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.

Hey there! I'm Vishesh Srivastava, and we're at the halfway mark of my SoK 2026 project — writing Appium-based UI tests for Lokalize. I was a bit late for the halfway mark, but we're still on track.

So what's Lokalize?

It's KDE's translation tool — the app that translators use to work with PO files and manage translation. It does its job well but it had zero UI tests. None. My job this SoK is to fix that.

The starting days (January)

My first task was Bug 514468 — where copyright year strings in PO headers would be very long like 2006, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 instead of the more concise 2006, 2010-2015, 2017-2021.

I was asked to write a failing test first. So I added a simplifyYearString placeholder function, wrote a unit test that expects the collapsed range output, and marked it with QEXPECT_FAIL since the actual implementation was going to be done by someone else. It was updated to expect to pass when the bug was fixed.

More importantly, this got me comfortable with KDE's setup, kde-builder, and how the testing framework works.

The main work: Appium tests (February – March)

This is where the real fun began. Lokalize had absolutely no Appium setup, so everything was built from the ground up.

First steps

My first tests were very simple. simple_open.py literally just opens Lokalize and closes it. That's the whole test. file_open.py was the next step: open the app, click File, click Open, and confirm the dialog shows up. Not much but you have to crawl before you can walk.

A bug I encountered

Here's something I found: Appium finds UI elements through accessibility properties, and Lokalize's editor text fields didn't have any (found using accessibilityinspector). So my test scripts were essentially blind — they could see menus and buttons but couldn't interact with the actual editor. I had to edit editorview.cpp to add object names and accessible names to the widgets to actually get Appium to see them.

Other KDE apps with Appium tests (Dolphin, KCalc) already had these, but nobody had needed them in Lokalize before. These were my reference for writing the code.

The workflow test (the one I'm actually proud of)

workflowtest.py is the test that simulates what a translator would actually do:

1. Open a .po file with two untranslated entries
2. Type a translation into the target field
3. Hit "Approve and Go Next"
4. Do the same for the second entry
5. Check if the editor tab UI was updated successfully
6. Check that the status bar says Not ready: 0 — meaning everything's translated
7. Save the file

Below is a demo of this working:

It's a proper end-to-end test.

Integrating with CMake

To make it so that these tests run along with all other tests with kde-builder --run-tests, I added a CMakeLists.txt for the appiumtests directory and added it into the project's build system behind a BUILD_APPIUM_TESTS option:

kde-builder --run-tests lokalize --no-include-dependencies --no-src --cmake-options="-DBUILD_APPIUM_TESTS=ON"

Now the tests integrate with the Appium tests just like they do in other KDE apps.

Next steps

• Writing failing tests for bugs
• Edge case tests

Final thoughts (for now)

It's been a enjoyable experience and many thanks to Finley Watson for offering great help along the way.

Halfway there. Let's see what happens next.

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After months of intensive development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is thrilled to announce the stable release of digiKam 9.0.0. This major version introduces groundbreaking improvements in performance, usability, and workflow efficiency, with a strong focus on modernizing the user interface, enhancing metadata management, and expanding support for new camera models and file formats.

• New Features and Major Changes
  • General Updates and Porting
  • Bundles Component Versions
  • Raw Camera Support
  • User Interface and Usability
  • Metadata and Tag Management
  • Preview and Media Support
  • New Survey Tool
  • Editor and Plugins
  • New Advanced Search and Sorting Options
  • Geolocation Editor
  • Performance and Stability
• Notable Bug Fixes
• Internationalization
• Future Plans
• Final Words

New Features and Major Changes

General Updates and Porting

digiKam 9.0.0 marks a significant milestone with the core code now fully ported to Qt 6.10.1 for the AppImage and macOS bundles, ensuring improved performance, security, and compatibility with modern operating systems. The Windows Qt6 bundle also benefits from the latest Qt 6.9.1 and KDE Frameworks 6.20.0.

FOSDEM 2026

This year I had the chance to attend my first ever FOSDEM. My main objective there was the GCompris workshop in FOSDEM Junior track. It was an experimental one with the initiative from the organizer since it was only the third year that this track existed.

The workshop had way more adult attendees interested in GCompris for their children than children themselves. So, naturally, it turned more into a dev room than a workshop.

Me, together with the organizers came to a conclusion that GCompris isn't fit for the FOSDEM Junior, at least not in the form of: short presentation -> hands free experience.

The FOSDEM, for me, was very overwhelming. The amount of people in one place as well as having to choose from many different topics, navigating an unfamiliar city had me drained by the end of the first day. Mostly because of that, on the second day I had my workshop and attended only one talk.

Despite that, it was awesome to meet the people of KDE, experience solo travelling for the first time and get to know the core of open source.

Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Gear 26.04 releases to them

Next Dates:  

•   March 12 2026: 26.04 Freeze and Beta (26.03.80) tarball creation
•   March 13 2026: 26.04 Beta (26.03.80) release
•   March 26 2026: 26.04 RC (26.03.90) tarball creation
•   March 27 2026: 26.04 RC (26.03.90) Release
•   April  9 2026: 26.04 tarball creation
•   April 10 2026: 26.04 packages released to packagers
•   April 16 2026: 26.04 Release

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.04_Schedule 

Today we're releasing the third beta of Krita 5.3.0 and Krita 6.0.0.

The bug-squashing continues, We received 63 bug reports in total, of which we managed to resolve 8 for this release, making a total of 22 fixed bugs. Beyond that, the manual has been updated for 5.3 and 6.0, complete with dark theme!

Please keep testing and reporting!

Note that 6.0.0-beta3 has more issues, especially on Linux and Wayland, than 5.3.0-beta3. If you want to combine beta testing with actual productive work, it's best to test 5.3.0-beta3, since 5.3.0 will remain the recommended version of Krita for now.

To learn about everything that has changed, check the release notes!

5.3.0-beta3 Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-5.3.0-beta3-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-5.3.0-beta3.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

⚠️ Warning

Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.0-beta3-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.0-beta3-signed.dmg

Android

Krita on Android is still beta; tablets only.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK

• 64 bits Arm CPU APK

• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

See the source code for 6.0.0-beta3

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/unstable/krita/5.3.0-beta3/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

6.0.0-beta2 Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-6.0.0-beta3-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-6.0.0-beta3.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

⚠️ Warning

Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.0-beta3-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.0-beta3-signed.dmg

Android

No Krita 6.0.0 for Android for now. Please use the 5.3.0-beta3 APKs.

Source code

• krita-6.0.0-beta3.tar.gz

• krita-6.0.0-beta3.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/unstable/krita/6.0.0-beta3/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).