Akademy 2026 will be a hybrid event held
simultaneously in Graz, Austria, and online. The
Call for Participation is open!
Send us your talk ideas and abstracts.
Why talk at #Akademy2026
Akademy attracts artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers,
companies, public institutions and many other KDE friends and contributors.
We celebrate the achievements and help determine the direction for the next
year. We all meet together to discuss and plan the future of the Community
and the technology we build. You will meet people who are receptive to your
ideas and can help you with their skills and experience. You will get an
opportunity to present your application, share ideas and best practices, or
gain new contributors. These sessions offer the opportunity to gain support
and make your plans for your project become a reality.
How to get started
Do not worry about details or slides right now. Just think of an idea and
submit some basic details about your talk. You can edit your abstract after
the initial submission. All topics relevant to the KDE Community are
welcome. Here are a few ideas to get you started on your proposal:
How KDE can empower building robust communities in changing political climates
Work towards KDE's goals:
Streamlined Application Development Experience, We care about your Input, and
KDE Needs You
Giving people more digital freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy with KDE software
Advice on how to participate for new users, intermediates and experts
New developments/plans for KDE Frameworks, Plasma, Applications and other projects
30 years of KDE: achievements, highlights, and what’s next
Anything else that might interest an audience of long-time, new, and potential KDE contributors!
We're currently working on porting Qt to HarmonyOS. For our CI and developer machines, we need a number of third-party libraries built for HarmonyOS. Cross-compiling open-source C and C++ libraries for this platform has been a manual, error-prone process. Each library has its own build system, whether CMake, Autotools, or Meson. Each needs individual attention to produce correct binaries for the OHOS target. We have been maintaining a hand-written shell script that builds libraries one by one, with per-library workarounds for cross-compilation quirks.
With our vcpkg fork, that script is now a single command.
In my opinion, KDE Connect is one of the finest pieces of software KDE has ever produced. It lets you easily pair your devices and makes them work together. Copy some text on your computer, paste it on your phone. A call comes in and the video you’re watching in your browser pauses. How cool is that? For the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on even tighter integration between KDE Connect and the Plasma desktop.
Battery Monitor displaying status about devices paired wirelessly using KDE Connect
By adding a corresponding back end to Solid, KDE’s hardware abstraction framework, your phone’s battery status will show up in the “Power & Battery” popup just like a wireless mouse would. The key advantage of reporting a KDE Connect device as storage media is that it can show up in various places just like a USB drive would, including the Places panel in Dolphin and “Disk & Devices” in Plasma’s system tray. Right now, the Places panel entry is actually manually added by kdeconnectd creating a bookmark. This also means that any modifications done to the entry, such as hiding it, will be lost once the device disappears. If instead it is a proper Solid device with a unique identifier, the Places panel will remember that the device was hidden next time it is discovered. Additionally, PowerDevil, Plasma’s power management daemon, already automatically issues a notification when a connected external device runs low on battery.
Now that the fact that you can browse your phone’s storage remotely via KDE Connect is more obvious, I spent some time improving the user experience when doing so. Since KDE Connect is cross-desktop and cross-platform it uses sshfs to provide access to the phone. It doesn’t implement a proper KIO worker like we normally would since that really only works in KDE applications. This unfortunately comes with a couple of downsides: for example, the device is mounted into /run/user/<uid>/<deviceid> which is gibberish that will be shown to the user in the address bar. More importantly, though, it makes the file manager think it’s a local path (which is normally fast to access) and could lead to UI freezes when the connection is slow or unstable.
To improve this, I made use of KIO’s ForwardingWorkerBase. This is a tiny KIO worker that just rewrites a URL and forwards it to a different location. This way, the application sees a “remote” kdeconnect://device/path URL and keeps everything nice and asynchronous but under the hood still uses the sshfs infrastructure we already have. It’s what the magic desktop:/ URL uses that parses the name of .desktop files (so your get nice application names) but other than that merely reads from /home/<user>/Desktop. This also makes the entry in the Places panel match up with the URL being browsed and ultimately makes the device’s name appear on the address bar instead of an ugly UUID.
No more gibberish /run/user/somethingsomething URL on the address bar
While at it, I also added a “KDE Connect Devices” link to the “Network” folder, like we already have for Bluetooth, MTP, and Apple devices. Finally, when there is only a single storage location on the device, such as “Internal Shared Storage”, it redirects into it automatically. This saves one click when opening the device and puts you directly where your stuff is. The back end has just been merged and will be released next month as part of KDE Frameworks 6.26. However, since there’s still a bunch of infrastructure work needed around it, the back end is disabled by default. We will likely need to have at least KDE Gear 26.08 and Plasma 6.7 released that will include some necessary changes before we can flip the switch.
If you run latest KDE git builds, please give it a try and let me know what you think! You need to set the SOLID_ENABLE_KDECONNECT=1 environment variable to use it. To enable all debug output to aid debugging, set QT_LOGGING_RULES=kf.solid.backends.kdeconnect*=true or use KDebugSettings.
During Season of KDE 2026, Tanish Kumar worked on cleaning up the UI in Lokalize, KDE’s translation tool. The main task was fixing an annoying bug where the menu bar kept jumping around whenever you switched tabs, which was solved by giving the menus a stable “skeleton” in the KXMLGUI .rc files. Along the way, a bunch of “ghost actions” were discovered - menu entries that existed only in XML - and actually implemented the missing ones like Cut, Copy, Paste, Alternate Translation, Save All, Revert All, and Close All. He also built a Bookmark Manager dialog so translators can see all their bookmarks in one place.
Navya Sai Sadu and Kumud Sagar fixed navigation inconsistencies in the Editor Tab where shortcuts like “Approve and Go Next” failed to respect active filters and custom ordering in the Translation Units view. They ensured consistent behavior across all related shortcuts, including Next Ready, Next Non-Empty, and Next Bookmark.
They unified the traversal logic so navigation always follows the filtered and ordered entries and users of Lokalize can now navigate through Translation Units using the keyboard shortcuts or the options in Go menu properly..
Additionally, Kumud identified Lokalize’s on-disk file tracking mechanism and began improving its handling of external file updates.
Jaimukund Bhan fixed foundational issues with the Glossary file, ensuring it could be properly loaded, saved, and autosaved, and cleaned up the codebase by removing an obsolete Restore function that no longer made sense once autosaving was in place. Several UI bugs were resolved, including the editor failing to clear when all terms were deleted and incorrect pre-selection behavior when the app started on the Glossary tab. In the second half, Jaimukund improved the manual term addition workflow by replacing silent blank entry creation with a proper dialog prompt, preventing accidental accumulation of empty entries. He also fixed a broken keyboard shortcut for switching to the previously active tab by replacing an index-based tracking variable with a widget pointer, which remains valid even as tab positions change.
Aditya Sarna made a full Figma redesign for the Glossary tab, which was referenced in several places to implement comprehensive UI and UX improvements. The work involved close collaboration with translators to understand user pain points and iterating on designs based on feedback from the design group. It included replacing button text with icons and adding tooltips to the Add and Delete buttons to clarify their purpose. This was followed by designing a new delete functionality, which introduced a cross button for each entry to make deletion more intuitive. Several additional UI changes were implemented, including shifting elements and improving the overall structure and layout of the Glossary tab. Furthermore, the workflow for adding new terms was refined by moving note text into the dialogue box and enhancing its layout, resulting in a cleaner, more intuitive and user-friendly interface.
Varun Sajith Dass worked on improving the proofing capabilities of Lokalize and implemented a reactive character consistency check that alerts translators in real-time when special characters are mismatched between the source and target strings. This involved debugging Qt UI signals, resolving macOS build issues with KIO workers, and creating a persistent status bar warning system to enhance the overall translation workflow.
Vishesh Srivastava worked on adding Appium-based UI testing to KDE’s Lokalize. Vishesh started with a small bug fix and unit test to familiarize with the codebase and then built a complete Appium test from scratch, including basic tests and a full end-to-end workflow. Another thing done was adding accessibility ids in the UI so Appium could interact with the editor. The tests were integrated into the CMake system, ensured they ran independently of the user, and can run with kde-builder tests with a flag. By the end, Vishesh had developed a functional UI testing framework for Lokalize, along with documentation to help future contributors.
Advaith Sathish Kumar project was transforming mentorship.kde.org into a proper onboarding system for new KDE contributors. On the homepage, the hero section was redesigned, placeholder routing with experience based navigation was replaced, social media links were added, and the news cards to include author, date, and tags were also redesigned. For the /mentees page, I added past mentee details, implemented pagination, and added client-side filtering by year, program, and technology.
Aryan's project was to make mentorship.kde.org better so that new contributors who want to work with the KDE ecosystem have a better onboarding experience. As part of this effort, a new "/programs" page was added. It gives a structured overview of the main KDE mentorship programs and links to help newcomers find their way around the opportunities more easily.
He also changed the card template to better organize the repository, making it more structured, easier to maintain. Aryan also filled the /resources page with more useful resources for new contributors.
Mohit Mishra worked on decoupling the bundled dblatex fork from the docs-kde-org repository and fixing PDF generation for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages for KDE documentation. This involved switching the TeX engine to XeTeX from pdfTeX and then re-integrating the KDE styles. The outputs are now nearly identical, with CJK languages rendering correctly as well. There is still work in process to ensure there are no regressions and we can officially switch to this generation.
Aviral Singh and Keshav Nanda worked on fixing KDE's translation tools so translators can easily locate where text belongs in the code. Keshav corrected the underlying logic to make sure these paths are always accurate, and Aviral built an automated testing system to validate the fix across KDE projects.
Siddharth Chopra worked on Marknote to add source mode for notes. The Source Mode essentially allows users to bypass the rich-text WYSIWYG interface and directly edit the raw markdown. While working on this feature, Siddharth also made a major refactoring of the codebase (on both the QML and C++ sides). Spell checking using Sonnet was also added, among other small fixes and improvements.
Hrishikesh Gohain worked on setting up KEcoLab's measurement environment with Wayland on Fedora 43 KDE Plasma Desktop. He ported the Okular measurement scripts from the X11-based xdotool to ydotool and kdotool, which work on both X11 and Wayland. His contributions can be found in this merge request. The original project plan had included measuring the KDE Plasma desktop environment itself. However, porting the Okular scripts to Wayland in the new lab setup turned out to be more complex than expected. Moreover, measuring a desktop environment may need some infrastructure changes to the KEcoLab setup. Hrishikesh is currently working towards it and will continue after SoK26 is over.
Chuyen Nguyen wrote automation scripts and created environments for them to perform some of the KDE promotional team's insight data collection tasks. The first script collects KDE's X, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads accounts' follower and post counts using a mix of API requests and web scraping methods alongside a local Nitter instance. The second script scrapes the KDE subreddit's Reddit Insights page for weekly metrics on page visits, unique visitors and its total member count and includes a Docker image that allows for headless execution. The final script collects articles related to KDE using Google Alerts emails and performs sentiment analysis on them using a locally run large-language model. The figure below shows output from the follower and post count scraper, Reddit Insights page scraper, and Google Alerts evaluator respectively.
Onat Ribar worked on bringing Plasma Setup, KDE's first-run setup wizard, to Plasma Mobile. Plasma Setup was built with desktop screens in mind, and running it on a phone showed overall accessibility issues including but not limited to overlapping components, content clipping on short window sizes, session buttons that remained tappable beneath wizard pages, and a timezone selector built around an interactive map that was nearly unusable on a small touchscreen. Onat worked through these systematically across the wizard's QML UI, resulting in an adaptive experience across screen sizes and input methods without affecting the desktop UX. Two MRs have been reviewed, merged, and are now part of the upstream codebase in repositories plasma-setup and plasma-workspace.
Sairam developed a XMPP extension that adds a chat client directly into the KDE Falkon browser's sidebar. Written in Python using Slixmpp, the project lets users message each other and run interactive WebXDC apps right inside their chat window. It supports modern XMPP features like Message Carbons (XEP-0280) for device syncing, Message Corrections (XEP-0308) for edits, Emoji Reactions (XEP-0444), and HTTP File Uploads (XEP-0363). This setup turns Falkon into a communication tool without even leaving the browser.
J Shiva Shankar added XMPP bookmark syncing to the Falkon browser. The basic setup is working, so whenever you add or update a bookmark, it successfully syncs across your devices. Deleting bookmarks still has a few bugs right now, but they have been documented. He plans to keep contributing after SoK to squash these bugs and get the feature completely polished.
Sayandeep Dutta helped in redesigning the MankalaNextGen GUI with Kirigami and added designs fixing the Main UI and the Game with game boards and shells. He also added music with Qt to Mankala and made translations in Tamil and Hindi. Made assets for the game variants using Krita in their traditional designs and motifs. Started with the review process of MankalaNextGen with the CI build.
Pavan Kumar enhanced MankalaEngine by adding an opening book and investigated performance of multithreaded alpha-beta search using OpenMP, Pthreads and Taskflow. In addition, he enhanced MankalaNextGen by creating visual assets for game boards and seeds and also created logos for MankalaEngine and MankalaNextGen.
Very technical post, feel free to ignore if you're not working on KDE stuff.
Since I'm on KDE Linux, I use flatpak apps for pretty much everything, such as Kontact suite.
I wanted to test out how my Breeze changes would look like in KMail and other apps, but I didn't
want to build the whole PIM stack.
Here's how I tested it by building the flatpak-kde-runtime in CI, downloading the built files
and using it as a repository for testing any changes to org.kde.Platform locally.
Akademy 2026 will be a hybrid event held simultaneously in Graz, Austria,
and Online.
Hundreds of participants from the global KDE community, the wider free and
open source software community, local organisations and software companies
will gather at this year's Akademy 2026 conference. The event will take
place in Graz and Online from Saturday, 19 September to Thursday, 24 September.
KDE developers, artists, designers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and
supporters worldwide will meet face-to-face to discuss key technology issues,
explore new ideas and strengthen KDE's innovative and dynamic culture.
Register now and join us for engaging talks,
workshops, BoFs and coding sessions. Collaborate with your fellow KDE
contributors to fix bugs, pioneer new features and immerse yourself in the
world of open source.
For more information about the conference, visit the
Akademy 2026 website.
Qt 6.11 brings a set of meaningful improvements to the Qt GRPC library, focusing on stability, safety, performance, and new capabilities that make building gRPC™ based applications in Qt more powerful and productive.
@kbroulik:kde.org
smankowski
