This is the release schedule the release team agreed on
https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_25.12_Schedule
Dependency freeze is in around 2 weeks (November 6) and feature freeze one
after that. Get your stuff ready!
Dear digiKam fans and users,
After four months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 8.8.0. This version delivers significant improvements in performance, stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on image processing, color management, and workflow efficiency.
The digiKam team remains committed to providing a powerful, open-source digital photo management solution, continuously enhanced with new tools and optimizations for photographers and enthusiasts alike.
The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects.
Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time, be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant.
The same happens for our communication channels or web sites. 20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like discuss.kde.org or in our Matrix channels.
Unfortunately our community is not that good at cleaning dead stuff up or deciding that the zombie state of some things hurt.
A no longer updated website might be a small issue, that just looks bad, but most people will see that stuff with news from 2010 will likely be not alive.
Still, I think it makes sense to remove such sites and just redirect them (if there is any follow up information online).
It is no good state if we have stuff up that rots away since a few years, at least if it contains no other valuable info, like documentation or howtos.
Worse than dead web sites are zombie Git repositories that still get merge requests but nobody takes a look as all people are just gone but the stuff is not clearly marked as archived.
People waste their time and will likely be upset their contributions are not even looked at.
If a project is really dead, that should be archived, one can still resurrect it with easy later on, it is not gone, just clearly marked as dead.
Even worse are in my eyes dead mailing lists.
People will drop questions there, in worst case that will even already hang for days in moderation or then forever without answer on the list.
That turns away people, you have a question or contribution and it ends in a black hole? No good first contact.
What can we do?
We not just need to create new stuff and maintain what we have, we need to do some house cleaning or gardening.
We did that in the past, we can do it again :)
If you want to help, or just turn up and tell that your old project, web site or list it dead, show up on one of these issues:
Feel free to join the discussion at the KDE reddit.
Sometimes an application can look kinda wrong due to very small details, few pixels can make or ruin the first impact. And since today a lot of monitors, especially laptop ones have to use fractional scaling, making things look sharp and pixel perfect is even harder.
Here is System Settings, on a screen scaled at 175%:
Here is zoomed, you can see some separators being one pixel, some other being two, usually blurred, making them appear of significantly different colors:
It was something that always annoyed me, so this is how System Settings will look with the next Kirigami that will come with the next Frameworks release in the beginning of November:
Here zoomed:
Separators are now 2 perfectly sharp pixels everywhere on 175%, giving the app a much cleaner look.
This will apply to every application which uses the Separator QML component. There are of course a lot of similar details fixes to do (and yes, I can see several ones still in the above screenshot), but sometimes small polishes can look like a big improvement 
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.
Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!
Yuki Joou continued improving Merkuro Calendar, fixing the "Today" button, which wasn’t working as expected (25.08.3 - link).
Akseli Lahtinen fixed an issue where the icon sizes of list items were incorrect when zooming in and out rapidly. (25.12.0 - link).
Andreas Cord-Landwehr added support for loading user units in KJournald Browser (25.12.0 - link).
Jack Hill added configuration for rust_hdl, a language server for the VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) (25.12.0 - link).
Kåre Särs fixed Git blame parsing for commits containing tabs in their summary. (25.12.0 - link)
Kai Uwe Broulik reworked how the list of alarms and timers is loaded. This process is now asynchronous. (25.12.0 - link)
Wendi Gan fixed some styling issues that occurred when saving Konsole output as HTML. (25.12.0 - link)
Alberto Jiménez Ruiz fixed decimal number parsing for locales that don’t use a dot as the decimal separator, such as Spanish. (25.12.0 - link)
Volker Krause added some missing icons on Android (25.12.0 - link).
Forest Crossman fixed a crash in the virtual monitor plugin when used with misbehaving virtual monitor devices (link).
Laurent Montel updated KRetro to follow KDE best practices (link 1, link 2, link 3 , link 4, link 5, and more).
Arno Rehn added basic support for Matrix Widgets and Jitsi (25.12.0 - link).
James Graham and Tobias Fella fixed various crashes in NeoChat detected by Sentry (link 1, link 2, and link 3).
Joshua Goins moved the "Post" toolbar action to be a floating button on mobile devices (25.12.0 - link).
Juraj Oravec added a context menu to the bookmark menu (25.12.0 - link) and fixed custom protocol handler registration (25.12.0 - link).
Stefano Crocco increased the quality of the exported PDFs (25.12.0 - link) and added support for the standard JS window.print() call to open a print dialog (25.12.0 - link).
Dr. Tej A. Shah started porting Clear.Dental to Kirigami!
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.
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.
I'm writing this blog in the very very early stages of development because I'm 50% sure someone will link me to some existing library that Google failed to find.
Varlink is an IPC mechanism that is gaining popularity in a few places across Linux. It's very simple, JSON blobs over a socket terminated with a null byte. It doesn't have anywhere near the features of DBus, but the simplicity is the main selling point.
Ultimately when it comes to choosing IPC what matters is what the servers you want to talk to are already using and then things become forced.
Interacting with C APIs is a horrible experience for all involved. We want something that looks and behaves likes a Qt developer would expect and used the inbuilt QtJson classes.
My new library provides API as follows.
TSDgeos
@christoph-cullmann:matrix.org
VarlinkClient client("unix:/tmp/foo");
QFuture<VarlinkResponse> pendingResponse = client.call("org.example.Ping", QJsonObject({{"ping", "1"}}));
pendingResponse.then(this, [](VarlinkResponse response) {
qDebug() << response.parameters()["pong"].toString();
});Or any variation of QFutureWatcher or just blocking.
Code is available at: https://invent.kde.org/davidedmundson/qtvarlink
As mentioned in the intro, it's pre pre alpha. It's the minimum viable product for a task I had, but I intend to make it a standalone project.
Please let me know if this would be useful to you. There's a roadmap in the Readme and pull requests are more than welcome!
Linux Magazine included a nice article about Tellico in its June 2025 edition on Cool Linux Hacks. It has a nice description of adding items to one’s collection and how to search various sources online. A couple of screenshots are included that do a good job of showcasing the interface.
It even connects to the subsequent review of a barcode scanner to talk about using it together with Tellico. The distinction between using a webcam for scanning, where Tellico has to convert the image to a barcode, and a specific barcode scanner isn’t always clear to users. A scanner can essentially act as a keyboard, where the barcode comes across just as if someone were typing it in. For Tellico’s use, the webcam functionality isn’t well-tested since scanners are much more prevalent.
The second maintenance release of the 25.08 series is out continuing the focus on stability and polish. It fixes issues with effects and transitions, improves clip selection, and resolves crashes related to filter jobs and effects on sequences. This version also comes with updated parameters for frei0r effects and GIF rendering preset.
The Windows package also fixes an annoying short freeze issue affecting the 25.08.1 version.
For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.
