under development. I would not recommend running Karton with any VMs that are important as they may break.

My Plans for Google Summer of Code '25

Once the domain installer is finished up, I think the majority of my time will be spent on working on and polishing the virtual machine viewer.

Some of the other things I would want to get to during the summer are:

• Support snapshotting, so users can save the state of their virtual machines.
• Rework the UI so that it uses space more effectively, possible more similar to UTMs layout.
• System monitor to graph CPU and RAM usage of VMs, similar to virt-manager.
• Other configuration options for the installer to support device passthrough and such.
• A bunch of more stuff mentioned in the project proposal!

If you have any features you'd like to see in the future, let us know in our Matrix, karton:kde.org!

That's all!

Thanks for reading! I'm still new to KDE development and virtualization in general, so if you have any suggestions or thoughts on the project, please let me know!

Email: derekhongdalin@gmail.com

Matrix: @kenoi:matrix.org

Discord: kenyoy

I also made a Mastodon recently: mastodon.social/@kenoi

On July 12/13th we’ll have the first Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, Germany.

What is this?

Hack weekends, sprints or however you want to call this are a long established thing in e.g. the KDE or OSM communities, for Transitous we are doing this for the first time.

The idea is the same though: Get a bunch of people into a room together for a few days to discuss and work on topics around Transitous.

There’s organizational, operational as well as technical aspects on the agenda. That’s anything from moving Transitous under the umbrella of some legal entity (for being able to handle money and hold assets such as the domain) over improvements to the hosting infrastructure to things like determining the correct way to display a route or line name from GTFS data.

Client- or application-facing topics are equally in scope, on-trip queries or ensuring the latest MOTIS features are properly supported have been mentioned for example.

Who can join?

The sprint is open to anyone interested in or contributing to Transitous and/or related/adjacent topics. That explicitly includes people working on applications using Transitous as well as people working on obtaining and improving GTFS(-RT)/GBFS/etc data.

We have space for about 15 people, please add yourself to the Wiki page and/or get in touch with us on Matrix.

Time and Location

Wikimedia Deutschland kindly allows us to use their WikiBär venue for this. We’ll start on Friday July 11th on 15:00 CEST and have to end before Sunday July 13th 15:00 CEST as that’s when the next event starts there. You’ll find a more detailed timeline on the Wiki page.

That this is both time- and location-wise adjacent to the DELFI Family & Friends Day is of course no coincidence, several attendees will be at that event as well (DELFI is the entity producing the German national aggregated public transport timetable dataset).

More Events

If you are looking for even more mobility/transport-related events, there’s also the Open Transport Community Conference coming up on October 17/18th in Vienna, Austria. More on that once its Call for Participation is finalized.

Welcome to a new issue of “This Week in Plasma”! Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week the hard feature freeze came into effect, so Plasma 6.4’s feature-set is now finalized! There’s a lot of great stuff in this release, a summary of which can be found here.

A few of those items were added this week, as they were deemed to have had a long enough development time that it was okay to get them in after the soft feature freeze. And with that, the bug-fixing and UI polishing period begins!

On that subject, don’t be alarmed by the number of high and very high priority bugs rising; we’re using these lists to guide our bug-fixing efforts for the next month, so expect the numbers to go up and down and all around for a little while.

Notable new Features

Plasma 6.4.0

Added an HDR calibration wizard! (Xaver Hugl, link)

KWin now allows you to enable “Extended Dynamic Range” on displays that support it, which makes them simulate HDR by strategically changing the backlight’s brightness. (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, and link 4)

KWin now allows you to limit the maximum color depth on screens that support this feature. (Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3 and link 4)

You can now allow XWayland-using apps to control the keyboard and pointer, which of course decreases security, but some of those apps rely on this behavior to work. Now you can choose for yourself which one of those you care more about. (David Redondo, link)

Plasma’s built-in free space notifier now warns you about low free space on any partition, not just / and /home. It has some intelligence to ignore partitions that are read-only or were mounted in an already mostly-full state, to avoid annoying you into wanting to throw your computer out the window. You can now also configure the percentage at which it starts to warn you. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.3.6

Improved the way keyboard navigation works throughout the System Tray widget’s popup to be more conventional. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

System Monitor’s Overview page now includes more relevant monitors front-and-center, including for GPU usage and individual disk capacities. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

On Wayland, sticky keys now get un-latched on click, the same way they do on X11. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Enabling Plasma’s built-in RDP server now asks for authorization once, and then after you grant it, you don’t get annoyed by this again. (Harald Sitter, link)

That same built-in RDP server now accepts horizontal scroll events from connected client apps. (Jack Xu, link)

Made significant improvements to the Comics widget with respect to its configuration dialog and messaging and in an unconfigured or error state. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

In the Audio Volume widget, the sections for audio input and output devices now have little textual headers, like many others throughout Plasma and KDE apps do. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Added a little contextual help button to System Settings’ Mouse page that explains what the middle-mouse-button scrolling feature does, since it’s otherwise not very obvious. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Improved the way screen readers announce scrollable views in System Settings. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Trash widgets now show a little busy spinner while being emptied, because sometimes emptying the trash can take a while, and otherwise you’re just staring at it doing nothing, wondering if it’s broken until it finally completes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

The hover buttons for items in the clipboard now feature the “Edit” button first, since it’s likely to be the one you want to use most often. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Spectacle’s recording notifications no longer linger in the history, because they’ve lost relevance right after you’ve seen them. (Noah Davis, link)

The Kickoff Application launcher’s footer button to show more power and/or session actions now always reflects what’s in it, rather than only sometimes doing so. (Nate Graham, link)

Removed all the tooltips that appear when you hover over labels on System Settings’ Mouse and Touchpad pages, because they just duplicated the visible text with minimal or no differences. Instead, only the things that actually need explanation now get it using the more common contextual help button UI. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Removed the “Disable this Popup” menu item that appears on pop-up clipboard actions, because these are off by default now, which means if you’ve gone to the trouble of turning them on, you actually want to see them and already know how to turn them off! (Nate Graham, link)

Frameworks 6.15

The dialog that asks if you want to open or run an executable file, which you can invoke from Dolphin or Plasma, now makes the "don’t ask again" option much clearer so you actually know what you’er agreeing to! (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.6

Removed the pointless “Mount” action for audio CDs and blank optical disks in general from the Disks & Devices widget. (Bogdan Onofriuchuk, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash with certain screen arrangements. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed some bugs on the desktop Locations page that made some of its settings not work. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Plasma OSDs and the panel configuration dialog are now laid out properly (i.e. reversed) when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Oliver Beard, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a bug that caused notifications to now appear on a large Notifications widget placed on the desktop or in a thicccccc panel. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Typing an absurdly, impractically long number into the “Show last” spinbox on System Monitor chart dialogs no longer allows it to eventually overflow off the page if you decide for some reason to keep on typing. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed an esoteric bug that caused window titlebar context menus’ sub-menus to be mis-rendered on first appearance when there’s a secondary monitor to the left of the primary one. (Vlad Zahorodnii. link)

Fixed a bug that caused the previews in the wallpaper chooser view to sometimes not visually reflect the aspect ratio of the screen that the wallpaper will be applied to. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Frameworks 6.14.1

Fixed a bug that caused practically all QtQuick-based KDE software to crash when you scroll when using a distro that turned on asserts for user builds. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed a bug in the new KWallet backend implementation that caused Chromium-based apps to hang for 60 seconds on launch if you’ve intentionally disabled KWallet. (Marco Martin, link)

Frameworks 6.15

Search and password fields throughout Plasma and KDE apps are now laid out properly (i.e. reversed) when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Other bug information of note:

• 4 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
• 22 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 20 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Frameworks 6.15

Fixed a performance issue in Plasma, Dolphin, and anywhere else that shows folder thumbnails that could cause excessive disk I/O usage when hovering over a folder showing thumbnails of its contents. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

How You Can Help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine!

You don’t have to be a programmer, either. Many other opportunities exist:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

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

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Yesterday KDE announced the release of Plasma 6.4 Beta.

The Fedora KDE SIG is happy to announce that we built it in our @kdesig/kde-beta COPR repository.

If you are using Fedora 42 and want to contribute to Fedora and KDE by testing the beta… give it a try!

Let us know what you think on our matrix room #kde:fedoraproject.org!

Enjoy!