Akademy 2026 will be a special edition, marking the 30th anniversary of KDE! This milestone event will take place at the Graz University of Technology in Graz, Austria.

This birthday edition of Akademy will continue to bring together contributors, users, partners, and friends of KDE to reflect on three decades of collaboration, innovation, community growth, and commitment to Free Software. Just like previous years, Akademy 2026 will be a hybrid event, offering both on-site and online participation.

We will be announcing the exact dates soon. Until then, follow us on Mastodon and Lemmy for the latest Akademy updates!

About Graz

Graz is the second-largest city in Austria and the capital of the federal state of Styria. Known for its well-preserved old town, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Graz offers a blend of historic charm and modern vibrancy. The city is home to numerous cultural attractions, including the iconic Schlossberg with its clock tower, the Kunsthaus Graz, and the Murinsel, a unique architectural feature on the River Mur. Graz is also renowned for its educational institutions, particularly the University of Graz and the Graz University of Technology, making it a hub for innovation and research. The city's lively atmosphere, beautiful parks, and rich culinary scene make it an ideal destination for both leisure and professional visits.

About Akademy

For most of the year, KDE, one of the largest free and open software communities in the world, works online communicating over email, instant messaging, video-conferencing, forums and mailing lists. Akademy provides all KDE contributors with the opportunity to meet in person to foster social bonds, work on concrete technology issues, discuss new ideas, and reinforce the innovative, dynamic culture of KDE. Akademy brings together artists, designers, developers, translators, users, writers, sponsors and many other types of KDE contributors to celebrate the achievements of the past year and help determine the direction for the next year. Hands-on sessions offer the opportunity for intense work, bringing those plans to reality. The KDE community also welcomes companies building on KDE technology to Akademy, as well as those who are looking for opportunities.

Aurorae is a decoration engine that allows you easily using third party decoration themes from KDE Store.

It’s been around for quite a while and it has a plenty long history. However, in the recent years, it has been somewhat neglected. The UI trends changed, e.g. rounded corners are all the rage now, but there has been no changes in Aurorae to allow theme creators to follow those trends more easily. There are also performance issues. In comparison to the default Breeze decoration theme, it performs quite poorly, unfortunately.

What is Aurorae anyway?

In Plasma, we have a C++ library that’s used to implement window decorations called KDecoration. Both Breeze and Aurorae use KDecoration, but the main difference between the two is that the former directly implements a window decoration that follows Breeze style, while the latter is just a very themeable window decoration.

Aurorae supports both QML and SVG themes. With a QML theme, you need to write some QML code to define how the window decoration should look and behave. With an SVG theme, you need to provide a bunch of SVG files that specify how the window frame and various buttons look. Under the hood, SVG themes are effectively built as QML themes.

QML is pretty cool because with a few lines of code, you can get something that works and looks very decent. But for our usecase, it’s also a heavy tool, and due to the way how QtQuick works, it’s very challenging to have proper fractional scaling support. To be fair, normal applications that use QtQuick are mostly fine, it’s just that we have a pretty unique usecase where we need full control where every individual pixel gets painted.

Aurorae V2

Recently, I started a rewrite of Aurorae with a few goals in mind. The first goal is to improve performance so KWin doesn’t struggle when you resize a window (just to be clear, no, this doesn’t mean that there are performance issues in QtQuick. The way QML decorations are rendered is inefficient. We render a QtQuick scene in an offscreen texture, then download its contents, and then upload its contents in another texture. These roundtrips kill performance, and they are necessary because of KDecoration API constraints). The second goal is to open up the road for fractional scaling support improvements, like fixing misaligned window border edges or gaps between the decoration and the window contents. The third goal is to prepare the foundation for future improvements and to provide more tools so artists can create themes that reflect “modern” stylistic tendencies.

In this rewrite, raw KDecoration and KSvg APIs are used. This makes aurorae decorations quite lightweight and it significantly improves performance. Some fractional scaling issues have already been fixed, while others still need more work. Window decorations are rendered on the CPU side. While, yes, it will be nice to have everything done on the GPU side, doing things on the CPU side is also not that of a big bottleneck right now. In the future, we may follow up on doing more things on the GPU, but for now, it is not high priority.

The main focus has been on improving performance issues and preserving compatibility with the previous implementation of SVG decoration themes so decorations look more or less the same way. There may be some (unintentional) differences, but they should be very minimal.

What about QML decoration themes then? The main idea behind them is brilliant, but after so many years, there are not that many window decoration themes that use QML. In either case, the original (V1) and rewritten (V2) aurorae engines live side-by-side, but the future of V1 is unclear. QML and SVG decoration themes will use V1 and V2, respectively.

Future plans

At the moment, the goal is to continue polishing and optimizing V2. There are certain limits how far we can push things due to the theme format. Some parts of the theme force us to do some things, which ideally we shouldn’t do.

It’s highly likely (not saying this for sure though!) that there will be a V3, which is going to address some theme limitations and add support for new features, for example rounding bottom window corners or outlines.

If you’re a decoration theme creator and would like to see some particular feature in Aurorae, feel free to reach out to me (@zzag) on Matrix (e.g. in #kwin) or file a feature request at https://bugs.kde.org (product: kwin; component: aurorae).

Welcome to the October 2025 development and community update.

Development Report

Text Rework Progress

The Text Tool's Tool Options have been overhauled. There's now a button to access the Text Properties docker, along with an option to create new texts with current properties or with a style preset. Options to switch between using visual or logical cursor direction for bidirectional text, and pasting rich or plain text have also been added. (Change)

The other addition is Type Setting Mode, which shows transform handles for the font size and baseline-shift. With preformatted or pre-positioned text, character transforms are also possible. Holding Shift shows different baselines to switch to. (Change)

In the area of file formats, basic support has been added for PSD text layers, vector masks, vector strokes, vector parametric shapes, and guides. (Change)

Wolthera discusses these changes in the Text Tool thread and asks again for feedback on a proposal for splitting character and paragraph properties.

Touch Input Fixes

Carsten has continued to fix issues with touch input in the Stable branch.

Long-press handled has been further improved. Long-pressing a slider-spinbox no longer shows text selection handles when not in text edit mode. The long-press distance is now calculated correctly, so a slight movement won't cancel it. The kinetic scrolling timeout no longer adds onto the long-press timeout. (Change)

Kinetic scrolling by left-click has been disabled on the animation timeline to not interfere with dragging frames and other operations. (CCbug report) (Change)

Popup-at-cursor widgets such as the Selection Action Menu now appear at the touch location instead of cursor location. (Change)

The Edit Shapes Tool now works properly with touch, instead of only making selections. (bug report) (Change)

Wayland Support

Basic HDR support for the canvas on Wayland has been implemented by Dmitry. Testing instructions and discussion of issues can be found in the forum thread. (Change)

Plans for 5.3.0's Upcoming Release

Krita 5.3.0 is scheduled to enter feature freeze on November 21st. This means no new features will be accepted for the next version, and developer focus will shift to finishing features already in progress and fixing bugs.

After a bugfixing period of a few months, the first beta testing release is currently planned for February.

Community Report

October 2025 Monthly Art Challenge Results

14 forum members took on the challenge of the "The Burden of Power" theme. And the winner is… The Burden of Power by @Famouzy

The October Art Challenge is Open Now

For this month's theme, winner @Famouzy has chosen "Civilization Engulfed by Nature".

Featured Artwork

Best of Krita-Artists - August/September 2025

This month's Best of Krita-Artists Nominations thread received 21 nominations of forum members' artwork. When the poll closed, these five wonderful works made their way onto the Krita-Artists featured artwork banner:

Autumnal Street by @Paulo

Young Escherstein! by @jimplex

Bee Macro by @Brian_Bigelow

Interstellar Gura by @RavioliMavioli

Peaceful Stream by @CrazyCatbird

Best of Krita-Artists - October/November 2025

Take a look at the nominations for next month, and suggest your favorite latest artworks to be featured. Don't forget to vote when the poll opens on November 11th!

Ways to Help Krita

Krita is Free and Open Source Software developed by an international team of sponsored developers and volunteer contributors. That means anyone can help make Krita better!

Support Krita financially by making a one-time or monthly monetary donation. Or donate your time and Get Involved with testing, development, translation, documentation, and more. Last but not least, you can spread the word! Share your Krita artworks, resources, and tips with others, and show the world what Krita can do.

Other Notable Changes

Other notable changes in Krita's development builds from October 20, 2025 - November 11, 2025.

Stable branch (5.2.14-prealpha):

• Android: Make app fullscreen by default. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Canvas Input Shortcuts: Add Toggle Eraser Preset to canvas input shortcuts. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)

Unstable branch (5.3.0-prealpha):

• Blending Modes: Add Marker blending mode. When used on a brush in Build up painting mode, it increases the layer's opacity only when the stroke's opacity is greater while mixing the colors. It's similar to Alpha Darken, but adheres to alpha lock/inherit alpha and interpolates between colors cleanly. (Change, by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Shortcuts/Toolbars: Add actions for each Transform Tool mode. (Change, by Stuffins)
• Toolbars: Toolbar actions' icons can now be custom-picked in Configure Toolbars, useful for actions that do not have icons by default. (Change, by Pavel shlop)
• macOS: Sign and notarize nightly builds, allowing them to be run without workarounds. (Change, by Ivan Yossi)

Nightly Builds

Pre-release versions of Krita are built every day for testing new changes.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable "Krita Plus" (5.2.14-prealpha): Linux - Windows - macOS (unsigned) - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Or test out the latest Experimental features in "Krita Next" (5.3.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux - Windows - macOS - Android arm64-v8a - Android arm32-v7a - Android x86_64

Plasma's first-run experience (FRE) / out-of-box experience (OOBE) has seen significant improvements in security recently.

Although first off I think I maybe hadn't mentioned yet how the project was renamed.

Previously known as "KDE Initial System Setup" (KISS), the project has been rebranded to "Plasma Setup" and now sits nicely alongside other system projects like "Plasma Desktop", "Plasma Mobile", "Plasma Keyboard", etc.

Enhancing Security in Plasma Setup​

We received a notice of potential security issues from the folks at openSUSE, which have now been addressed.

This sort of thing is a great example of why it can be so difficult to provide ETAs and timelines for software development: unexpected issues often arise that need to be addressed before other planned work can proceed, and these issues can take time to investigate and fix properly; in this case, the security issues required careful review and testing to ensure that they were resolved without introducing new problems, and delayed our initial release by weeks.

I had very little experience with this sort of security-minded defensive programming before this, so it was a great learning experience for me personally as well. It required a whole lot of reading and research to understand the best practices and principles involved, and I definitely have a better feeling for how to think about defensive programming in the future.

It amazes me the kinds of things people will try to do to break software, and many of them (like path traversal attacks) are things I would never have thought of on my own!

I'd like to thank the openSUSE security team for responsibly disclosing these issues, and for their patience while we worked through them. Their help has made Plasma Setup more secure for all users, and I appreciate their dedication to improving the security of open source software.

A massive thank you specifically to Matthias Gerstner for the multiple rounds of detailed and thoughtful reviews and suggestions on the MR to address these issues. Your help was invaluable, and it was a pleasure working with you! 🙇‍♀️ 💙 🦎

Looking Ahead​

Plasma Setup is nearly ready for initial testing and adoption. There are a couple more items to wrap up, but (barring further unforeseen delays!) we are very close to being able to release it for early adopters to try out! 🎉

Calamares is a Linux system installer. During installation, it asks the user where they are on the globe, in order to set the timezone correctly on the installed system. Calamares displays the nearest timezone after you click on a map. I would like to leverage that a little for social good (or at least a tiny bit of awareness).

The last time I wrote about the Calamares timezone selector, I also said it is terrible.

One thing I do like about the timezone selector is that it supports translating the name of a timezone. That way, even though the string in the timezone database is Europe/Kiev – a relic of the time-period that the timezone database was conceived – it displays the correct Europe/Kyiv. That’s when you run Calamares in English, anyway.

I added timezone translations to Calamares because a friend asked for it, and then did a couple of Dutch translations. That is because Dutch has exonyms (names in Dutch for other places) and calls Berlin, Berlijn and Paris, Parijs. There is a timezone Europa/Berlijn. The official Dutch name – last I checked – of Kyiv is Kiev, though.

The current translations addresses only a tiny fraction of the timezones, most of them ones that I have personally paid attention to, and I’d like to change that.

So here is the social project: I want, for every timezone-location (in FreeBSD, those are listed in /usr/share/zoneinfo/zone.tab) a local name. Please send them to me by email or as a change request in Calamares on Codeberg, the relevant file is tz_local.ts.

I imagine a lot of the ones in Europe will be unchanged, although I feel like Europe/Chisinau is missing accents, Europe/Athens should be Αθήνα. Those are relevant, but I’m more interested in imported names. The exonyms (what others call a place, like “Berlijn”) could be endonyms (what is the local name, like “Berlin”).

For everywhere where the name of the timezone was imported, I want to know what it would be locally, written locally. From Africa/Harare (this one might already be accurate, but for comparison purposes, pretend it was Africa/Salisbury, like in an atlas from 1922) to Australia/Broken_Hill to America/Edmonton (which could plausibly be ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ if we pick the Cree name for the area) to America/Santiago to Asia/Dubai (دِبَيّ in Emirati Arabic) they all deserve a local name and I’d like to make that possible in Calamares.

Some time back I posted a bran muffin recipe. That recipe uses eggs, and I received a comment by email, perhaps from Gregor S. They pointed out some things about the egg-milk-industrial complex and how I should avoid using eggs. That annoyed me a little, although it was written respectfully and factually. Anyway, I’ve given it some thought and experimentation, and here’s a vegan recipe for mnietballs (vaguely Dutch for “not meatballs”).

I wrote a mnietballs recipe in 2023, which uses eggs as well – so that recipe is ovo-lacto-vegetarian, while this one is vegan. Vegan, but now the soy-industrial complex is involved.

• 1 tea cup (I have a specific glass one in mind, probably 220ml) of dried soy chunks. Soak them in 1 cup of warm water for 10 minutes, then squeeze out all the water.
• 1 tablespoon of chia seeds and 1 tablespoon of whole linseed, with 2 tablespoons of water. Let stand for 10 minutes until it all gloms together.
• 1 tea cup of rolled oats.
• whole wheat flour as needed.
• 2 tablespoons of ketjap manis.
• spices to suit (I like the tandoori masala I get at Toko Weuro).
• optional, finely chopped onion.
• optional, dried chopped parsley.

Mix it all together and knead it to a lumpy paste. Add wheat flour until it is fairly stiff and you can shape it into balls about 3cm in diameter. Let stand for a while for it to glom together better. Optionally roll each ball in some breadcrumbs. Fry in plenty of oil.

Quality of live improvements in Kate, basic HDR support in Krita on Wayland and touch improvements in Photos

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.

As part of our yearly fundraiser, you can adopt one of KDE's apps and we can share with the whole world how awesome you are and how much you're doing to support us.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE app scene, let's dig in!

Multimedia/Graphics Applications

Photos Image Gallery

Anders Lund added support for navigating between images when zoomed in using a touchscreen or stylus in Photos (25.12.0 - link). He also made the viewer auto-zoom when releasing a pinch when appropriate (e.g., the image is now smaller than the view) (25.12.0 - link).

Anders also enabled the slideshow feature on mobile (25.12.0 - link).

Travel Applications

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Jonah Brüchert implemented auto-resolving from railway station names to coordinates based on Nominatim (the geocoding engine powering OSM) (25.12.0 - link).

Volker Krause added support to the extractor for citycity.se, Comboios de Portugal, and Wiener Linien barcodes, and improved a bunch of existing extractors (25.12.0 - link 1, link 2, ...).

PIM Applications

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Christoph Erhardt fixed a segmentation fault when migrating an existing Akonadi database to SQLite (25.12.0 - link).

Nicolas Fella dropped the barely used feature to show an "About Data" dialog in Akonadi resources (25.12.0 - link).

Office Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Jack Barmes added new bookmark actions to add and remove books in various context menus in Okular (26.04.0 - link).

Utilities Applications

Kate Advanced text editor

Waqar Ahmed improved Git support in Kate. The list of branches now shows the latest activity (25.12.0 - link).

Additionally, he improved the Quick Open dialog, and it is now possible to jump to a specific line and column by entering something like 10:5 (25.12.0 - link).

Dennis Lübke added a plugin to transparently edit encrypted text files with GPG in Kate (25.12.0 - link).

Social Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins added an informational Keyboard Shortcuts settings page to NeoChat (25.12.0 - link).

Joshua also improved the design of the room notification settings and made it more consistent in terms of wording with the context menu used to configure notifications (25.12.0 - link).

Among a multitude of other small fixes, he improved the user experience related to the basic Jitsi meeting button to show whether a meeting is in progress, and to only enable it when the user has permission to start a meeting (25.12.0 - link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Carsten Hartenfels added a way to trigger the "toggle eraser preset" action via touch gestures in Krita (Krita 5.2.x - link).

Wolthera van Hövell ported the text tool dock to QML (link).

Dmitry Kazakov implemented basic HDR support on Wayland (link).

Games

Chessament Chess tournament manager

Manuel Alcaraz replaced the hamburger menu with a menu bar (link).

Third-Party Applications

Easy Effects - Audio Effects for PipeWire Applications

Easy Effects 8 was released and now uses Kirigami! Read the full announcement for details.

…And Everything Else

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.

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 just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

A mobile-centric look at the Plasma 6.5 release

About three weeks ago we released Plasma 6.5 and it's high time we talk about the plethora of improvements and bug fixes that arrived in Plasma Mobile and related projects. Let's not delay any further and get right into the juicy details!

Waydroid Integration

While our end goal is obviously KDE for world domination and a resulting breadth of native apps, we're not quite there yet and until then we wanted to make it easier to use and integrate apps running through Waydroid into your Plasma Mobile system. To that end, Florian made it so you can now set up and manage your Waydroid install right from the comfort of your settings app and turn on/off the Waydroid container from the quicksettings dropdown.

(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Lockscreen

The lockscreen is one of the most often used and seen parts of a phone's UI and it has two jobs: Securely lock your device, but ultimately, get out of your way. So far we succeeded at the first of these jobs, but in 6.5 Devin made sure we do in the second as well. Plasma Mobile's lockscreen will now load much faster, due to reusing the existing status bar and action drawer process from the shell, instead of loading them separately each time the lockscreen is loaded. This also has the positive side effect of notifications now properly being synced between the lockscreen and unlocked shell. (Devin Lin, Link)

Florian also worked on some other nifty additions:

• Add double tap to lock
• Polish UI feedback for lockscreen actions

(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2, 3)

Folio Homescreen

Micah improved and expanded the background blur effect for both the Folio and Halcyon homescreens, resulting in more consistent use of blur.

(Micah Stanley, Link)

Devin put in some work to make Folio more keyboard navigation friendly, as well as improving it in various places under the hood: from cleanup to performance improvements there's a good mix of changes here

(Devin Lin, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Meanwhile, Florian added double tap to lock to Folio, as well as a number of other improvements.

(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Halcyon Homescreen

Devin unified some code paths between Halcyon and Folio, and added a small settings page to Halcyon. Like with Folio, he also ported Halcyon to use a new applet registration method which allows it to be precompiled by qmlcachegen

(Devin Lin, Link 1, 2, 3)

Settings

There's a good bunch of stuff here as well:

• Separated out the navigation settings from the Shell settings page to its own page and added a small tutorial for the gesture navigation mode there. (Luis Büchi, Link)

• Added a setting to change the maximum number of quicksetting columns, really useful for tablets! (Sebastian Kügler, Link)

Devin made sure mobile settings pages only show up on form factors that they make sense on so we stop showing the mobile shell settings on desktop. (Devin Lin, Link 1, 2)

Taskswitcher

Luis has worked on the taskswitcher internals to make it more compatible with qmlcachegen. This lays the groundwork for improving its performance while also making the code more maintainable for the future.

(Luis Büchi, Link 1, 2, 3, 4)

Haptics

Devin has done the first step on porting over our haptics plugin to use feedbackd as backend. In the future, this will allow us more fine-grained control over haptic feedback, as well as better cross-desktop compatibility

(Devin, Link)

Action Drawer

Besides Devin's work on making the action drawer overlay over the lockscreen mentioned above, there's also been some more work on improving performance of it and its contained quick actions.

For all of you running multi-monitor setups with Plasma Mobile and/or regularly docking and undocking, thanks to Sebastian there's now a quick settings to configure multi monitor layouts when several monitors are connected.

(Devin Lin, Link)

(Florian Richer, Link)

(Sebastian Kügler, Link)

Envmanager

The envmanager, responsible for keeping track of the settings environment of the shell has gotten more robust while improving how Plasma Mobile and Plasma Desktop coexist: there is now less cross-talk between potentially conflicting settings between the two shells making a hybrid setup (like on a 2-in-1 laptop/tablet combo) easier to use. In light of the work on Plasma keyboard, envmanager now also properly supports changing of the selected virtual keyboard for the mobile session.

(Devin Lin, Link 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)

UI Polish

We've also spent some time improving the general look and feel of the UI. This includes updating some elements to use more appropriate theme colors, using system-wide animation durations and better layouting to reduce overlapping text/UI controls.

(Devin Lin, Link 1, 2, 3, 4)

(Micah Stanley, Link 1, 2, 3)

(Florian Richer, Link 1, 2)

(Luis Büchi, Link)

Plasma Keyboard

While not technically part of the 6.5 release cycle, we've recently also released the first unstable version (0.1.0) of our new virtual keyboard. While it's not ready for prime-time just yet, progress is quick and it's already something enthusiasts may want to tinker with - so tinker away and do let us know of any feedback you might have!

...and there’s much more. To see the full list of changes, check out the complete changelog for Plasma 6.5.

Contributing

Do you want to help with the development of Plasma Mobile? We are a group of volunteers doing this in our free time, and are desperately looking for new contributors, beginners are always welcome!

See our community page to get in touch!

We are always happy to get more helping hands, no matter what you want to do, but we especially need support in these areas:

• QA Testing
• Telephony (Calling and SMS)
• Camera
• App development (Photo Viewer, Browser, Audio Recorder, Games, etc.)
• Shell work
• You can also check out our Plasma Mobile issue tracker for more details.

Even if you do not have a compatible phone or tablet, you can also help us out with application development, as you can easily do that from a desktop!

Take Plasma Mobile for a spin! Check out the device support for each distribution and find the version which will work for your device.

If you have any further questions, view our documentation, and consider joining our Matrix channel. Let us know what you would like to work on or where you need support to get going!

Our issue tracker documentation also gives information on how and where to report issues.