This is a recipe post. Allergens: contains gluten, lactose, and alcohol.

The oliebol is a Dutch thing for new year’s eve. From mid-November you can find stalls in front of supermarkets, at the home-improvement store, outside the mattress store, in squares everywhere. The oliebollenkraam. And then the boxes of Koopman’s Oliebollen Mix start blocking the aisles at the supermarket, and the 5 litre jugs of frying oil appear on shelves. More information about oliebollen (and how as a food-product they’re not limited to the Netherlands) can be found on the internet.

It’s a thing.

At new year’s eve, the neighbours at the end of my little street get together – Adriaan, Adriaan, Antoon, and whoever else shows up – to fry oliebollen under my car port. Each year our getup gets a little more fancy, with better screening from the wind, improved lighting, what have you. There’s a fire to keep us warm, music (Snob 2000 is a good pick), and whatever weird-ass alcoholic beverages we’ve collected this year. Slovenian “Punch” liqueur? Elster kruitenbitter? Maracuja cream? Lychee fizz? Pour it.

Here’s what I made this year, since I don’t use the boxes of mix. The mix is good enough, but there’s some joy to be had in do-it-yourself. Besides, as a daily baker-of-bread I have everything in-house anyway. Recipe is good for about 20 boils, depending on the size of the spoon used to spoon the batter into the deep-fryer.

Volkoren Herfstbok Oliebollen

Wets:

• 250ml Grolsch Herfstbok, warmed up in the microwave (about 1min at 600W)
• 250ml milk, also warmed up

Drys:

• pinch of salt
• 8g (a small scoop) brown sugar
• 6g (a heaping teaspoon) dry yeast
• 250g whole wheat flour (for bread; the local windmill adds a little extra gluten and ascorbic acid)
• 250g white flour (patentbloem from the supermarket)

Lumps:

• 125g of raisins or currants, soaked in warm water and then drained

Mix the wets. Mix the drys. Mix the drys into the wets and stir to a smooth(-ish) batter. Stir in the lumps. Let rise for at hour or a little more at 40℃. Fry spoonfuls (I have a small soup-ladle that yields a nice size) at 180℃ for 5 minutes, flipping them in the hot oil after about 3 minutes to brown them nicely on both sides.

Volker mentioned that we need better blog post coverage of events, so hereby I’m doing my part :)

I attended the yearly 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3), together with a number of KDE people and my local hackerspace Spline.

This year I wanted to attend a few more talks live and in person, which worked somewhat well. I’ll include a list of talks in the end, in case you are looking for some ideas for talks to watch on media.ccc.de.

Just like last year, I spend a large amount of time at the KDE assembly. Once again, we were part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat. My initial worries about our new location being being in a fairly dark hall instead of the bright and very visible area near the central stairs turned out to be unjustified. We received tons of great feedback and had many nice and motivating conversations with other developers and users.

Victoria started a Konqi hotline service on the Congress phone network, which was in high demand.

The most important activity for me at Congress was meeting some Transitous contributors I had not yet talked to in person. It was great to meet you all.

There were also multiple opportunities to connect with GNOME developers and designers. We identified some low-level components that we might be able to share. We exchanged our ideas for making contributing as easy as possible for new contributors, a topic which GNOME is doing fairly well at as far as I can tell.

Projects

Later on, the KDE assembly turned into a (very small) mini-KDE-Sprint. We shipped much improved maps in KDE Itinerary, based on the MapLibre project. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. This should also fix the pixelated rendering at certain zoom level that sometimes showed with the previously used map. Another advantage is, that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. A big Thanks to Volker, Carl and Tobias who helped with bundling and testing MapLibre for Android.

Afterwards, we looked into options for making a more general KDE maps application, but this will take a bit more work. However, we already have a number of great components, which should make this much easier, such as the code for accessing public transport data known from KDE Itinerary, KPublicTransport, the library for reading opening hours (KOpeningHours) and our library for accessing weather forecasts, KWeatherCore. That leaves this as mostly a matter of tying together all of these components in a nice UI. However, the Qt bindings for MapLibre don’t currently expose enough details for us to do that, so some preparation is required.

I also managed to work on a few long-standing tasks in Transitous. It is now possible to add manual configuration options to public transport feeds in France, which used to be overwritten by a script. Additionally, it is now possible to automatically add all feeds for a country from the Mobility Database, which should make adding new countries a lot easier.

Sessions

• Railway-bubble Meetup Meetup of people interested in a diverse list of railway-adjacent topics. I joined the subgroup interested in crowd-sourcing GPS positions of trains, where I presented the minimal prototype I built for Transitous.
• Transitous Meetup We met with some users of the Transitous API and apps, and exchanged ideas for future improvements. A major topic was support for accessibility features, like considering elevator status in routing. We also discussed possible ways to improve the accuracy and details of data in Germany, where schedules go through a long pipeline that loses details and introduces long delays in the delivery of changes. Thanks to Julius for organizing and moderating this.

Talks

• Zentrum für Politische Schönheit: Ein Jahr Adenauer SRP+ und der Walter Lübcke Memorial Park - A quite fun and hopeful talk, considering the broader topics covered, about the work of a political art collective in Germany.
• All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale Investigation into different kinds of fraud patterns based on Deutschlandtickets.
• Human microservices at the Dutch Railways: modern architecture, ancient hardware? - Insights into the operations of Dutch Railways
• Infrastructure Review - Interesting statistics on the huge scale of infrastructure involved in the Congress

As you can see, I still left a lot to watch online over the following few days.

Here comes Kaidan 0.14.0! It includes some great new features and fixes!

Most of the work has been funded by NLnet via NGI Zero Entrust and NGI Zero Commons Fund with public money provided by the European Commission.

Advanced Media Sharing

It is now possible to select media to be shared while being offline. Once you are connected, all media is automatically uploaded. Even downloads can be enqueued to be started as soon as you are online. In addition, ongoing transfers are canceled on disconnecting and automatically restarted once connected again. Up- and downloads can be manually canceled and restarted as well.

Filtering XMPP Providers for Account Creation

Kaidan’s manual registration now allows to filter all XMPP providers by various properties. For example, you can choose whether only providers are shown that store their data in a specific country or whose service runs on renewable energy. That is possible because Kaidan uses the data from XMPP Providers.

Highlighted Messages

Messages are now precisely highlighted on various actions. A border is displayed around a message if you open its context menu, search it, or jump to if from a reply. That makes it possible to quickly see the relevant message.

XMPP URIs

If you received an XMPP URI such as xmpp:alice@example.org, you can paste it directly into the field for adding a new contact. There is no need to remove any characters that are required to be machine-readable. The same applies to XMPP group chat URIs.

Changelog

There are several other improvements. Have a look at the following changelog for more details.

Features:

• Keep draft messages on top of pinned/unpinned chat list items (pehg)
• Optimize thumbnail creation (fazevedo)
• Display border around searched/referenced message instead of bar (melvo)
• Display border around message if its context menu is shown (melvo)
• Highlight message’s avatar if hovered (melvo)
• Display provider chat (used for welcome messages and service announcements) as such (melvo)
• Always display same name and proper avatar initials for notes chats (melvo)
• Allow to cancel downloads/uploads (fazevedo)
• Allow to restart canceled uploads (fazevedo)
• Allow to resend failed message via context menu (melvo)
• Retrieve support addresses from server instead of provider list (XEP-0157: Contact Addresses for XMPP Services, XEP-0128: Service Discovery Extensions) (melvo)
• Allow adding contact by entering XMPP URI (including authentication of OMEMO 2 keys) (melvo)
• Allow joining group chat by entering XMPP URI (melvo)
• Add option for allowing SASL PLAIN (needed for servers using LDAP) to custom connection settings (melvo)
• Add filtering options to choose provider for registration (melvo)
• Cancel file transfers on disconnecting from server (fazevedo)
• Add support for offline media sharing queue (fazevedo)
• Restart downloads canceled on logout once logged in (melvo)
• Remove all related data on message removal (such as reactions and media) (melvo)

Bugfixes:

• Fix displaying message reaction details (melvo)
• Fix adding unneeded separator on mention after new line (melvo)
• Wrap hint for actions needing user to be connected to server (melvo)
• Fix displaying icons on Windows (pehg)
• Fix adding new line at cursor position (melvo)
• Ensure that own encryption devices are not removed if notes chat is removed (melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan requires KIconThemes (for Windows) now
• Kaidan requires Qt6GuiPrivate (for Qt 6.10 or above) now
• Kaidan requires Qt 6.7 now
• Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.13 now

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Last week on Dec 26 we had the yearly family admin day and a day later 39C3 (the 39th Computer Chao Congress) started. I usually try to watch interesting talks about security, reverse engineering and hardware. Most if not all I wanted to join are available as recordings and I will add a list of the ones I enjoyed most.

While watching the talk about the End-of-10 campaign (I have met Joseph at Akademy 2024 in person) I was reminded at one spot to my job as family admin. When the presenters referred to the administration of a Linux system compared to a Windows one. I got reminded of chats with folks in my town who talked about “re-installing Windows” a few times during the year because something was broken. I don’t remember when I last re-installed one of the family computers.

Bringing Linux closer to the family already started many years ago. I started out using Linux already in the last millennium. My wife at the time used a Windows 2000 system. At some point (seems to be usual for Windows systems) I needed to install a fresh system. That was the time, when I installed OpenOffice and told my wife that this is the word processor to be used in the future. Of course, she asked why I hadn’t installed the MS Suite, but when you tell someone with legal training that we don’t have a license, that answers the question without further inquiry. So it was Windows 2000 with OpenOffice as word processro and spreadsheet program and Pegasus Mail as mail reader.

At some point the hard drive of this computer broke and I was lucky to be able to rescue the most important files off of it. Because I did not have a replacement drive at hand, I simply setup a TFTP bootable Linux system keeping all the files on the network drive on the Linux server in my house. This allowed me to use the same box but without a hard drive. So this hard drive crash in the early 2000s allowed me to introduce my wife to Linux.

When my kids got into the age to go to grammar school, they have seen me working on the computer during our summer vacation and also wanted to play with it. Since I did not have games with me, I installed KTouch, a typewriter trainer for learning to touch type for them. They had a lot of fun and actually learned how to touch type in the following weeks.

Later on, when they got their own computers, it was clear to install a Linux system, because they were already used to it. They liked writing stories of all kinds and used LibreOffice for it. I had a few arguments with teachers at their school why we don’t have the usual widespread tools. I remember one time though, when my daughter came home and reported, that they now have new white boards at school. Due to German bureaucracy, the hardware was financed but the money for application software licenses (beyond the operating system) was not included in the budget. So one of the teachers simply installed free software like the OpenOffice suite and the problem was solved. Well, only to some extent, because the other teachers did not know how to operate this software. This was the time, when my daughter – out of the sudden – gained a big advantage.

Later, she enrolled in university to study computer science and bought herself a new computer. A Samsung Book 2 with a pre-installed operating system (guess which one). She was playing around with it for some time when she came to me and said “Daddy, please install some real software on it. I can’t use it the way it is”. I had a bit of a hard time to find the right Linux distro which already supported it at the time but we got it working. And she was more than happy when we ported all the data from her old laptop over. Today, five years later, she is still using it after a few updates of the operating system. Oh, 3 months after she enrolled, she withdrew again to start a career as paramedic.

My mom on the other hand, uses Linux also for more than 15 years now. At one point, she told me that she needs a new computer and asked if I could provide support for it. I told her, that I would only provide support if we will install Linux on the computer. At first, she was a bit scared, but today she is happy that I can provide even remote support from the other end of the world and that things are simply working.

All in all, coming back to the End-of-10 campaign, I see that I am not affected by all of this. All – well most of all – of my family members are already using Linux for a long time. Of course I made sure to install KDE as the desktop environment and that they have KMyMoney to maintain their finances

Thanks for reading until here. The post got longer than expected. And since I promised to leave links to the 39C3 talks (and one from 37C3 and 38C3 each which need to be watched in series) here they come:

37C3

• Reverse engineering a train to analyze a suspicious… and it’s follow-up on

38C3

• We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure

39C3

• A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet
• All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale
• To sign or not to sign: Practical vulnerabilities in GPG & friends
• Hacking washing machines
• KIM 1.5: Noch mehr Kaos In der Medizinischen Telematikinfrastruktur (TI)
• Who cares about the Baltic Jammer?
• Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone
• Excuse me, what precise time is It?
• Schlechte Karten – IT-Sicherheit im Jahr null der ePA für alle
• Pwn2Roll: Who Needs a 595€ Remote When You Have wheelchair.py?
• FeTAp 611 unplugged
• How To Minimize Bugs in Cryptography Code
• Spectre in the real world: Leaking your private data from the cloud with CPU…
• Celestial navigation with very little math
• BitUnlocker: Leveraging Windows Recovery to Extract BitLocker Secrets
• “End Of 10”: How the FOSS Community is Combatting Software-Driven Resource and Energy…

All 39C3 recordings.

My initial post on Ni! OS gained more interest than I expected. Any time I jokingly do something, people react to it more than when I do something serious. :)

As a reminder, KDE Ni! OS is not a distribution, but a configuration for NixOS that aims at providing a ready-made immutable system for KDE users and developers with similar features to those of proper immutable KDE distributions.

If the Google search AI tells you it is a distribution, do not trust it:

Further, if the Google search AI tells you Ni! OS is a code name for KDE Linux, do not trust it:

Repository

The project got a repository at invent.kde.org which is currently in a very rough/bare state. Could be useful to existing NixOS users, but has a long way to go to become a proper resource on how to install and use Ni! OS.

Logo

NixOS has its own (quite cool, if you ask me) logo which doesn’t suite the comical image Ni! OS is trying to achieve.

For this reason, Ni! OS now has a proper custom logo – representing a – a shrubbery! – one that looks nice, and not too expensive.

It is also meant to represent the way NixOS achieves immutability. Many packages are present on the system, but hidden from the plain sight as they belong to the previous system versions or are just hidden-from-the-user dependencies of other packages.

After my talk about TeX syntax-highlighting font at TUG2025 conference, then vice-president of TeX Users Group, Boris Veytsman approached me with a proposal to develop a Math counterpart for the beautiful Arsenal font designed by Andrij Shevchenko.

What followed was a deep dive into the TeXbook to learn about math font parameters, OpenType Math specification, and related documentation & resources. Fortunately, FontForge has really good support for editing Math tables; and the base font used (KpMath-Sans by Daniel Flippo) already had all the critical parameters set (which needed slight adjustments). I started the development of Arsenal Math by integrating the glyphs for Latin letters, Arabic numerals, some symbols etc. and with proper scaling & stem thickness corrections, for regular, bold, italic and bolditalic variants, plus math calligraphic letters. In addition, a lot of Math kerning (known as ‘cut-ins’ in OpenType parlance) was added to improve the spacing.

Being an OpenType font — XeTeX, LuaTeX or some Unicode math typesetting engine (e.g. MS Word) is required to use Arsenal Math. Boris did testing and provided many feedback, and Vaishnavy Murthy graciously reviewed the glyph changes I made. The CTAN admins were quite helpful to get the font accepted into the repository. There is a style file and fontspec file supplied with the fonts to make the usage easy. The sources are available at RIT fonts repository.

Boris also donated funding for the project, but he had already paid me many folds by mailing The TeXbook autographed by Donald Knuth for me, so I requested the LaTeX devfund team to use funding for another project. Karl Berry suggested to write an article about the development process, which is published in the issue 46:3 of the TUGboat journal, and has a lot more technical details.

The learning experience of Math typesetting internals, and contributing to the TeX ecosystem has been a fulfilling spare-time work for me in 2025. Many thanks to all those involved!

We achieved significant milestones during 2025 on the Ocean design system for Plasma. Here is a video recap of all of the things that happened.

It’s been a few years since I did an end-of-year “highlights in KDE” post, but hopefully better late than never! 2025 was a big year for KDE — bigger than me or any of us individually.

My focus these days tends to be on Plasma, so that’s mostly what I’ll be mentioning on the technical side. And as such, everything here is just what I personally noticed, got involved with, or got excited about. Much more was always happening! Additional KDE news is available at https://planet.kde.org.

The Wayland transition nears completion

For several years, Plasma has been transitioning to the newer Wayland display server protocol, and away from the older X11 one. 2025 is when it got real: we announced a formal end to Plasma’s X11 session in early 2027.

To make this transition as seamless as possible for as many people as possible, the people involved with the Plasma shell and especially KWin did a herculean amount of work on improving Wayland support on topics as varied as the following:

• Accessibility
• Drawing tablets
• HDR
• Color management
• P010 video color
• Overlay planes
• XRandr emulation
• Screen mirroring
• Custom screen modes
• Implemented support for a large number of protocols, including xdg-toplevel-tag, xdg_toplevel_icon, ext_idle_notifier, color_representation, fifo, xx_pip, pointer_warp, and single_pixel_buffer
• Pre-authorization for portal-based permissions
• Clipboard and USB portals

Thanks to this and earlier work, most FOSS operating systems (also known as “distributions” or “distros”) that ship Plasma are defaulting to the its Wayland session these days — including big ones like Arch Linux, Debian, and Fedora KDE. Kubuntu is planning to for the next LTS as well. As a result, our (opt-in) telemetry numbers show that 79% of Plasma 6 users are already on Wayland. I expect this number to increase once SteamOS and the next Kubuntu LTS version default to Wayland. So you see, it really is driven by distros!

Now, Plasma’s Wayland support isn’t perfect yet (any more than its X11 support was perfect). In particular, the two remaining major sources of complaints are window position restoring and headless RDP. We’re aware and working on solutions! I can’t make any promises about outcomes, but I can promise effort on these topics.

This admittedly somewhat messy and plodding transition has taken years, and consumed a lot of resources in the process. I’m looking forward to having it in the rearview mirror, and 2026 promises to be the year that enables this to happen! Expect a lot of Wayland work in 2026 to make us ready for the end of the Plasma X11 session in 2027.

Plasma continues to mature and improve

In addition to what I mentioned in the Wayland section, Plasma gained a whole ton of user-facing features and improvements! Among them are:

• Rounded bottom window corners
• Day/night global theme and wallpaper switching
• Saved clipboard items
• Speed graph in file transfer notifications
• Panel cloning
• Per-virtual-desktop custom tiling layouts
• “You missed X notifications while in Do Not Disturb mode” feature, and auto DND mode enabling while in a fullscreen app or video
• Install hardware drivers in Discover (on supported distros)
• New app highlighting in Kickoff
• UI overhaul for KMenuEdit and Info Center’s energy page
• Playback rate selector in the Media Player widget
• Three-finger pinch to zoom
• UX and video quality and file size improvements in Spectacle
• GPU usage monitoring in System Monitor
• Use existing user accounts for RDP/remote desktop
• Printer ink level monitoring
• Inline print queue viewing in the Printers widget
• Only show the screen locker and logout screen UI on one screen, not all of them
• OCR in Spectacle (coming in Plasma 6.6)
• Monochrome colorblindness filter (coming in Plasma 6.6)
• Option for automatic screen brightness on supported hardware (coming in Plasma 6.6)
• Option for virtual desktops to only be on the primary screen (coming in Plasma 6.6)

Phew, that’s a lot! And Plasma is getting rave reviews, too. Here are a few:

• https://www.xda-developers.com/after-decades-of-windows-linux-kde-spoiling-me-rotten/
• https://www.pcworld.com/article/2803571/dont-toss-your-windows-10-pc-try-switching-to-kde-plasma-instead.html
• https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/18/kde_plasma_64_released/
• https://txtechnician.com/blog/adventures-in-linux-3/kde-plasma-the-ultimate-configurable-linux-desktop-19
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hf7TtqHVA0

A decade ago or so, it used to be that Plasma wasn’t seen much as the default option for distros, but that’s changing.

Today Plasma is the default desktop environment in a bunch of the hottest new gaming-focused distros, including Bazzite, CachyOS, Garuda, Nobara, and of course SteamOS on Valve’s gaming devices. Fedora’s Plasma edition was also promoted to co-equal status with the GNOME edition, and Asahi Linux — the single practical option for Linux on newer Macs — only supports KDE Plasma. Parrot Linux recently switched to Plasma by default, too. And Plasma remains the default on old standbys like EndeavourOS, Manjaro, NixOS, OpenMandriva, Slackware and TuxedoOS — which ships on all devices sold by Tuxedo Computers! And looking at the DIY distro space, Plasma is by far Arch users’ preferred desktop environment:

It’s a quiet revolution in how Linux users interact with their computers, and my sense is that it’s gone largely unnoticed. But it happened, so let’s feel good about it!

In fact, if we exclude the distros that showcase their developers’ custom DEs (e.g. COSMIC, ElementaryOS, and Linux Mint), at this point the only significant distros missing here are the enterprise-oriented ones: Debian, RHEL, SLE, Ubuntu, and the like. It’s something for us to work on in 2026, but clearly the current state is already great for a lot of people, including gamers, artists, developers, and general users.

KDE Linux grows

On the subject of operating systems, at Akademy 2024, Harald Sitter revealed the KDE Linux operating system project to the world. But in 2025, it spread its wings and began to soar.

Despite technically still being an Alpha release, I’m using this in-house KDE OS in production on multiple computers (including my daily driver laptop), and a growing number of KDE developers and users are as well. Thanks to its QA and bulletproof rollback functionality, you can update fearlessly and it doesn’t feel like an alpha-quality product. You don’t have to take my word for it; ask Hackaday and DistroWatch!

This project has been very special to me because I believe that KDE needs to take the reins of OS distribution in order to offer a cohesive product. The earlier KDE neon project already broke the ground necessary to make this kind of thing socially possible; now KDE Linux is poised to continue that legacy with a more stable and modern foundation.

To be very clear, none of this is an attempt to kill off other distros. Far from it! In fact, an explicit goal is to showcase what a well-integrated KDE-based OS looks like, so others can take notes and improve their offerings. And there’s still lots and lots of room for specialized distros with different foci, and DIY distros that let people build their own preferred experiences.

I’m really excited to see where this project goes in 2026. You can learn more on the project’s documentation wiki: https://community.kde.org/KDE_Linux

Fundraising performance is completely bonkers

This is the second year that Plasma users have seen a donation request pop-up in December. And it marks the second year where this not only didn’t kill KDE, but resulted in an outpouring of positivity and a massive number of donations! Last year I wondered if it was repeatable. It’s repeatable.

That plus an even more ambitious and well-organized end-of-year fundraiser propelled KDE to its best ever Q4 fundraising sum: nearly €330,000 as of the time of writing! KDE e.V. (the non-profit organization behind KDE) is going to end up with a 2025 income that’s a significant fraction of a million Euros, and mostly crowdsourced, too.

I say this a lot, but sums like this truly help keep KDE independent over the long haul. But how, specifically?

First, by being mostly funded by small donors, KDE retains its independence from any powerful and opinionated companies or individuals that happen to be patrons or donors.

Second, with such a large income in absolute terms, KDE e.V. now has resources to rival the private companies in KDE’s orbit that contribute commercially-funded development to KDE (like mine), and that’s a good thing! It means a healthy diversity of funding sources and career opportunities for KDE developers. It’s systemic resilience.

And finally, with money like this, KDE e.V. is able to fund projects of strategic interest to KDE itself, and fund them well. Historically KDE’s software has been developed by volunteers working on what’s fun, companies funding what supports their income, and some public institutions funding their specific use cases. And that’s great! But it leaves out anything that’s not fun, doesn’t make money, and isn’t directly relevant for governments. These are the kinds of large projects or maintenance efforts that KDE e.V. is now able to fund if necessary.

It’s a big deal, folks! This kind of fundraising performance puts KDE on the map, permanently. And it’s mostly thanks to people like you, dear readers! The average donation is something like €26. KDE is truly powered by the people.

If you can make a donation please do so, because it matters, and goes far!

KDE’s overall trajectory

It’s positive. Really positive.

But when I joined KDE in 2017, the community was a bit dejected. After giving my very first public conference talk at Akademy 2018, multiple people came up to me and said some variant of “thank you for this optimistic vision; I didn’t think I could feel positive about KDE again.”

These reactions were really surprising to me; without the benefit of history, I had no idea what the mood was or how things had been in the recent past. But some statistics about contributor and commit numbers bear out the idea that 2013-2017 was a bit of a low period in KDE’s history, for various reasons.

But since then, KDE has come roaring back, and you see it in positive trends like adoption by hardware vendors and distros, great fundraising performance, good reviews, positive user feedback, and new contributors.

Everything isn’t perfect, of course; there are challenges ahead. Bugs to fix and stability problems to overcome. The Wayland transition and a new theming system to complete. Features to add that unlock Plasma for more users. More effort to put into getting Plasma-powered operating systems and devices into the mainstream.

But the KDE community is up for it. KDE is a mature institution that’s resisting enshittification, and making the world a better place in ways both big and small. My work on KDE represents by far the most meaningful part of my career, and I hope everyone else involved can feel the same way. What we do matters, so let’s go out there and do it even better in 2026!

Like every year I took a couple of days off at the end of the year to wind down and spent some quality time with the family. Time just flies and it feels like the year had only just begun. I have also taken the time to revisit some of my work-in-progress merge requests and tried to push them over the finish line.

More than five years ago, at the peak of the pandemic, I wrote a patch to add a “Push to talk” feature to Plasma’s volume keys handler. For meetings, I even bought a cheap 8€ USB foot pedal to operate it like a bus driver! It’s basically a single button USB keyboard. Unfortunately, back then KGlobalAccel, our global shortcuts handler, couldn’t report key press vs. key release. Therefore, it was a bit of a hack abusing key auto-repeat: pressing the key, a timer was started and the microphone unmuted. Every key repeat reset the timer and only when it expired the microphone was muted again. Fortunately, nowadays we can query a global shortcut’s state and detect when it is pressed and released again. I decided to revisit the patch and made it much simpler. I hope to finally include it in Plasma 6.7 coming out next summer.

Speaking of shortcuts, Meta+P (p as in projector) lets you quickly switch between a couple of common display arrangements. For when the one you want isn’t included, there’s now a handy button in the corner to bring you to the full display settings. It has actually become my primary means of accessing them.

Another neat little addition is a “Compare files” button (using Kompare) in the confirmation dialog when copying a plain text like file (e.g. source code, too) would overwrite an existing one. It already looked at the files to decide whether they‘re different or not but it didn’t let you check in detail yourself.

Last year, I showed a shell script running in Konsole reporting its progress using ConEmu-specific OSCs (Operating System Command). The merge request sat dormant after I lost some work on it while moving to my new laptop. Always push your work-in-progress changes to a git branch sometime, right? I have cleaned up the patch, added API comments, as well as an option for whether to show progress in taskbar or not. It also opts into FLATPAK_TTY_PROGRESS. To my surprise, when I implemented Unity Launcher API in Plasma, I added an option to disable badges on individual applications but not progress reporting. It’s still in review but I am confident to ship it as part of KDE Gear 26.04.

It’s always fascinating to observe other users interacting with KDE Plasma. For instance, us power users take middle click paste for granted. On Plasma, middle clicking the desktop typically results in a sticky note of text being created. However, when you did that by accident, it wasn’t really clear how to get rid of it. If you click the sticky note, the format toolbar includes a delete button, sure, but a user might not even think of doing that. Originally, I thought about adding an “Undo” notification. The simplest solutions are often the best, though, and so it just focuses the newly created sticky note to ensure the delete button is visible right away.

Finally, for those who like to procrastinate, KPat (KPatience) now offers direct access to all of its game modes via the context menu in the application launcher and in KRunner. Just type “Freecell” or my favorite “Grandfather’s Clock” (because you can’t really lose) into KRunner, and off you go!

There’s still a couple of days left for our Year End Fundraiser. If you want to show your love for KDE and support the work we’re doing, please consider donating! I am looking forward to seeing you all around next year.

Happy holidays to all in the KDE universe who celebrate them! As 2025 draws to a close, I thought it would be a good time to take stock.

“This Week in Plasma” began 8 years ago as a development report for KDE’s Usability & Productivity goal, which had just been democratically selected by the community in the very first round of the new KDE Goals process.

Back then it wasn’t called “This Week in Plasma” (or “TWiP” for short), but eventually it would gain and change names, and move off my personal blog and onto KDE’s infrastructure.

During these past 8 years, I’ve done my best to keep the wider KDE community informed about what’s going on almost every week! And I’m constantly amazed and humbled by the positive feedback it’s generated.

The march of time and accumulation of responsibilities

My own role in KDE has changed substantially during these 8 years. I started out in 2017 as a volunteer and fell in love with KDE, squeezing my KDE time into a long daily train commute to and from work. And by 2019 I had a full-time job at Blue Systems, doing what I loved. In 2022 I was elected to the KDE e.V. board of directors, until October of this year. Each of these transitions heralded the accumulation of more responsibilities beyond TWiP.

And at the beginning of this year, everything changed again when I became the co-owner and CEO of Techpaladin Software, the successor of Blue Systems’ consultancy business, and an employer of over a dozen rockstar KDE developers.

This has been the largest career shift in my life, and caused my time to become more limited than ever before. It’s possible some readers may have noticed the quality of TWiP content slipping over the past year; it’s not a coincidence, and I apologize for not being able to do a better job.

I need help

I truly want to keep publishing this blog, but there comes a point where I have to face facts: my time and energy budgets are not as unlimited as I wish they were. In addition, my children are getting older; they’re 9 and 13, and they need their dad to do more than just work and work and work and work and work some more.

So it’s time to begin the painful but necessary process of ensuring that those budgets remain big enough to cover my work and family responsibilities.

In 2026, I’m actively looking for a person or team interested in taking over TWiP. Until then, I plan to reduce the frequency of posts, based on how busy my schedule is. Expect one every two weeks, or even every three or four weeks.

How You Can Help

If anyone reading would like to see TWiP remain a weekly fixture as much as I do, the best way to make it happen is to get involved and help out with it! I would be thrilled to hand off TWiP to the next generation.

Nothing about TWiP is particularly difficult, but it does take time. Time to notice or seek out relevant changes, time to collect them in a big list, time to sort them for relevance to the readership, time to write a little blurb for each of them, time to take screenshots showcasing the changes, and time to edit and polish the post.

I’m happy to teach, coach, or mentor anyone who wants to get involved. So if you’ve been wondering how you can get involved in something that matters without technical skills beyond basic markdown and git, this is a perfect way to do it. And if you are technical, I’m sure there are low-hanging-fruit opportunities for automation that I never pursued (I did try AI a few times, but the results were always horrible).

You can reach out to me about it at nate@kde.org, or the relevant Matrix room, or any other relevant means of getting in touch that you might already know about. Please do!

And finally

I’d like to take the opportunity to thank the readers and community members. This blog post series is something I never really expected to become popular, and it was my pleasure to publish it (almost) every week!

Today Plasma and KDE in general are strong and prosperous, with growing bases of users, hardware partners, distros pre-installing our software, and small-donor financing. In some ways KDE is outgrowing TWiP; it’s no longer really necessary to provide weekly evidence that we’re still keeping the lights on. The evidence is all around us!

But it’s still a nice thing to have, I think. I personally would feel sad if I had to abandon TWiP without anyone to hand it off to. So if you’re interested in getting involved, please reach out!

If helping to take over TWiP isn’t your cup of tea, consider donating to KDE’s 2025 end-of-year fundraiser. It’s already demolished past records by raising over €325,000, but every little bit helps! This level of funding can support significant projects and keep KDE independent for years to come. And that’s what we all want.

So here’s to a great 2025 for KDE, and may 2026 be even better!