This is a weekly update from my Google Summer of Code 2026 project with KDE, improving effect widgets in Kdenlive, a free and open source video editor.
Gradient widget: switched to Qt-Color-Widgets
Julius Künzel suggested last week that the Gradient widget be built with an eye toward upstreaming to KDE Frameworks, pointing to Qt-Color-Widgets's GradientEditor class as a reference. It's already vendored inside MLT's Glaxnimate module, so this week I wired it in directly instead of maintaining a fully custom-painted widget.
The vendored color_widgets::GradientEditor gives a native-styled gradient bar with checkerboard alpha preview, drag-and-drop stop reordering, and its own color dialog, all for free.
Fixing undo-stack behavior
The library only emits stopsChanged on completed actions (mouse release, menu add/remove, dialog accept), not per-pixel during drags. That meant two bugs: every plain click created a junk undo-stack entry, and drags had no live preview on the monitor at all.
Fixed with three pieces:
commitStops() emits valueChanged(..., true) only when the serialized value actually changed
An eventFilter emits valueChanged(..., false) during drag moves, for live monitor preview
An echo-guard in slotRefresh() ignores the model value coming back from our own emit; without it, the synchronous refresh resets the editor's selection and kills the drag mid-motion
32-stop cap
MLT's gradientmap filter supports stop.1 through stop.32. The library has no pre-add hook to reject a 33rd stop, so commitStops() rejects after the fact: the just-added stop gets removed and the editor reset under a signal blocker, with no undo entry created. gradientStopsFromString() also truncates at 32 on load, so an over-long saved value can't smuggle in extra stops. Exposed as GradientEditWidget::MaxStops.
Build: configurable vendor path
The path to Qt-Color-Widgets was previously hardcoded assuming a sibling MLT checkout. Replaced with a KDENLIVE_QTCOLORWIDGETS_PATH CMake cache variable; same default, overridable with -D, and a missing path is now a fatal configure error instead of a silent skip that only surfaced at compile time.
Tests
gradienteditwidgettest.cpp now covers a full widget-interaction path with a real timeline document and synthesized mouse events: a plain click produces zero undo entries, a drag produces two preview emissions plus exactly one committed undo entry, and adding a 33rd stop is rejected with the editor staying at 32. All 5 test cases pass, 62 assertions.
What's next
Four commits are done locally (gradient widget + CMake + tests, plus two unrelated Qt 6.10 compat fixes found along the way), but nothing's pushed yet. Waiting on Jean-Baptiste to confirm this is the direction to commit to before opening an MR.
After a long development cycle, we are thrilled to announce the official release of Rolisteam v1.10. This version brings a wave of brand-new tools for Game Masters, a major technical overhaul of the whole project, and a much healthier codebase for the years to come.
Rolisteam now embeds a full mind-map editor, letting you sketch out plots, NPC relationships, or campaign notes visually, right next to your other campaign tools.
Rolling dice has never been more satisfying. The new 3D dice roller uses a real physics engine to simulate dice tumbling and bouncing, giving your rolls a tactile, tabletop feel.
A brand-new Antagonist panel lets you list and manage all the NPCs of your campaign in one place, with search and filtering options to quickly find the antagonist you need, right when you need it.
Thanks to the KDE translation teams, Rolisteam is now available in even more languages, with existing translations kept up to date release after release.
Refactoring
Under the hood, this release is the result of a massive modernization effort:
Port to Qt 6 — the entire codebase now runs on the Qt 6 framework.
Build system switched to CMake, replacing the previous qmake-based setup.
Websites migrated from self-hosting to KDE’s infrastructure.
Websites migrated from the Pelican generator to Hugo.
Source hosting moved from GitHub to KDE’s GitLab.
Quality
Code quality and long-term maintainability were a major focus of this release:
70% of the code is now covered by unit tests.
An extensive suite of validation tests now runs continuously to catch regressions early.
Dedicated test coverage was added for the mind-map, the character sheet, translations, and the network layer.
Continuous integration now tracks code coverage on every change.
A huge thank you
This release wouldn’t have been possible without the community, the KDE translation teams, and everyone who reported bugs, tested pre-releases, and contributed code. Thank you!
Updated KDE content snaps with Qt 6.11.1, KF6 6.27.0, and Applications 26.04.3, critical bug fixes, Debian packaging of Rust crates for Plasma 6.7.0, and what's on the horizon.
This week Plasma 6.7 received a few more stabilization bug-fixes while attention turned towards the upcoming 6.8 release. Some exciting changes are in progress, and a few have already merged, including highly visible improvements to some common animations.
Check it out!
Notable new features
Plasma 6.8
Updated the Emoji Selector app to version 17 of the Unicode emoji standard, giving you access to derpy new emojis like “️”. (Jens Jerosch, plasma-desktop MR #3849)
Notable UI improvements
Plasma 6.7.2
Moved the global “Move Mouse to Focus” and “Move Mouse to Center” actions out of the Zoom effect, so they still work even if you’ve globally disabled the Zoom effect. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #522070)
Plasma 6.7.3
Made KRunner’s Bookmarks search provider return results for 2-character queries (so it will match “Qt”, for example), and use fewer system resources. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6764)
The Clipboard widget’s Actions Configuration page now uses better internal margins for the content. (Levi Leal, plasma-workspace MR #6779)
After
Before
Plasma 6.8
The “Bouncing app icon” launch feedback style now uses a more visually pleasing animation with a better physics model, a more appropriate easing curve, and a higher frame-rate. (The Entropyist, kwin MR #9487)
The new sliding animation for notifications now uses a more natural easing curve, so it looks even better than it already did! (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #522276)
There’s no longer a secret keyboard shortcut (previously Meta+Ctrl+x) that turns on clipboard actions. This was easy to press by accident, and would then make weird popups appear when you copied URLs. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6773)
The Digital Clock widget now requests “tabular numerals”, which are monospaced digits supported by some fonts. The use of these numerals prevents the clock from changing its width as time passed in a few edge cases where the existing code to prevent that wasn’t good enough. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR #6797)
Discover’s old “CD and DVD” category is now named “Disc Burning”, because that’s what apps expect it to be, which explains why it only contained disc burning apps. (Nate Graham, discover MR #1350)
Info Center’s Memory page now shows a busy indicator if it takes more than a moment to load. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kinfocenter MR #305)
You can now more easily find the System Settings page responsible for the “press and hold a key to see alternative characters” popup, to turn it on or off or change the delay before it appears. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-keyboard MR #154)
The DrKonqi crash reporting wizard now tells you when it’s safe to close the window. (Antti Savolainen, drkonqi MR #397)
Notable bug fixes
Plasma 6.6.6
Hardened the Task Manager widget against maliciously-crafted .desktop files for apps. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #6817)
Hardened the ksystemstats_intel_helper process against path traversal attacks. (Matthias Gerstner, ksystemstats MR #141)
Plasma 6.7.2
Fixed a recent regression that made certain screens incorrectly notify about being disconnected and re-connected in a loop after they went to sleep. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521826)
Fixed a recent regression that produced corrupted visuals on some rotated screens and with some older AMD GPUs. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521878 and KDE Bugzilla #521764)
Fixed a recent regression that broke the ability to drag desktop files and folders between screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521713)
Fixed a recent regression that made SDR content look a bit de-saturated for some screens while in HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521759)
Fixed a recent regression that made certain ICC profiles show the wrong colors. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522301)
Fixed a recent regression that made KWin lag and hang when playing certain poorly-optimized games via Proton. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #522005)
The implementation of the new “press and hold for alternative characters” feature now prioritizes compatibility for apps, fixing a massive number of bugs. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-keyboard MR #152)
The new Vietnamese calendar now shows the correct dates. (Trần Nam Tuấn, KDE Bugzilla #522099)
The new feature to show how much earlier or later a time zone is than your current one now correctly calculates the value for time zones with a half-hour offset that are earlier than your local time zone. Time is hard. (Michael Kohl, KDE Bugzilla #522037)
Forcing the use of the software pointer no longer makes it disappear when a window pushes a panel in “Dodge Windows” mode into its hidden state. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #521953)
The Mouse page in System Settings no longer shows layout glitches in X11. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #521992)
Text on the Networks widget’s Details tab can no longer visually overflow when it’s really long. (Manuel Alcaraz, KDE Bugzilla #522333)
Plasma 6.7.3
The “Kameleon” system service is now disabled by default, which prevents it from applying a color to your keyboard’s backlit keys even if the feature to apply colors to RGB keyboard backlighting is disabled. The context here is that we added support for the Steam Machine’s LED strip, and this also made it work for many keyboards, but exposed a pre-existing bug. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #521793)
Spectacle no longer includes the tooltip showing image dimensions in the final screenshot if you accept a rectangular region by double-clicking it. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #513715)
Plasma 6.8
Fixed the most common crash in Plasma, which could happen once in a while when using multiple screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #500044)
Minimizing the window of an RDP client no longer stops the video stream. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #497765)
Frameworks 6.28
XWayland-using apps no longer start to behave in a couple of weird and quirky ways after XWayland itself crashes and restarts. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwindowsystem MR #220)
Notable in performance & technical
Plasma 6.7.3
Fixed a recent performance regression that increased KWin’s CPU usage on some Intel systems using atomic mode-setting. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #522075)
Plasma 6.8
Implemented support for version 1.6 of the Emulated Input system. (David Edmundson, kwin MR #9112)
KWin now internally only uses OpenGL ES, which ensures that it will always be working since everyone will be using it — at least until Vulkan support is farther along. OpenGL ES is necessary for some old GPUs and turns out to be sufficient for everything KWin needs anyway, so we don’t anticipate any downsides from this change. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9488)
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To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here
Excellent piece, where are the netizens who should be fighting back those bills? Looks like we became very complacent and passivity reigns this time around. Didn’t think it was related to the pervasive centralisation already in place… but indeed that might be a strong contributing factor.
Several times I bump into articles praising this one. I’ve been test driving it a bit, the experience is still a bit bare but it’s clearly maturing. Definitely an option to keep an eye on in my opinion.
You sure you can trust those systems? It’s proprietary software and they’re clearly on a slippery slop. For something so security sensitive this is concerning.
Interesting paper (go to the full one for all the details) which shows that with the current architecture it’s really hard if not impossible to make safe systems with LLMs. This gives interesting insights in the weird form of proto-cognition those models exhibit.
Unsurprisingly cache locality is a very important factor. What’s interesting here is that it still applies to a language like Javascript where you’d expect to not have enough control on the memory layout to reap any benefits.
This is an ongoing series, but there are good insights about software architecture work in the first few articles. Shows quite well the important tradeoffs and the usual traps.
Every bottlenose dolphin invents a unique whistle that becomes its name
Tags: biology, nature, cognition
So using personal names is not an inherently human trait, this is confirmed through research now. Before their were signs and suspicions, but now the trail of evidences is strong.
A couple of months ago I improved some of our dialogs and this time I worked on some more. Did you know that you can just paste the clipboard’s content into the Dolphin file manager or on the desktop to create a new file from it?
Just paste your clipboard’s content to create a new file
Tobias Fella added a proper “platform message dialog” for Qt to use. This replaces the hideous Qt Quick message dialogs you could see in some places. With that, we are also finally able to play our message box sounds for Qt-only applications using QMessageBox (instead of KMessageBox or KMessageDialog). To do this, Qt sends an QAccessible::Alert event that is then handled by the relevant platform accessibility integration. On Windows it for example calls the win32 PlaySound API. However, I didn’t want to mess with Qt’s AT-SPI1 stack just for this. Now that we provide a custom dialog, we might as well play the sound from there.
Just like the “New File” dialog, the paste dialog mentioned above also displays the file icon now. It also tries to guess what kind of file it is and automatically suggests a matching file extension. For example, copying something that looks like HTML will suggest the name “pasted file.html”. You are of course still free to choose a different file name and extension.
An application can also suggest a name using the custom application/x-kde-suggestedfilename MIME type. Spectacle does this so a screenshot copied to clipboard and then pasted (rather than saved directly) will nevertheless use a “Screenshot_xyz” file name. The clipboard history now remembers the suggested name when it stores an entry so when you recall it later it will still use that name as expected.
Little preview icon when configuring syntax highlighting
When dropping a folder into Kate, all files contained within will be opened. Kate has always been able to open files on remote locations thanks to KIO but the drag and drop code only worked with local folders. This is now fixed and you can drop a folder from a SMB or other share into your Kate the same way as any local one.
A nifty addition to both the menu and settings page for choosing a syntax highlighting color scheme is a little preview icon similar to the application color scheme. This lets you roughly judge the appearance of the theme before selecting it.
Finally, KWin’s debug console (Open KRunner, type “KWin”) received a “Pick Window…” button. This way you can more easily find a particular window in the potentially long list of windows. The kwindowprop tool (KWin’s equivalent to xprop) now also includes the PID of the process owning the window.
Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface, a cross-desktop accessibility framework ︎
This week I shipped two new features for KeepSecret.
KWallet XML Import (!34)
The Import menu on the wallet page is now a submenu with two options:
-KeepSecret…
-KWallet XML…
Both import formats are converted into the same internal format, allowing them to use the existing import code. I only implemented import support, since exporting to the old KWallet format wasn't necessary because KWallet is being deprecated.
I added a Generate button to the Create New Entry dialog. Clicking it generates a random 16-character password and fills the password field.
The password is generated in SecretItemProxy::generatePassword() using QRandomGenerator::global(), which uses the operating system's secure random source. A character set is built from the selected options (lowercase letters, uppercase letters, numbers, and symbols), and each character is chosen randomly from that set. This also allows passwords to include symbols like !@#$%^&*.
The function returns a QByteArray instead of a QString, matching the existing code and avoiding an unnecessary copy of the secret in C++.
During code review, Michael K83 pointed out that secrets stored in normal QByteArray or QString objects are not automatically erased from memory after use. He suggested looking at how ksecretd and KeePassXC handle secure memory.
Marco Martin explained that an even bigger challenge exists once the password reaches QML. The password becomes a QString inside the QML engine, where Qt may create multiple internal copies that cannot be explicitly cleared. It will be addressed separately in issue #25.
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