Last weekend I joined parts of the FOSSGIS Community Meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, focusing on topics related to organizing this year’s edition of the Open Transport Community Conference.

FOSSGIS Community Meeting

Twice a year FOSSGIS e.V. (the German local chapter of OpenStreetMap) hosts a multi-day meeting at Linuxhotel, for people to work on primarily non-technical topics, such as organizing conferences, presence at events, public communication and outreach, lobbying and political activities around FOSS/Open Data, finances and fundraising, and operations of the FOSSGIS e.V.

I had been at Linuxhotel for a KDE sprint before, but only after looking up the group photo from back then I realized that this was already 18 years ago…

Open Transport Community Conference

While the first edition of the Open Transport Community Conference last year was very successful and ran very smoothly overall, one important thing that had to change to make this long-term sustainable was moving this under the umbrella of some form of legal entity. We are looking at doubling the length, doubling the number of attendees and a 40x increase in budget this year, way beyond something you’d want to have individuals carry the legal and financial risks for.

I’m therefore very happy that with the FOSSGIS e.V. we have found a suitable organization for this. Besides the obvious overlap in domain and partially also in people, FOSSGIS e.V. has extensive experience in organizing conferences we can tap into, as well as infrastructure we can use.

This should allow us for example to handle sponsors this year, as well as offering (optional) paid tickets for people attending for their employers. And with that we could then (given enough income) provide some kind of travel support program for community attendees to soften the impact of the rather expensive location in Switzerland.

The weekend provided an opportunity to work out a number of legal, financial, organizational and operational implementation details for that. Some aspects have still to be resolved with the tax advisor though, given Switzerland isn’t in the EU, which should then unlock finally opening the registration for the conference.

Transitous

Transitous is in a somewhat similar situation, although with less time pressure for now. To improve long-term sustainability we’d also need a legal entity to hold assets (such as the domain), handle money and sign contracts.

We are extremely lucky so far that the “big” servers doing the heavy lifting are provided to us for free, including all hosting cost. While there’s no indication that might change anytime soon, we at least want to have options ready should this change, or in case we need additional capacity.

Our current yearly budget is around 60€, if we’d have to pay market prices for our entire infrastructure we’d need to increase that significantly, 50x before the global madness in recent months, more like 100x now. Obviously not something we can do overnight, so starting to explore and ramping up fundraising options sooner rather than later makes sense.

And that’s just the direct cost for server operations, it would also be great to be able to support community members with travel costs for example.

Just as with the conference, the plan is to attach Transitous to the FOSSGIS e.V.. FOSSGIS e.V. is “gemeinnützig” in Germany, which allows receiving tax-deductable donations, something we’d be unlikely to achieve with a separate organization on our own.

FOSS and Open Data

With my KDE hat on, there were also a number of other relevant and interesting topics:

• Rules and criteria for “recommended service providers” lists by FOSS projects, and countering misuse (e.g. KDE e.V. Trusted IT Consulting Firms, FOSSGIS e.V. Dienstleisterliste, Transitous supplier list).
• Participation and presence at the Digital Independence Day events.
• Lobbying for recognizing FOSS/Open Data work as charitable (“gemeinnützig”) in Germany, to receive all the legal, tax and PR benefits associated with that, and without the current workarounds and uncertainties (see also the ongoing petition for that).
• Lobbying for FOSS use in public administration, in particular in the context of the current interest in “digital sovereignty” there.

I think for all this we could benefit from building more bridges between the various communities and organizations affected by or interesting in those topics.

You can help!

It’s foundations like FOSSGIS e.V. or KDE e.V. that provide all the boring legal, financial and operational infrastructure for Free Software and Open Data communities and initiatives to do their work, and keep doing that independently. Your donations enable this.

The first maintenance release of the 26.04 series is now available, with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements.

Thanks to an NLnet/NGI0 grant, we had a security audit provided by Radically Open Security. The audit found one serious vulnerability that can happen when opening a malicious project file, allowing remote code execution. This is fixed with Kdenlive 26.04.1. Thanks to Edoardo Geraci and Radically Open Security for helping us make our software safer!

We are not aware of the vulnerability being exploited so far. It is important to understand that this security issue is about a manipulated .kdenlive project file containing potentially malicious code. Therefore, it is only relevant if you open a .kdenlive project file that you received from someone else or downloaded from the internet. If you are working only with your own projects or with shared projects in collaboration with fully trusted partners, there is no security risk.

If you cannot upgrade, do not open a project file that was not created by you.

Although the vulnerability is fixed in 26.04.1, we have also implemented another layer of security checks for the upcoming 26.08.0 to warn the user if some other unexpected input is detected in a project file.

Head to our download section to get the latest binaries, or check the updates from your package manager. Please note that for Linux only AppImage and Flatpak are supported by the Kdenlive team.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a lot of lower-level technical improvements made throughout Plasma’s software stack. Not super flashy, but super important.

Nevertheless, two color-related features did manage to sneak in! And as Plasma 6.7’s feature period comes to a close, expect more polishing and bug-fixing for the next month or so.

Without further ado:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

You can now use an ICC profile while HDR mode is active! (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #514239)

You can now disable or control the intensity of the “adaptive backlight modulation” feature of many AMD laptops, which changes screen colors at low brightness levels to try to improve visibility. If you don’t like it, you can now turn it off! (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #511801)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Improved Discover’s ability to de-duplicate apps present in both system and user Flatpak installations. (Tobias Fella, Discover MR #1316)

The temperature values on Info Center’s Sensors page now reflect the units you have configured system-wide, rather than always using Celcius. (Chandradeep Dey, kinfocenter MR #294)

You can now remove apps from the Kickoff Application Launcher’s Favorites view by dragging them out of the view and over any part of the rest of the widget. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3662)

The Printers widget now shows badges indicating the number of active and queued print jobs on each printer. Useful for large institutional environments with a lot of printers! (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #324)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.5

Fixed an issue that made the power buttons vanish from launcher menus for some people with version 260 of systemd, which changed around some things we were relying on. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518174)

Fixed an issue that caused periodic freezes and stutters on some systems with multiple discrete GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #519461)

Fixed an issue that could make Discover crash on some distros while changing the priorities of Flatpak repos. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1318)

The portal-based dialog to add launchers now actually works. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #519631)

Using window rules to move a window partially off-screen using a negative position property no longer makes the window disappear and become unreachable. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #466119)

Fixed one source of a tricky issue that could make secondary screens inappropriately remain dimmed after waking from sleep. (Patryk Ludwikowski, KDE Bugzilla #513809)

Fixed a recent visual regression in the hover highlighting effects applied to the Printers widget. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518705)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause custom non-default global shortcuts to be reset during software updates on specific distros that uninstall and re-install apps as part of their upgrade processes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #484597)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Improved performance and power efficiency for software that uses CPU rendering, such as most QtWidgets-based Qt and KDE apps. Read more about this on Xaver’s blog! (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9178)

Improved KWin’s heuristics for when it can use the “direct scan-out” feature to improve performance and save power for full-screen windows. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #515784)

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.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Back from vacations, the reading offline was good… I managed to read some articles too, so let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-19.

Building a cyberdeck is the most punk thing you can do right now

Tags: tech, hacking, culture

It’s indeed a nice endeavour. I don’t have the appetite for it right now, but I wish more people would do this.

https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/70129/1/building-a-cyberdeck-diy-tech-rebellious-billionaire-broligarchs-computers

Cal Newport’s anti-brain rot rules

Tags: tech, attention-economy, literacy, health

This is good and sane advice to survive the attention economy and take care of your mental health. It’s not too hard to put in place if you’re not already doing it.

https://thetangent.space/2026/brain-rot/

radio is cool, actually

Tags: tech, radio, music, culture

Yep, I like radio as well. Don’t judge me.

https://donthave2sting.bearblog.dev/radio-is-cool-actually/

Endgame for the Open Web

Tags: tech, web, foss, knowledge, enclosure, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, politics

This piece is maybe a bit too much on the panic side… Which part of the Web are we talking about? The commercial stuff? Overall, the logic makes sense though. We see many examples of power plays in guise of “innovation” which lead to killing openly sharing (and so killing real innovation). It’s urgent to fight back and ensure things stay open.

https://www.anildash.com/2026/03/27/endgame-open-web/

Netizen

Tags: tech, internet, culture, history

The Internet culture definitely changed at the turn of the 21st century. Before this it was a more civilized and hopeful place. I’d like to see the netizen etiquette make a strong come back.

https://sive.rs/netizen

Using the internet like its 1999

Tags: tech, internet, web, social-media, messaging, culture

This could be a piece full of nostalgia. There is a bit of nostalgia of course, but it’s also a path to use what we got in a more valuable and humane way.

https://joshblais.com/blog/using-the-internet-like-its-1999/

The Boring Internet

Tags: tech, internet, web, culture, resilience, protocols, decentralized

This is a good point, unlike what some claims the Internet isn’t dying. The commercial land on top is thinning out and is getting filled with crap indeed. Still, what made the Internet and the Web are still here for people to use.

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-internet

A .well-known Complaint

Tags: tech, web, standard

Indeed, there’s no reason to not use .well-known for newer standard files.

https://www.vzqk50.com/blog/scraps/a-well-known-complaint/

Palantir Workers Are Finally Noticing The Skulls On Their Caps

Tags: tech, surveillance, politics, surveillance, defense, palantir

Better late than never I guess? Let’s just hope this becomes very costly for that evil company.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/04/30/palantir-workers-are-finally-noticing-the-skulls-on-their-caps/

The AI Compute Crunch Is Here (and It’s Affecting the Entire Economy)

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, business, economics, sustainability

This part of the industry is struggling more and more (or more likely silently taking more risks to hide the struggle). It has no path to sustainability and it starts to show.

https://www.404media.co/the-ai-compute-crunch-is-here-and-its-affecting-the-entire-economy/

The Zig project’s rationale for their firm anti-AI contribution policy

Tags: tech, foss, community, ai, machine-learning, copilot

It totally makes sense. If you’re a FOSS project you have to invest in getting more long term contributors, which requires mentoring. The contributions themselves are not something to maximise. I wish more communities would follow that path.

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/30/zig-anti-ai/

All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot!

Tags: tech, web, frontend, ai, hype, ux, simplicity

So many requests based on vanity and hype… I like the question “when you go to other websites do you use it?”, we should use it more. Maybe at some point we’ll realise that simplicity matters.

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/all-my-clients-wanted-a-carousel-now-it-s-an-ai-chatbot.md

NHS Goes To War Against Open Source

Tags: tech, foss, politics

Weird decisions, this is really backwards…

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/05/nhs-goes-to-war-against-open-source/

GitHub is sinking

Tags: tech, git, github, foss, self-hosting

This is indeed time to move away from GitHub if you’re still there. There are many viable alternatives.

https://dbushell.com/2026/04/29/github-is-sinking/

in which more paths are charted towards code independence

Tags: tech, git, github, tools, version-control, foss, self-hosting

Good first half of the post, there’s indeed more paths out of GitHub than jumping from a centralised system to another one (even though Codeberg and Forgejo are much saner from a governance standpoint). We’ll see what the future brings.

https://technomancy.us/204

Soft launch of open-source code platform for government

Tags: tech, git, github, foss, self-hosting, europe, politics

Looks like some governments noticed that they can move away from GitHub and are testing the waters. Good idea!

https://www.nldigitalgovernment.nl/news/soft-launch-for-government-open-source-code-platform/

Open Source Does Not Imply Open Community

Tags: tech, foss, community

Indeed, a reminder that the two concepts are not necessarily aligned. It kind of misses the point about corporate Open Source with no open contributions which can be easily captured as well. But indeed for the individual side project you might not need the whole burden of issues and contributions, you get to choose.

https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/04/open-source-does-not-imply-open-community/

Email is crazy

Tags: tech, email, routing, security

Want a primer on email routing? This is pretty much it.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/email-is-crazy/

A text editor as a user interface

Tags: tech, text, config, editor, shell, scripting

It’s an interesting trick for personal tooling. Keeps things really simple to setup with limited code to maintain.

https://ratfactor.com/cards/text-editor-as-ui

Lua can be a really cool HTML templating engine

Tags: tech, lua, dsl

This is a good illustration of how flexible and expressive Lua can be. Gives ideas to make DSLs.

https://riki.house/lua-html

Podman rootless containers and the Copy Fail exploit

Tags: tech, podman, containers, security

Worthwhile exploration on the impact of CopyFail in the context of Podman. The baseline security posture seems better and you can even improve things using older techniques. Definitely worth switching.

https://garrido.io/notes/podman-rootless-containers-copy-fail/

Your Container Is Not a Sandbox: The State of MicroVM Isolation in 2026

Tags: tech, virtualization, infrastructure, containers

Don’t think this piece really needed to talk about AI but oh well… I guess it’s the obsession of the moment. That said, it’s interesting to see how far the microVM ecosystem matured so far. The pieces are falling in place and that opens the door to interesting architectures.

https://emirb.github.io/blog/microvm-2026/

A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management

Tags: tech, c++, supply-chain, dependencies, security, satire

C++ too can have its own supply chain disasters with enough effort!

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/a-breakthrough-in-cc-dependency-management

Bugs Rust Won’t Catch

Tags: tech, rust, failure, security, system, filesystem, memory

Straight from the uutils rewrite. This is interesting both for the class of bugs which made it (very system integration oriented, unsurprisingly) and the ones which didn’t appear at all (anything to do with memory).

https://corrode.dev/blog/bugs-rust-wont-catch/

You can beat the binary search

Tags: tech, simd, performance

A good illustration that you can beat classical algorithms by taking into account how modern CPUs are designed.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/04/27/you-can-beat-the-binary-search/

Why Don’t Lowercase Letters Come Right After Uppercase Letters in ASCII?

Tags: tech, text, codec, memory

When you look at the binary representation of those characters, things become clear. This opens the door to interesting bitwise operations.

https://tylerhillery.com/blog/why-dont-lowercase-chars-come-after-upper/

How Many Frames Per Second Do You Need?

Tags: tech, game, graphics, performance

There is clearly a sweet spot around 60 fps. Beyond this… You quickly end up in cargo cult territory.

https://hooby.blog/posts/how-many-frames-per-second-do-you-need/

Forty Years in Tech

Tags: tech, history, career

It all changed so much! That’s quite a journey for our field. Of course it’s not over yet. At some point we’ll be real engineers I guess. 😉

https://forkingmad.blog/forty-years-in-tech/

Programming Still Sucks

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, team, organisation, engineering, learning, satire

This feels a bit too realistic for my taste… and yet… Well this piece of satire is well crafted I’d say.

https://www.stvn.sh/writing/programming-still-sucks-fqffhyp

Collective Speed Is Not the Summation of Individual Speed

Tags: tech, team, organisation, productivity

A bit of a stretched metaphor in here, but indeed being individually faster doesn’t automatically make the team faster. Sometimes quite the contrary in fact.

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/collective-speed-isnt-the-sum-of%20individual-speed/

How to See Your Leading, Lagging, and Reliable Estimation Metrics

Tags: tech, project-management, agile, metrics

Indeed I wish we’d see less fixation on burndown and velocity. There are superior alternatives and what matters if the full flow of work.

https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2026/05/how-to-see-your-leading-lagging-and-reliable-estimation-metrics/

Hire based on the conversation about code, not the code itself

Tags: tech, hiring, interviews

Another post which shows that the right technical job interviews are the ones creating a real conversation. It’s the only way to have a chance to figure out what the candidate is made of.

https://dbarabashh.com/thoughts-and-experience/hire-for-the-conversation-not-the-code

Notes on influencing politics

Tags: politics, decision-making

Especially true for local politics indeed.

https://blog.mattglassman.net/notes-on-influencing-politics/

Bye for now!

Friday, 8 May 2026

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.26.0.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version

Akademy 2026 (the annual world summit for KDE) is happening in Graz. Austria, Saturday 19th – Thursday 24th September. 

First of all, if you're reading this and thinking, "Should i go to Akademy?" 


The answer is [most probably] YES! Akademy has something for everyone, be it coders, translators, promoters, designers, enthusiasts, etc.


Now, with this out of the way, go and register at https://akademy.kde.org/2026/register/

After you have registered, you think which interesting talks will we have on the weekend?

And you know who has something to say? *YOU*


Yes, *YOU*. I'm sure you've been working on something interesting, or have a great idea to share.


*YOU* may think that your idea is not that great or the things you work on are not interesting, but that's seldomly the case when someone explains me their "boring" thing they've been working on, i always think "Wow that's great".


Ok, so now that I've convinced you to send a talk proposal, when better than *TODAY* to send it?


Yes I know the Call for Participation is open until the 17 of May, but by sending it today you make sure you don't forget sending it later and also [more important for me] you help those of us in the Program Committee not to worry when the final date starts approaching and we don't have lots of talks yet because you all prefer sending talks on the very last minute.


So stop reading and send your talk today ;-) 

Singleton Controllers in Times of Declarative QML

The post Singleton Controllers in Times of Declarative QML appeared first on KDAB.

KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation supporting the KDE community, is looking to hire a software engineer to help improve the software stack that KDE software relies on. Please see the call for proposals for more details about this contract opportunity. We are looking forward to your application.

The full call for proposals has more details.

If you have been on invent.kde.org lately you might have seen some merge requests about “Install Qt metatypes” and wondered what that’s all about.

When defining QML types in C++ the buildsytem tries to capture as much information about the type as possible, so that tools like qmllint, qmlls, and the QML compiler know about what API the type provides. If that information cannot be gathered the code will still work fine at runtime, but the development experience will be degraded.

Normally, when all the types involved are from the local project (or Qt), and you are using the qt_add_qml_module CMake API as well as declarative type registration, things will work mostly out of the box. However, in some cases that’s not enough, and we need some extra steps.

Imagine we have a library MyLib, that exposes a class MyModel. That model isn’t registered to QML at all. Now we have a program MyProgram, that creates a subclass of MyModel, and registers that to QML:

#include <MyLib/MyModel>

class MySubModel : public MyModel {
    Q_OBJECT
    QML_ELEMENT
    ...
}

This will work fine at runtime, but produces a suspicious build warning:

Warning: mysubmodel.h:3: MyModel is used as base type but cannot be found.

Opening any QML file using MySubModel in an qmlls-capable editor will show that type information for MySubModel is limited or nonexistant. So how do we fix this? Enter: metatypes files.

During the build process moc processes your classes and extracts information about properties, signals, invokables, etc. That information is then processed by the QML tooling. For Qt’s own types that’s done out of the box, and for custom QML module’s types too, but if your custom module is using types from another library some extra steps are needed.

First, the library needs to extract its metatypes into a consumable file. This is done using the qt_extract_metatypes CMake API:

add_library(MyLib)

qt_extract_metatypes(MyLib)

This will produce a JSON file that contains information about the types in MyLib. If the QML module needing this is in the same buildsystem that’s enough to make things work. However, quite often it will be used by something in another project, so we need to install the file alongside the library:

add_library(MyLib)

# the path of the generated file will be stored in ${METATYPES_FILE}
qt_extract_metatypes(MyLib OUTPUT_FILES METATYPES_FILE)

install(TARGETS MyLib)
install(FILES ${METATYPES_FILE} DESTINATION ${KDE_INSTALL_QTMETATYPESDIR})

This will install the file, but that’s not enough for the consuming project to pick it up, we need to associate the metatypes file with the library. To make that happen we add the (public) sources for that library:

add_library(MyLib)

# the path of the generated file will be stored in ${METATYPES_FILE}
qt_extract_metatypes(MyLib OUTPUT_FILES METATYPES_FILE)

# extract the filename from the path
get_filename_component(METATYPES_FILE_NAME ${METATYPES_FILE} NAME)
# add metatypes file to the interface sources set
target_sources(MyLib INTERFACE $<INSTALL_INTERFACE:${KDE_INSTALL_QTMETATYPESDIR}/${METATYPES_FILE_NAME}>)

install(TARGETS MyLib)
install(FILES ${METATYPES_FILE} DESTINATION ${KDE_INSTALL_QTMETATYPESDIR})

This scary looking line of CMake basically boils down to “Everything that links against MyLib will get the installed metatypes file added to its sources”. This makes the QML machinery in the application pick it up.

With that, no changes to the application are necessary. The build warning disappears, and type information in the editor starts working.

Since it’s hard to know in advance whether a library’s types are going to be used that way it’s probably a good idea to do this for any library, especially since there’s effectively no cost to this, other than some CMake code. It would be great if Qt would take care of most of that code though, see https://qt-project.atlassian.net/browse/QTBUG-123052 and related patches.

A word on the install location: When installing Qt-related files there’s some subtleties involved when determining where to install things. Fortunatley ECM takes care of that for us, so it gained a new variable KDE_INSTALL_QTMETATYPESDIR for this.

This has been applied to a few KDE libraires already, but there’s likely more where it would be benefitial, to allow for better QML tooling and ultimately a better developer experience.