Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in Plasma"! Every week we cover the highlights of what's happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.

This week there's big news: at long last, KWin has gained support for the initial version of the Wayland session restore protocol! This work was done by David Edmundson and Vlad Zahorodnii, and lands in Plasma 6.4.

Now, before you go celebrate in the streets, there are some big caveats:

1. This version of the protocol only supports window sizing, positioning, and virtual desktop placement.
2. It doesn't govern windows saving their internal content yet. That's coming later.
3. Toolkits and apps still need to opt in; nothing automatically starts working for free.

But this point is… this stuff is coming soon and in motion! Exciting times.

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.4.0

Overhauled the portal-based shortcut chooser window to look nicer and be easier to use. (David Redondo, link)

The double-click speed chooser now includes a test area you can use to test it out. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

You can now start an update in Discover straight from the notification, without needing to open the app and do it there. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

When editing a clipboard entry, the "Save" button now only becomes active if there has been a change to the text. (Fushan Wen, link)

Frameworks 6.14

Fixed a case where various messages in System Settings and apps would have links that did nothing when clicked. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.3.5

Fixed several KWin crashes. (Vlad Zahorodnii and Xaver Hugl, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4)

Fixed a glitch affecting people with NVIDIA GPUs that could make the lock screen go black or flicker under certain circumstances. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a visual glitch with window shadows when using Night Light on certain hardware. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Task Manager "audio is playing" icons specifically are no longer so blurry when using a fractional scale factor. (Marco Martin, link)

Plasma 6.4.0

Clicking on various apps' System Tray icons that want to display a menu on left-click now shows the menu, instead of a weird tiny window in the middle of the screen with one menu item in it. (David Redondo, link)

Re-added the "Edit Contents" global clipboard shortcut that accidentally got removed in Plasma 6.0. (Fushan Wen, link)

Fixed the Select All/None buttons on the Filter page of Plasma's desktop configuration window, which also got broken in Plasma 6.0. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a few cases where setting or resetting custom icons in the Kicker Application Menu widget didn't work properly. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Fixed a bug where selecting text in XWayland-using apps wouldn't correctly populate the clipboard when using certain clipboard settings. (Fabian Vogt, link)

Fixed auto-updates in Discover even moar betterer! (Yosuke Matsumura, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 1 very high priority Plasma bug (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 20 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 18 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.4.0

Plasma Browser Integration now supports Chrome and Firefox variants like LibreWolf and Ungoogled Chromium when run in a Flatpak. (Kristen McWilliam, link 1, link 2)

Improved performance when using Night Light and changing the brightness. (Xaver Hugl, link)

The Lock screen now respects the login timeout value coming from PAM, allowing it to be configured. (Akash Suresh, link)

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.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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:

• Triage and confirm bug reports, maybe even identify their root cause
• Contribute designs for wallpapers, icons, and app interfaces
• Design and maintain websites
• Translate user interface text items into your own language
• Promote KDE in your local community
• …And a ton more things!

You can also help us by making a donation! 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 a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Work done so far

Implemented the PvP mode by leveraging XMPP for communication, enabling the played to exchange moves. The code for this are implementd in connection.h, connection.cpp and bohnenspieltui.cpp.

Setting up the PvP mode

The player select the game mode they desires to play, for PvP the choice would be option P.

Connecting to XMPP server

To establish the chat room and enable the communication the player must provide their jabber id and password and the opponent’s JID (This should be done from both players side).

The program then establishes a connection to the XMPP server using the entered credentials. The game proceeds only when the credentials are verified.

Host and Turn Order

The program determines who will play first in a simple manner i.e., by comparing the lexicographical order of their jabber IDs.

Sending a move

When it’s player turn, they are prompted to enter their move. The move is validated and sent to opponent via the established chat room.

The board is updated locally and then the turn is passed to the opponent.

Receiving a move

When the move is received from the opponent, the program prompts the player to sync the board manually.

This is to ensure that both the players have their board in sync. Then the program prompts the user to enter their move and it game will be continued.

What’s next

• Automatic move sync
• The man page to explain the working to players.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-15.

A new security fund opens up to help protect the fediverse

Tags: tech, fediverse, security

This is clearly needed. This should increase the maturity of the security practice around Fediverse software.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/02/a-new-security-fund-opens-up-to-help-protect-the-fediverse/

Bored of it

Tags: tech, culture

Hear, hear! It sucks up all the air in conversation and obliterate imagination. As if we couldn’t do better.

https://paulrobertlloyd.com/2025/087/a1/bored/

Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research, language

This is very interesting research. This confirms that LLMs can’t be trusted on any output they make about their own inference. The example about simple maths is particularly striking, the real inference and what it outputs if you ask about its inference process are completely different.

Now for the topic dearest to my heart: It looks like there’s some form of concept graph hiding in there which is reapplied across languages. Now we don’t know if a particular language influences that graph. I don’t expect the current research to explore this question yet, but looking forward to someone tackling it.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/03/27/1113916/anthropic-can-now-track-the-bizarre-inner-workings-of-a-large-language-model/

The Slow Collapse of Critical Thinking in OSINT due to AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security, cognition

The “asleep at the wheel” effect is real with such tools. The consequences can be dire in quite a few fields. Here is a good illustration with OSINT.

https://www.dutchosintguy.com/post/the-slow-collapse-of-critical-thinking-in-osint-due-to-ai

Hardened File Backup Routine

Tags: tech, backup, security, complexity

Personal backups don’t have to be fancy… And probably shouldn’t.

https://wrongthink.link/posts/hardened-backup-routine/

git-withme - Peer-to-peer, encrypted, ephemeral Git collaboration

Tags: tech, tools, version-control, tools

It’s little known that regular Git has a server mode. The thing is that it’s not often useful beyond sharing over the local network. Know this tool leverages magic wormhole to share repositories with peers over the Internet. This is really cool stuff in my opinion.

https://git.sr.ht/~meejah/git-withme

.localhost domains

Tags: tech, networking, services

Neat little trick for services which you’d be running locally.

https://inclouds.space/localhost-domains

Pitfalls of Safe Rust

Tags: tech, programming, rust, safety

Sure, you get good memory safety with Rust. It’s important and welcome, but it’s just the beginning of the story.

https://corrode.dev/blog/pitfalls-of-safe-rust/

On JavaScript’s Weirdness - Stack Auth

Tags: tech, programming, javascript

A friendly reminder that Javascript is an endless pit of surprising behaviors. Watch out!

https://stack-auth.com/blog/on-javascripts-weirdness

A feel for the data

Tags: tech, data, data-visualization

Nice piece to give ideas about what type of diagram to consider depending what you’re exploring.

https://briefer.cloud/blog/posts/look-the-data/

The Best Programmers I Know

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, engineering, learning

This is a good list of skills and behaviour to develop if you want to get better at our craft.

https://endler.dev/2025/best-programmers/

How to develop a sixth sense for the long-term

Tags: tech, project-management, risk

Good approach to detect problems early and manage the risks they’ll bear.

https://www.rubick.com/long-term-sense/

Distrust Breeds More Distrust

Tags: tech, management, leadership, trust

It’s indeed a vicious circle. Also it seems easy to fall into this particular trap, I see it in many places.

https://mdalmijn.com/p/distrust-breeds-more-distrust

Strategic opportunism

Tags: strategy, leadership, management

This is indeed a very good way to approach planning. You shouldn’t be shackled to a too detailed strategy. The broad goals are the real value, then it’s about seizing opportunities to advance your position.

https://medium.com/@mshmsh5000/strategic-opportunism-7f2b8b255384

What it’s like to interview a software engineer preparing with AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, hiring, interviews, scam

Unsurprisingly, hiring scams are becoming more elaborate. Keep it in mind for your upcoming interviews.

https://www.kapwing.com/blog/what-its-like-to-interview-a-software-engineer-preparing-with-ai/

The spice of life

Tags: tech, business, marketing, learning

There’s some truth to this. It’s easier to market yourself as a specialist rather than a generalist… This doesn’t make it easy.

https://gomakethings.com/the-spice-of-life/

Bye for now!

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 16.0.1!

Some time ago we reached out to Wesley Gardner because, a bit belatedly, we saw he has published a great book on Krita, titled Draw and Paint Better with Krita.

For krita.org, Wesley wrote an introduction to his book!

Teaching art has been a passion of mine for a long time, and seeing students find their “inner voice” and push through barriers they thought insurmountable is one of the coolest things in the world. In 2021, I was approached to write a “how to digital paint” book, geared towards beginners to digital art, but with the goal of also having enough weight to give intermediate and advanced digital artists some fun exercises as well. Without second thought, I agreed, and knew that Krita would be the focal point of the book. Thus, in 2022, ‘Draw and Paint Better with Krita’ was published worldwide, and has become a sort of “guardian angel” guide for artists around the world, which I’m super humbled by and grateful for.

:

Krita’s everything that I believe digital art is about: Open access, customizable to fit your needs, easy to get started, and impossible to master. There’s always something new to learn in art, and likewise, there’s always something fun to learn in Krita. Whether it’s the various effects you can get with the ever-expanding layer management and adjustments, or the near-infinite pool of incredible custom brushes made by the community, there’s ALWAYS a new way to push yourself to that next level in your journey.

I’ve been a Krita user since Krita 3, and seeing how much it has evolved and expanded in the past few years has been unbelievable! It’s always installed on EVERY machine that I make art on, and is one of my “must-download” softwares the moment I get a new machine. It’s one of those programs that grows with you, and can handle absolutely anything you can throw at it. I’ve produced personal work and art prints, as well as professional client work for the likes of Star Wars, Warhammer 40k, and Riot Games, and the program never breaks a sweat. When I’m stumped on what type of video to make for my YouTube channel, I can always fall back on playing around in Krita, as it’s always a treat to poke around and learn new workflows.

Writing the book on Krita was a no-brainer, as I think learning Krita can help you learn ANY digital painting software, as the workflows are so similar. It’s the perfect entry-point for every artist that wants to work digitally, and it’s the perfect ending point for tenured veterans that need a little bit of “extra spice” to finish off their work and build their brand. If there’s one digital art program every single person needs on their machine, it’s Krita.

For real, what CAN’T Krita do? Go join the forums, be part of the community, and (if you’re financially able to, of course) donate somewhat regularly to the Krita Foundation. They do incredible work, and the fact that Krita’s available on Windows, Mac, AND Linux, for FREE, is still some sort of wizardry I can’t wrap my head around. For the Krita Team: Keep knocking it out of the park, it’s an honor to be a part of the Krita legacy, and for the team, and all artists out there:

Go make cool art.

Life:

Last week we were enjoying springtime, this week winter has made a comeback! Good news on the broken arm front, the infection is gone, so they can finally deal with the broken issue again. I will have a less invasive surgery April 25th to pull the bones back together so they can properly knit back together! If you can spare any change please consider a donation to my continued healing and recovery, or just support my work

• GoFundMe
• Patreon
• Github
• Donorbox

Kubuntu:

While testing Beta I came across some crashy apps ( Namely PIM ) due to apparmor. I have uploaded fixed profiles for kmail, akregator, akonadiconsole, konqueror, tellico

KDE Snaps:

Added sctp support in Qt https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging/kde-qt6-core-sdk/-/commit/bbcb1dc39044b930ab718c8ffabfa20ccd2b0f75

This will allow me to finish a pyside6 snap and fix FreeCAD build.

Changed build type to Release in the kf6-core24-sdk which will reduce the size of kf6-core24 significantly.

Fixed a few startup errors in kf5-core24 and kf6-core24 snapcraft-desktop-integration.

Soumyadeep fixed wayland icons in https://invent.kde.org/neon/snap-packaging/kf6-core-sdk/-/merge_requests/3

KDE Applications 25.03.90 RC released to –candidate ( I know it says 24.12.3, version won’t be updated until 25.04.0 release )

Kasts core24 fixed in –candidate

Kate now core24 with Breeze theme! –candidate

Neochat: Fixed missing QML and 25.04 dependencies in –candidate

Kdenlive now with Galxnimate animations! –candidate

Digikam 8.6.0 now with scanner support in –stable

Kstars 3.7.6 released to –stable for realz, removed store rejected plugs.

Thanks for stopping by!

In this blog post, I would like to talk about the improvements in documentation navigation you can see in the Qt Framework's documentation for the Qt 6.9 release. 

As a former Apple guy, it pains me a bit to say this, but I’m coming to believe that the whole “It Just Works” thing is a temporary illusion.

Oh, it can be achieved! But the real trick lies in keeping it. This came to mind while I was watching a video about one of Bambu Labs’ very impressive-looking Apple-style “It Just Works” 3D printers, and felt myself drawing a parallel between the world of 3D printing and our more familiar KDE world.

As I mentioned recently, my first real introduction to the world of free software was 15 years ago with 3D printers, back when the field was dominated by RepRap hackers designing open hardware and software. And last year, I bought a new printer for the first time in over a decade. After drooling over a bunch of very cool Vorons, I eventually settled on a Prusa Mk4 instead of a different Bambu printer that looked very impressive at the time: printing faster, having an enclosed chamber and smoother wireless functionality, being cheaper, and looking prettier.

But the Prusa felt like KDE: simple by default, but powerful when needed. Big friendly community. Built by a company led by one of the early RepRap hardware hackers. Buying it was investing in the people helping to keep their part of the industry open, rather than private. No spyware, no lock-in, no phone app or internet connection needed. Can’t be bricked if the company goes out of business. Open, hackable, humane, trustworthy.

I’m making this sound like the decision was some sort of ideological compromise, but the Prusa Mk4 is also excellent. It’s as good or better in many ways, almost as much in others, and its UX still pretty polished. Maybe it’s not Apple polished, but it’s very easy to use and produces great prints. I did have to invest a bit more time and money into the Prusa upfront, but now I have a tool I can truly rely on, not because it’s got a seamless auto-updating cloud-based AI-enabled UI, but because it doesn’t.

And since then, both companies went in exactly in the directions I expected: Prusa released a new version of their printer that’s cheaper and better, plus a $100 kit for existing owners so they don’t have to buy a whole new thing… while Bambu released a firmware upgrade that lets them control how your Bambu printer can be used.

It Just Works… until it doesn’t.

I’m glad I went with the Prusa, the same way we’re all glad we went with KDE over Apple or Microsoft. In KDE we know this well, so it’s up to us to spread the message to everyone else: resist the lure of “easier now, screwed later.” This is where the big commercial offerings start to fail: anything proprietary and closed source that Just Works may simply stop working at any time. You’ll invest in it, and it’ll work out great for a while, but then start to worsen, break, or exploit you.

Even as we invest in making our software easier to use, we need to level the playing field by advertising our advantages in ownership, privacy, personalization, and freedom. Our software is trustworthy because it can’t be taken away by us or anyone else; you’ll be able to use it over the long term, developing skills and efficiencies over time. Investing in KDE is investing in yourself, rather than someone else’s bottom line.

Last week I attended this year’s FOSSGIS Konferenz in Münster, Germany, focusing on public transport and indoor navigation topics.

Indoor Navigation

We use indoor map rendering and indoor routing in KDE Itinerary for e.g. train stations. There were a number of interesting talks and discussions in that area:

• A 2.5D visualization of buildings and especially of the vertical connectivity (stairs, elevators, etc) between floors, by a team from TU Dresden, with a free implementation available. Compared to our current 2D view this makes it easier to understand how to move between floors, but it brings new challenges as well (video).
• Indoor localization and routing including an AR demo by the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG). The routing is done via Unity, which uses the same library underneath that we use as well. Localization is using a mix of sensors available in normal smart phones, which is particularly interesting for us. Unfortunately like most similar systems the implementation isn’t published (talk).
• Work on importing building geometries for 400+ buildings of TU München, using IFC BIM data. That’s the best way to get high-quality building geometries into OSM I think, but while there has been previous work on building an import toolchain for this, getting the actual BIM data has been elusive due to various concerns by building owners.
• Modelling and tagging of infrastructure in and around train stations in OSM (session notes).

And of course there was also the yearly offline FOSSGIS edition of the OSM indoor meetup for connecting everyone working on that subject (translated session notes).

Open Transport

The other big topic for me was public transport routing, which we do in Transitous, for use in Itinerary and many other apps.

There were several talks and poster sessions in that area:

• Katharina presented her work on an explorative long distance journey planning UI (English version from FOSDEM here). I’d really like to see Transitous become a platform to build such innovative UIs on top, so you can focus on that rather than redoing the entire data handling and routing.
• My own talk introducing Transitous.
• Felix spoke about the routing capabilities of MOTIS, the routing engine Transitou is built upon.
• René showed work on developing and standardizing data formats for describing public transport vehicles in great detail. That’s badly needed for considering accessibility during routing, the current modelling in GTFS (basically “wheelchair=yes|no”) is way to simplistic for that.
• A talk about DB Regio’s vehicle position processing. Especially deriving delay estimates from position data is highly relevant for Transitous, but unfortunately neither their data nor their code seems to be openly available.

There also has been a lot of hallway track discussion on this:

• Together with several MOTIS users and contributors we reviewed and updated the MOTIS feature wish list.
• There are ideas for collaborating on a public transport optimized geocoder, between Nominatim, Transitous and other people needing this. Currently this is usually based on OSM data, but additionally using schedule data would allow things like considering the number of lines or trips at a stop for ranking. “Meta-stations” were another subject, ie. if you select “Paris” as the destination any of its major railway stations and airports would be expected destination, rather than just the first stop inside the city boundary.
• GTFS data quality was a prevalent topic, including during the offline FOSSGIS edition of the Open Transport Meetup, and now also with the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy (BKG) joining everyone else in exploring the wonders of this. More eyes (and more pressure) can only help here.
• Possible datasets for elevation models usable for routing, for Transitous something particularly interesting for first/last mile bike routing.
• Plans for a Transitous sprint/hack weekend are getting a bit more concrete, with two promising options in June/July.
• Ideas for improving Transitous’ outreach activities and social media presence/PR.

Also, if you are interested or involved in FOSS or Open Data topics around mobility/transit keep October 17/18 free, there’s an exciting announcement coming up shortly.

OSM

The FOSSGIS conference is of course much larger than just those two topics, and while those kept me occupied most of the time I managed to pick up a few more things as well:

• Pirmin’s talk on showing realtime data layers with MapLibre should come in handy for getting live updates onto the map view for monitoring our emergency and weather alert aggregation server. This talk also featured a Transitous live demo, something I didn’t dare doing myself.
• Frederik’s work on PostPass could turn out to be a vastly more efficient way to extract region or timezone boundary polygons than our current approach that takes hours and needs a full local OSM planet file.

And as always when hanging out with people from different communities there’s experiences to share on things like mentorship and funding programs as well as nowadays sadly also on defense measures to protect our infrastructure from overly aggressive AI crawler bots.