31 Jul 2026

Since I still hear about "microservices" more often than I'd like to. Here is another piece which points the trade-offs and that really there's no one size fits all.

https://var0.xyz/posts/what-even-are-microservices.html

Code Review Responses: Add Context When It Counts

Tags: tech, codereview

There are indeed cases where it's important to provide more context on the code which changed following up a comment by the reviewer.

https://testing.googleblog.com/2026/05/code-review-responses-add-context-when.html?m=1

How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer

Tags: tech, engineering, leadership, problem-solving

Good approach, you indeed need to immerse yourself in the context and see the recurring patterns. That's the best way to figure out impactful solutions to recurring issues.

https://lalitm.com/post/find-problems-staff-engineer/

Your harddrive is probably full

Tags: tech, storage, resources, procrastination

Interesting take, it's more than just about hard drives being full. Indeed, there are many things on which we tend to procrastinate. But on the other hand… so many budgets to track otherwise!

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_139_hdd/

The Crossover Project

Tags: tech, software, engineering, agile, craftsmanship

Very interesting series I previously missed. It explores if software engineering is really engineering, and the differences with other engineering fields. Quite a few nice lessons to draw from it.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/

Kaizen Board: A Reply on Every Sheet

Tags: tech, quality, kaizen, japan

Wondering how that works when it runs properly? Here is an example of a Kaizen board in a japanese factory.

https://www.leanblog.org/2026/07/kaizen-board-manager-comments/

Bye for now!

31 Jul 2026 4:17pm GMT

Fixing Multi-GPU performance, part 1

Performance on "secondary" GPUs has historically been suboptimal on Linux, especially with external GPUs. Let's take a look at why it's slow, and how we're finally fixing it.

How Multi-GPU even works

To know how things work with multiple GPUs, we first need to look at how applications present images in single GPU systems.

With Wayland, the linux-dmabuf protocol is used for sharing images from applications to the compositor. The compositor advertises which GPU it's using, and a list of drm formats¹ and format modifiers² it can make use of.

The application then allocates a dma-buf (direct memory access buffer) for each image with one of the supported formats + modifiers on the GPU of the compositor, and sends the compositor file descriptors for these buffers to share them.

This works quite well, but only for single GPU systems. In linux-dmabuf version 5, the compositor can only advertise one GPU as being usable! The app could still attempt to pass the buffer of any GPU to the compositor, but that can fail, requiring fallbacks, and it can cause really big performance issues.

Why it's slow

When you import a dma-buf to a GPU, the kernel tries to be helpful and automatically ensures for you that the GPU you're using can access the buffer. This sounds nice, and can be useful, but it's also the source of all our performance problems.

Let's say you have a laptop with an integrated GPU, and a dedicated GPU. When you start a game on the dedicated GPU, what would happen is

the game allocates a buffer on the dedicated GPU
it passes that buffer to the compositor
the compositor imports the buffer into the integrated GPU

To make step 3 work, the kernel would move³ the buffer to system memory. This can be really terrible for performance, since system memory is terribly slow in comparison to video memory, and the dedicated GPU has to go through the PCIe bus to access it, which has high latency.

To solve that problem, Vulkan and OpenGL drivers compare the GPU the application is using with the one the compositor advertises. If they're not the same, then the driver will not share the buffers on the GPU with the compositor, but actually create a copy in system memory and share that copy with the compositor instead. So this would be

the game allocates a buffer on the dedicated GPU
the driver copies the buffer to another buffer in system memory
it passes that other buffer to the compositor
the compositor imports the buffer into the integrated GPU

Now imagine you're not playing the game on your laptop display, but you have an external display connected to the dedicated GPU. The HDMI port on a lot of laptops is wired to the dedicated GPU, so this is a really common scenario. What happens in that case is

the game allocates a buffer on the dedicated GPU
the driver copies the buffer to another buffer in system memory
it passes that other buffer to the compositor
the compositor imports that other buffer into the integrated GPU
the compositor composites with the integrated GPU
the compositor copies the composited result to the dedicated GPU

So your game gets copied to system memory and back to video memory, for no real reason. The performance hit caused by that isn't great in general, but it gets so much worse with external GPUs.

When all you have is one USB C cable to transfer data from and to the GPU, with high resolution monitors the bandwidth of that cable can be too small even for copying in one direction! Going in both directions completely kills performance. For example, I have a setup with

a Framework laptop 13
a rx 5700 XT in an external GPU enclosure
a 5120x1440 monitor at 120Hz connected to the external GPU

If I start vkcube (a super simple test app) on the external GPU, move it to the monitor and make it fullscreen, it only reaches 55fps!

How to fix it

In principle, we "just" need to stop the driver from copying the buffer around, and instead have it pass the original buffer from the dedicated GPU to the compositor. That's exactly what I proposed version 6 of the linux-dmabuf protocol for: The compositor can support a list of GPUs instead of just one, and the application can tell the compositor which GPU it should import a given buffer into.

This all sounds nice and simple in theory, but as always, it wasn't quite that simple in practice. There are basically three problems that needed to be solved for this change to be useful:

the driver needs to not do the copies unless actually necessary
the compositor needs to do the copies when required
to actually get any performance gains, the compositor needs to skip the copies whenever possible

Thankfully, I didn't need to do this alone. Victoria Brekenfeld from System76 implemented support for the protocol in Mesa and Smithay, the library used by the cosmic compositor.

Unfortunately, it took a long time to support the protocol in a useful way in KWin. I needed to make it

aware of multiple GPUs beyond just displaying on them
properly handle GPU hotplug with that new infrastructure
deal with all the weird GPU setups in embedded systems
track which GPU each buffer is on
have generic multi GPU copy infrastructure
make those multi GPU copies actually as fast as the copies Mesa does internally
deal with GPU resets correctly while doing multi GPU copies
actually implement the Wayland protocol bits

Some of this was just moving code from out drm backend to more generic places, but a lot of it required doing things from scratch. Especially GPU reset handling was challenging because KWin's effects APIs make a lot of assumptions about OpenGL contexts and didn't support just stopping rendering a frame once it started.

While working on this, I also added Vulkan support to KWin specifically to make the multi GPU copies as fast as possible, which also took some time. As a positive side-effect though, we now have basic Vulkan infrastructure in KWin that can be used for a future Vulkan renderer.

Finally, just over 2 years after I first proposed the protocol, we had complete enough implementations to prove it works as expected and the protocol was merged. Since then, the KWin implementation was merged, the Mesa implementation should be merged soon and Nvidia has an (as of time of writing, unreleased) implementation of the protocol in their driver as well.

The actual performance gains

So, how much does this actually help? With vkcube, we go from 55 fps to the full 120 fps of the monitor, but that's hardly a practically relevant test.

So I fired up Cyberpunk 2077 with the "low" graphics preset and it went from 27 fps with Mesa main to 50 fps with linux-dmabuf v6. That's more than 80% better performance!

Mesa main	Mesa with dmabuf v6

From playing around a bit with the graphics settings, it seems likely that the game is bottlenecked by the USB C bandwidth, so the performance uplift could be even better with additional driver optimizations.

I haven't been able to benchmark the impact of dmabuf v6 on "normal" laptop setups, because I don't yet have access to a Nvidia Vulkan driver version implementing the protocol, and I don't have a laptop with a dedicated AMD GPU. If I had to guess though, I'd expect improvements there to be much more moderate, probably something in the 5-10% range. I'll update this post once I know more.

However, this performance uplift comes with two big caveats…

When does this work?

With the current KWin implementation, compositing always happens on the "primary" GPU. On laptops, by default that's whatever GPU the internal display was connected to when KWin started. This means you can only get those large benefits if the game gets direct scanout.

My rx 5700 XT doesn't have support for color pipelines, so I only get the performance benefit if HDR is disabled, night light is disabled and no color profile is used. I already have a merge request to lift that restriction though, stay tuned for part 2 to find out more about that!

There is another caveat though, and that's a far bigger challenge: Most games still run on X11, and implementing the protocol (in a useful way) in Xwayland is incredibly challenging because of some assumptions X11 makes. I don't know how that could be fixed, or even if it's feasible at all, so for now, you can only get these benefits with games using Wayland directly.

For a lot of native games, using SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland does the trick, and for most Windows games, you can use Proton forks with the Wine Wayland driver. In my experience, Wine Wayland works really well and even HDR just works™ with it nowadays.

drm formats describe how the memory in the buffer is used, like "16 bits red", "8 bits red, 8 bits green, 8 bits blue, 8 alpha bits" or similar ↩
format modifiers (more or less) describe how the pixels are laid out in memory ↩
meaning, it will create a copy, and then delete the original ↩

31 Jul 2026 2:50pm GMT

30 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Qt Creator 20.0.1 released

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 20.0.1!

The release improves tool detection and the default session directory for chats in the AI Agent Client Protocol integration, fixes various issues with CMake Presets as well as some crashes, and contains various other improvements.

30 Jul 2026 9:31am GMT

29 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Krita 5.3.3 Released!

Today we're releasing Krita 5.3.3 and 6.0.3, containing many bugfixes and improvements across the board.

Android Donations and Supporter benefits

On Android, version 5.3.3 lets you support Krita's development directly through the application. This goes through the Play Store, so if you have a device without Google services or are using a debug or nightly version of Krita, it won't be available and instead will show you donation links.

In return for supporting Krita, you'll be able to download resource bundles directly in the application, including the paid Digital Atelier bundle. The splash screen and welcome page will also tell you about the supporter packs or donation links. You are not required to make any purchases, no features are locked behind a paywall and you won't get nagged about it while you're actually working. You can also of course still manually import resource bundles, the downloads are just a convenience feature.

For a longer explanation and a way to give feedback or ideas, take a look at this forum post.

Changelog

Special thanks to Freya Lupen and Elena Sagalaeva, for multiple bug fixes, as well as the many newcomers who contributed to this release (named in the changelog).

Don't free hold frame undo command at scope exit (Bug 520732)
Added get started, community, website and source code icons (Thanks to Arkady Flury)
Try removing shell=True from the python calls on Windows
Get rid of division by zero in the KisMplTest.( Thanks to Elena Sagalaeva)
[android] All animation export and import functionality has been removed for now. Mostly because these functions didn't do anything. We're working on a properly working replacement for Android specifically.
Delete QuaZipFile before deleting the archive (Bug 520362)
Fix layers getting deselected when starting transform (Bug 517590)
Ensure a layer is activated for new views (Bug 518465 , Thanks to Gregg Jansen van Vuren)
Fix FFmpeg 7.0+ to render HDR animations (Bug 520669)
Fix Out-of-Bounds-Selection-Inversion (Bug 518235, Thanks to Ricky Ringler)
Fix Display Selection action check stats
Fix crash on null event pointer in Abstract Input Action (Bug 520581)
Fix crash when deleting a text shape (Bug 520939)
Fix not loading some xmp exif metadata correctly (Bug 520981)
Omit invalid values for xmp metadata when saving (Bug 520982)
Fix crash with combined shapes (Bug 521106)
[android] Implement supporter benefits
Make welcome page not show missing shortcuts as X
Allow welcome page to shrink properly
[android] Handle full-screen mode directly
[android] Let the user set the UI scale at runtime
UI/Animation: Fixed some animation actions breaking when switching playback engines. (Bug 518711)
UI/Settings: Fix bad animation settings layout.
[win][qt6] Fix transparent canvas widget issue (Bug 517102)
Force non-var vertical metrics to use default vertical caret. (Bug 517717)
Fix font-family sorting for fonts with wwsWithoutName set mixed.(Bug 518874)
Try to deduplicate font family names better, so we don't get sql errors. (Bug 517361)
Fix bug 522430. Switching between frames should always complete. (Bug 522430)
Fix deadlock when doing perspective transform (Bug 520602)
Expose tool and brush change signals to PyKrita (Thanks, Moritz Staudinger)
Various fixes to the selection action panel, including the ability to stick it to the sides of the canvas by pressing the "pin" icon.
Various fixes to the comic panel editing tool functionality.
Allow higher resolution of thumbnails on Welcome Screen.

⚠️ Warning

We consider Krita 5.3.3 suitable for productive work; 6.0.3 is, because of the many changes from Qt5 to Qt6 more experimental.

Download 5.3.3

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-5.3.3-setup.exe
Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-5.3.3.zip
Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

⚠️ Warning

Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.3-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

⚠️ Warning

With Krita 5.3.3 release minimum supported MacOS version has increased from 10.14 (Mojave) to 10.15 (Catalina)

MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.3-signed.dmg

Android

Krita on Android is still beta; tablets only.

Source code

Source code is the same as 6.0.3. See the 6.0.3 section.

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.3.3/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

Download 6.0.3

Windows

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-6.0.3-setup.exe
Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-6.0.3.zip
Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

⚠️ Warning

Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.3-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.3-signed.dmg

Android

Krita 6.0.3 is not yet functional on Android, so we are not making APK's available for sideloading.

Source code

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/6.0.3/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

29 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

GSoC Alumni Camp Delhi 2026

GSoC Alumni Camp Delhi 2026 - My Experience

I attended the GSoC Alumni Camp in Delhi, it was an amazing opportunity to make people who are already familiar with open source aware of KDE Community and I was actually able to do that. The event itself was from 8:00 A.M. to 10:30 P.M. at night. The event started off with a formal opening session. Soon after was the scavenger hunt (we were hunting people!) it was a 5x5 grid where you needed to get signatures of people who fit the question in the box. A few of them were :

I was born in July (I signed a lot of them )
I have held a koala
I know 3+ languages
I can juggle
I prefer go/Rust and so on. In all honesty it was an amazing ice breaker and something to get to know people. After that there were a few unconferences followed by lunch and then more unconferences till 6:00 P.M. after that lightning talk sessions started and fortunately I got to represent KDE.

Unconference Session - From GSoC Student to Maintainer/Mentor

I also hosted one of the first unconference sessions titled:

From GSoC Student to Maintainer/Mentor

I wasn't expecting a large audience, but at one point the room was at its capacity around 40 attendees.

The audience included:

GSoC Organization Administrators
Mentors
Open source employees
Existing contributors
Google code-in students

The discussion focused on contributor retention after GSoC and how organizations can better support contributors beyond the program. It led to some interesting discussions where we found out what some organisations are doing.

Discussion Points (Noted by an org admin)

Leverage Contributors as Subject Matter Experts

GSoC contributors naturally become subject matter experts for the components they build. When new issues, bug reports, or pull requests relate to their work, proactively invite them to participate in the discussion or review. This helps contributors feel that their expertise is valued and keeps them engaged with the project beyond GSoC.

Improve Communication Around Pull Request Reviews

Complex pull requests often require focused reviews and may take longer than isolated bug fixes. While taking the necessary time for a thorough review is important, mentors should acknowledge review requests and, where possible, communicate an expected timeline. Even a brief acknowledgment improves the contributor experience.

Using Organization Stipends for Contributor Retention

Explore using the GSoC organization stipend to support promising contributors after the program ends. This could fund continued maintenance or feature development through a transparent platform such as Open Collective, allowing contributors to invoice for their work and remain actively involved with the project.

Recognizing Mentor Contributions

Mentoring requires a significant investment of time in reviewing code, guiding contributors, and providing technical support. Consider allocating a portion of the organization stipend to compensate mentors, recognizing their efforts and encouraging long-term participation.

KDE's Community Support

Another topic that generated considerable interest was KDE's support for its contributors.

I talked about how KDE sponsors some students to attend Akademy, and how I was also sponsored to attend the event, which a lot of people agreed organizations should've done (some did, a lot didn't) but a lot of people agreed that when an organization consider these things contributors stay.

After all the unconferences ended a lot of people came up to me saying mine was the best and I managed and engaged everyone in the best way possible ( I was on cloud 9).

Lightning Talk

One of the highlights was being selected to give a lightning talk. Only 18 participants were chosen, and I was one of them.

My GSoC project Join KDE is an advertisement for KDE itself, so the project itself became an easy conversation starter. It was a great opportunity to introduce KDE and make more people aware of the organization.

Although I did fumble the last part of my presentation it was more of me being confused where my slide went (some slides were misplaced) aside from that it went as any other informative talk but hey I was funny on the stage (refer to the pics) so people remember me! You win some you lose some, oh well.

Conversations Throughout the Event

Outside the sessions, I had some interesting discussions with contributors from different organizations. Some contributors showed interest in working wwith us while some showed interest in our eduction/science side but honestly it's hard to bring contributors over as they're in different domains, org admins/mentors or they're busy with their careers.

SU2 Foundation

I had a conversation with a maintainer from the SU2 Foundation, whose work focuses on computational fluid dynamics.

We discussed KDE's scientific and educational initiatives, including KDE for Scientists and several education-related projects. I also shared the KDE For You website as an introduction to the wider KDE ecosystem.

After Party

The conversations continued during the after-party on the following day.

I met a group of students who had become interested in open source after interacting with contributors throughout the event. They had originally attended as friends of another contributor.

One of them is now actively looking for a project to begin contributing to within KDE. YAYYY!

New Contributors

Several first-time contributors approached me asking about projects suitable for beginners.

I introduced them to a number of KDE projects and explained possible contribution paths.

But the same issue they're busy with the beginning of their careers.

Overall Thoughts

The Alumni Camp was one of the best ways to make people aware of KDE and I tried my best while i had fun ( we played uno there! Will bill the cards to the organization jkjk), a lot of people seemed intrigued and asked me to share some stuff about KDE to them or they'll try it on their own. Met someone from GNOME (they didn't get any lightning talk HA! I know, I know no inter project fighting that's bad) had some good conversations, teased the person from GNOME, had breakfast with them, and tried to make the most of the unconference session and the lightning talks to at least get people to know the name KDE!

Event Gallery

29 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

28 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Making KIO copy many files fast

There is a bug in KDE's bug tracker that is almost as old as some of our contributors: bug 342056, "Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files)", reported by Alexander Nestorov back in 2014. The report is blunt: copying a 15 GB folder of roughly 3 million small files took 5 to 10 hours in KDE, versus about 20 minutes with rsync. One commenter summed up the mood:

I generally use cp and rsync instead of dolphin for anything more than a few files.

That bug has been stuck in my head for a while, so this post is about finally fixing it. I have been working on KIO's copy path, and I want to walk through where the time was going, some history that explains why, and show numbers across KIO versions including a plain cp for reference.

At with any optimization, let's measure first:

Off-CPU flame graph of a KIO 6.28 copy of 5000 small files, with the socket round-trip frames highlighted

Where a KIO 6.28 copy of 5000 small files spends its blocking time, and there is no single hotspot. Each file blocks in a burst of short syscalls: reading the mount table (/proc/self/mountinfo), opening the source and destination, and round-tripping a command to the worker over an internal socket. The socket round-trips, the send and receive plus the waits for each reply, are the frames highlighted in red, about 15% of the blocking here, spread as thin slivers across both threads because every one of the thousands of files pays them. The frames in green are the real filesystem work the copy cannot avoid: the statx and openat calls, copy_file_range moving the bytes, and the ext4 metadata updates beneath them. That per-file storm, not any single call, is what the rest of this post discusses. (Off-CPU flame graph from sched:sched_switch, weighted by number of blocking switches; click to open the full SVG.)

A little history

KIO is the layer behind almost every file operation in KDE software, from Dolphin's copy and paste to the network transparency that lets you open sftp:// or smb:// URLs as if they were local. Its design goes back to the KDE 2 days, around the year 2000. Back then the answer to "how do I do I/O without freezing the UI" was not a thread but a separate process: a worker (we used to call them kioslaves) is launched for a protocol and talks to the application over a socket. This predates usable threading on Linux (Native POSIX Thread Library only landed in Linux 2.6 in 2003), so processes plus socket IPC was the portable, robust choice, and it still is for network protocols today: if an smb:// worker crashes, your file manager does not go down with it.

The flip side is cost. Every request and its reply are serialized and sent over that socket, with an event-loop hop on each side. For file:// that overhead buys you nothing, because there is no untrusted network on the other end, just the local disk.

In 2022 David Faure changed that: Implement running KIO workers in-process using a thread landed in Frameworks 5.95. Since then the file worker runs on a thread inside the application instead of as a separate process (other protocols stay out-of-process for robustness). That removed process launch and context-switch cost.

No socket between the thread and the app (6.29)

There was still a catch that had been hiding in plain sight: even in-process, the worker thread and the application talked to each other over a socketpair, serializing every command as if they were separate processes. Once the thread was used, that socket was pure overhead.

That's the red highlight in the first flamegraph.

So in-process workers now use a real in-memory transport instead of a loopback socket. A new ThreadConnectionBackend handles commands, and for reads the actual data buffer, straight to the peer thread, with no serialization and no syscall, which makes in-process file reads zero-copy. This is the biggest single jump in the numbers below, and it has landed on master for 6.29 (kio!2279).

Next: batching the copy and the stat (under review)

The changes above make each command cheap. The remaining cost is that there are still so many of them: copying N files is N separate file_copy jobs, each one going through the job scheduler and taking its own round-trip to the worker. For many small files that fixed per-file cost, not the data, is what dominates.

CopyJob can dispatch a whole batch of plain local-to-local files to the worker in one command, and the worker copies them (using copy_file_range, and reflink on filesystems like Btrfs or XFS that support it). Each file still gets its progress signal, its byte accounting, its undo entry, and anything the worker cannot do blindly - an existing destination, an unreadable source, a rename or skip decision - is handed back to the normal per-file path. The gate is conservative on purpose so a hung mount can never freeze the batch (kio!2282).

Off-CPU flame graph after batch-copy, with the socket round-trip frames gone

The same copy on 6.29 with batch-copy: the red socket round-trips are gone. Two things removed them: the in-memory transport from the previous section (no socketpair at all) and batch-copy folding a whole run of files into one command instead of one round-trip each. What is left is real filesystem work: the green frames are the copy itself, copy_file_range moving the bytes, the openat and statx calls, and the ext4 metadata beneath them. The wide plateau that is not green is the benchmark loop deleting each pass's files before the next run (unlink), which is teardown rather than part of the copy.

Before copying, CopyJob stats every source, which is another per-file round-trip. The follow-up batches the stat phase over the same in-process lane. This is the batch-copy-stat column below.

Both of these are under review and targeted at a release after 6.29, so treat their columns in the table as a preview of what is coming rather than something you can install today.

Numbers

Methodology: a 13th-gen Intel Core i7-1365U laptop, everything built RelWithDebInfo without any sanitizer, copying onto a real ext4 volume (so no reflink shortcut, copy_file_range moves real bytes). Each KIO version supplies both its own libKIOCore and its own kio_file worker. Times are the median of 5 runs (3 for the large set) after a discarded warm-up, so caches are warm and equal for every version. cp -r --preserve=mode,timestamps is included as the floor, since that is what the bug reporter reached for instead of Dolphin.

5000 files of 4 KB each (the many-small-files case from the bug):

Version	Median time
`cp -r` (coreutils)	81 ms
KIO 6.28.0	1616 ms
KIO 6.29-dev (master)	396 ms
KIO 6.29-dev + batch-copy	88 ms
KIO 6.29-dev + batch-copy-stat	93 ms

1000 files of 5 MB each (bulk data, where the copy is I/O-bound):

Version	Median time
`cp -r` (coreutils)	1312 ms
KIO 6.28.0	1997 ms
KIO 6.29-dev (master)	1687 ms
KIO 6.29-dev + batch-copy	1506 ms
KIO 6.29-dev + batch-copy-stat	1454 ms

The small-files case is the story. KIO 6.28 was about 20x slower than cp, which is exactly the ratio the 2014 report complained about. Removing the socket for in-process workers, together with no longer probing the destination filesystem once per file, takes it from about 1.6 s to 0.4 s (roughly 4x). Batching the copy takes it to 88 ms, essentially cp speed and about 18x faster than 6.28. That "I use cp instead of dolphin" line finally has an answer.

The large-file case was already well covered before any of this work, and the table shows it: the copy is bound by moving the bytes, so even KIO 6.28 stayed close to cp there, and the per-file optimizations barely move the number (batch-copy lands within about 15% of cp). That is the whole reason this effort targets many small files instead, where the fixed per-file cost, not the data, is what dominates.

batch-copy and batch-copy-stat come out tied here: the benchmark copies a single directory, so its entries arrive in one listing and batch-stat has nothing to batch. It helps the other case, copying a large selection of individual files that would otherwise be one stat round-trip each. Since it removes the round-trip and not the stat call, the win is largest when stats are cheap, not when the disk is slow. Read the two as equal on this test.

And cp will almost certainly stay a little ahead, by design: KIO does more than copy the bytes. It reports per-file progress, can be paused and cancelled, keeps an undo record, preserves permissions and timestamps, resolves conflicts, and tells any open file manager what changed so its view refreshes. That work is not free, and the goal was never to beat cp, only to make the local case fast enough that reaching for cp instead of Dolphin stops being the obvious choice.

Caveats and what is next

These are laptop numbers on one ext4 disk with warm caches, meant to compare versions, not to be absolute. On Btrfs or XFS the batch path reflinks instead of copying, which changes the large-file picture entirely. The batch fast path only engages for plain local-to-local copies on a responsive filesystem; anything else (network, FAT/NTFS, conflicts needing a dialog) falls back to the existing per-file path, unchanged.

Thanks to David Faure for the in-process worker threads that made all of this possible, to Frank Reininghaus for the earlier listing fixes, and to Alexander Nestorov for a bug report that aged well enough to still be worth closing.

That's all, folks.

28 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

Plasma Vault Advisory: You should probably switch to gocryptfs

Months ago, some distributions accidentally removed cryfs and encfs from Vaults dependencies (temporarily). And some distributions are removing them intentionally from their package repositories (at least, for the time being).

It might be a good idea to switch your vaults to gocrtyptfs.

There is no automatic process for this, just create a new vault (it will be gocryptfs-based - other backends have been removed from the UI in the latest versions) and copy the data from the old one there.

Some context

To avoid users thinking there is something serious going on, this is some background on changes:

Plasma Vault creation wizard supports only gocryptfs since plasma-vault/-/merge_requests/62 as it is the most maintained upstream project, and to avoid "confusing the users".
Some distro packagers thought this means Vault no longer supports cryfs and encfs and they removed them from the package dependencies. This change was quickly reverted as there are existing users that already have cryfs and encfs-based Vaults.
Some distros are cleaning up FUSE2-based file systems and going FUSE3-only. Some of them ship a FUSE3-based CryFS, and some seem to be waiting for an official FUSE3-supporting release (see github.com/cryfs/cryfs/issues/419).

So, nothing important has happened. Your vaults are as safe as they always were.

It is just that it might bring you a headache if the backend you use for your vaults disappeared after you update your system.

And headaches for me when I get bug reports that Vaults no longer support encfs or cryfs :)

28 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

26 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Week 8: Gradient Widget Merged, Speed Ramp Begins

This is a weekly update from my Google Summer of Code 2026 project with KDE, improving effect widgets in Kdenlive, a free and open source video editor.

Gradient widget merged

MR !911 went through one more round of review, Jean-Baptiste caught a small inconsistency in how the 32-stop limit was applied and fixed it directly (c2d7a3d2, "Use limit everywhere"). After that, the Gradient widget merged. Two of the three widgets from the proposal are now in master.

One known issue flagged during review: MLT's gradientmap filter doesn't currently support alpha in its gradients, that's a bug on MLT's side, not the widget. Jean-Baptiste merged anyway to make the 26.08 window, with a plan to either disable alpha or fix it upstream before the final 26.08.0 release.

Speed Ramp: starting the third widget

With Gradient shipped, moved on to Speed Ramp. My original proposal described free-draggable bezier handles on the remap timeline's connector lines. Investigation before writing any code turned up a real problem with that: MLT has no bezier keyframe type to serialize a time map into, only preset easing types (linear, smooth, cubic, exponential, and more, as suffix characters on keyframe positions).

Checked with Jean-Baptiste. Turns out free bezier handles in MLT had already been investigated a few years ago and found difficult to integrate. His suggestion: use the same keyframe type system Kdenlive already uses for effects like volume and brightness, letting users pick a type from MLT's existing list rather than dragging custom handles.

Finding the right pattern to reuse

Kdenlive already has a widget that draws real keyframe curves in a plain QWidget, KeyframeCurveEditor, used in the effect stack for other parameters. It samples MLT's interpolated value per pixel and draws the result, no QML involved. That became the reference pattern for adding a curve to the remap dialog (RemapView).

Before building on it, tested MLT directly to confirm non-linear keyframe types are actually honored during playback, not just valid syntax. They are, sampled values matched the exact easing formulas. One gotcha found along the way: the keyframe type suffix has to go on the segment's starting keyframe, not the ending one, otherwise it's silently treated as linear.

Implementation

Four commits, each built clean before the next:

Added per-keyframe type storage (m_keyframeTypes) alongside the existing keyframe position map, synced across all 30+ places the position map gets mutated
Switched keyframe serialization and parsing to use MLT's own animation API instead of hand-formatted strings, so type suffixes are always placed correctly
Added a per-pixel sampled curve, drawn additively in the existing dual-ruler layout, nothing existing removed or changed
Added a keyframe type selector, starting with a curated list (Linear, Smooth, Cubic In, Cubic Out); the full MLT list includes bounce and elastic types, which cause the source time to briefly go backward on a time map, that's a product decision still pending, so it's left out for now

Manually verified: linear playback is unchanged, curve shape follows the selected type, old projects load correctly as all-linear, undo/redo works through type changes, and types survive keyframe drags and clip resizes.

curve rendering with non-linear keyframe keyframe type selector

What's next

Speed Ramp branch is local, not yet pushed. Bringing results to Jean-Baptiste before pushing and opening an MR.

26 Jul 2026 9:57pm GMT

Weeks 7 & 8: User Guide, Find Action, and Bug Fixes

With the main proposal items completed, I spent the last 2-3 weeks working on open issues in the KeepSecret tracker, fixing bugs and improving the overall experience.

User Guide (!37)

Added a minimal user handbook for KeepSecret in DocBook format - the standard format used by KDE applications. The guide covers the main features: wallets, managing entries, generating passwords, importing and exporting, and locking. It's accessible via the Help menu. Writing it also involved adding the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license to the repo, which triggered a kirigami-app-components 1.0.1 release (more on that below).

Find Action (!39)

Added the Find Action entry Ctrl+Alt+I to the global drawer. This opens the Actions Explorer dialog - a standard KDE dialog that lets users search through all available actions in the app by name. During testing, I discovered that kirigami-app-components 1.0.0 had a bug where FindAction wasn't working. Marco Martin fixed it and released 1.0.1.

Close entry panel when switching wallets (!41)

Fixed a UX bug in 3-column mode: when switching wallets, the entry panel from the previous wallet stayed open. The fix was a single line - calling App.secretItem.close() when a wallet is clicked in the sidebar.

Delete key shortcut (!43)

Added the Delete key as the default keyboard shortcut for deleting secrets. Since there's already a confirmation dialog, binding Delete directly is safe.

26 Jul 2026 3:04pm GMT

25 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

My GSoC Journey: Hacking on KDE's Network Manager

If anybody had told me I'd end up working on the very Linux desktop environment I've been daily-driving for the past three years, I probably wouldn't have believed them.

This summer, I got to learn and work on the main Network Manager component used by default in KDE, the desktop environment relied on by millions of users worldwide (source). Looking back, this has been the most challenging, and by far the most rewarding, journey of my open-source career so far.

How It All Started

I started looking for open-source projects to contribute to way before GSoC even announced its list of participating organizations. Back in October, I began contributing to major projects like OpenTelemetry, Lima-VM, and WasmEdge, repos I'm still active in today.

Somewhere along the way, I decided to explore the KDE ecosystem and give it a shot. That decision changed the trajectory of my year. From that point on, my co-mentors and I were actively working through a number of open-source issues together, including bugs in KClock, the native clock application used across KDE, long before the official GSoC coding period even began. That early groundwork ended up being exactly what prepared me to take on Network Manager as my actual project.

The Project

My GSoC project is titled "Make network related KCMs feature complete with desktop equivalent," under Plasma Mobile, mentored by Carl Schwan and the rest of the Plasma Mobile team.

Here's the core problem: Plasma Desktop and Plasma Mobile each ship their own, completely separate networking settings modules. The desktop KCM (kcm_connections) is mature and feature-complete, with full Wi-Fi security support (WPA/WPA2/WPA3, 802.1x Enterprise, various EAP methods), VPN configuration, and more. Plasma Mobile's networking KCMs, on the other hand, are QML/Kirigami-based and touch-friendly, but only support the basics (WPA/WPA2 Personal, essentially). Because the desktop editor lives in libs/editor/ as Qt Widgets, it can't be dropped into the mobile UI as-is, Widgets and Kirigami don't mix, so mobile has ended up stuck maintaining its own thinner reimplementation instead of reusing the desktop's mature backend logic.

My project is to close that gap: pull the shared backend logic in libs/ out from underneath the Qt Widgets layer, rebuild the connection editor in QML (in a new libs/editorqml/) using Kirigami, and get both the desktop and mobile KCMs consuming the same backend through QML property/signal bindings. This way, a feature added once (say, WPA3 Enterprise or a new VPN protocol) works identically on both form factors instead of being implemented twice. The work is broken into phases: project setup, the Wi-Fi/security connection-editor foundation, additional connection types (wired, hotspot, VPN, bonds/bridges/teams/VLANs), refactoring the KDED popup dialogs (like the Wi-Fi password and PIN prompts) from Widgets to QML, and finally integration testing plus writing proper architecture documentation for plasma-nm, which currently has very little of either.

The Challenge

The biggest hurdle, by far, was getting a real grip on QML and the architecture of the broader codebase.

Coming in, I understood C++ reasonably well, but plasma-nm's UI layer is written almost entirely in QML, a declarative language that describes what the interface should look like rather than how to build it step by step. On top of that, plasma-nm isn't a single self-contained app, it's a plugin-based system that sits on top of NetworkManager (the system daemon), talks to it over D-Bus, and exposes that state through a KDED module and a Plasmoid applet that the QML frontend binds to. Understanding which layer owned a given piece of logic, the daemon, the backend plugin, or the QML view, took real time.

Some of the specific things I had to work through:

Signal/property bindings in QML: tracing how a change in connection state on the backend actually propagates up through C++ signals into a QML property binding, and where things could silently break if a binding wasn't wired correctly.
The plugin architecture: plasma-nm supports different connection types (Wi-Fi, VPN, mobile broadband, etc.) via separate plugins, each with its own QML + C++ pairing, so I had to learn to navigate a fairly large, distributed codebase rather than one monolithic file.

Key Contributions

Here is the list of MRs that are merged in upstream as of this date:

What I Learned

Beyond the technical skills, QML, Network Manager core concepts, and plugin architectures, this project taught me a lot about contributing to a codebase that real people depend on every day. KDE isn't a toy project, it's a software that is used by millions of people to connect Wi-Fi and manage their networks without thinking twice about it. That changes how carefully you write and review code.

Thanks

A huge thank you to my mentors, Devin Lin and Carl Schwan, for the patience and guidance through the pre-GSoC Phase. And thanks to the broader KDE community and Plasma Mobile for being as welcoming as it is to newcomers navigating a genuinely large codebase for the first time.

25 Jul 2026 3:46pm GMT

This Week in Plasma: Auto-Lock and Unlock for Remote Desktop Sessions

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a bunch of work on some core infrastructure components, like the RDP server, login greeter, and screen configuration tooling. That's in addition to lots of other good work, too:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

You can now configure Plasma's built-in remote desktop server to automatically lock the session after the last connected RDP client disconnects. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #211)

Lock and unlock option on the “Remote Desktop” page in System Settings

Plasma Login Manager now remembers the last-used session for each user. (Jin Liu and Oliver Beard, plasma-login-manager MR #176 and libplasma MR #1557)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Discover's transaction progress view now shows items in groups, with the ones currently in progress in a group at the top. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1219)

grouped transactions in Discover’s progress dialog

On multi-screen setups, the existing Meta + 1-9 shortcuts for jumping straight to a task now target the panel on the screen you're actively using, rather than always going to the primary monitor's panel. This matches the behavior added to last week's new task-switching shortcuts. (Salman Farooq, plasma-desktop MR #3884 and plasma-workspace MR #6848)

You can now find languages in Plasma Setup by searching for their locale code, localized name, or English name. (Tiziano Gaia, plasma-setup MR #109)

Frameworks 6.29

Further improved the visual fidelity of small icons drawn with the Kirigami.Icon component. (Méven Car, kirigami MR #2127)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed an issue that made KWin crash on login for newer NVIDIA GPUs using the latest NVIDIA drivers in conjunction with various color management features. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #523287)

Restored the ability to play full-screen video in Chromium-based browsers on a virtual screen, such as those used when screen recording. (Xaver Hugl, Bugzilla #523353)

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze and then take down apps as well after you switched activities with unusual values in your Plasma config file. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #522039)

Fixed two visual glitches affecting the Digital Clock widget: one that made the layout overflow on a panel right after turning on the "always show seconds" setting, and another one that made the time zone label fail to use the systemwide font family. (Hunter White and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #523010 and KDE Bugzilla #523164)

When an image used in a slideshow in the Media Frame widget is changed on disk, the widget now notices it properly, rather than replacing it with a blank frame. (David Wild, KDE Bugzila #521538)

Plasma 6.7.4

Fixed a weird bug that could break Plasma Login Manager after you unplugged a screen and plugged it back in while on the login screen. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #523313)

Fixed a bug that could make KWin crash on login on various laptops. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9632)

Fixed a case where System Settings could crash when Fanatec racing pedals were plugged in. (Sebastian Sauer, KDE Bugzilla #522886)

Restored the ability to change the wallpaper and apply Plasma settings to Plasma Login Manager for users who upgraded from Plasma 6.6. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #517081)

Frameworks 6.29

Fixed a surprisingly common yet random-seeming way that Plasma could crash. (Shouvik Kar, KDE Bugzilla #519614)

QML-based KDE apps once again remember whether they were maximized or not across launches. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #522205)

Worked around a Qt bug that made some keyboard shortcuts in Kirigami-based apps not get assigned when using the app in certain languages other than English. (Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano, kirigami MR #2124)

Icons drawn by the Kirigami.Icon component now use the correct aspect ratio for portrait-orientation images when they're being rounded to standard icon sizes. (Méven Car, kirigami MR #2126)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

We have created a new kscreenctl tool, intended as a future replacement for the old kscreen-doctor tool. It includes more features, more robustness, and a more conventional usage method. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kscreen MR #487)

Output of <code>kscreenctl --help</code> in a terminal window

Discover is now faster to load icons for Flatpak apps. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1366)

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.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. 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.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

25 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

24 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Creating a player bot to automate Mankala

Hello everyone! Once again, I am here to share my fun experiences incorporating new features for Mankala.

Problem

This time I have built a bot server for Mankala where you can automate the entire game process of playing the game moves by using the server endpoints present in the bot. This Mankala bot can be run in various ways, and for the easiest to understand, can be an example in Python, which I have used in our process.

Approach

To build this bot, I built a minimal HTTP server using Qt's own QTcpServer. The BotApiServer class listens on port 8080 and handles raw HTTP requests by parsing the method and path manually, and when these requests are synced from the terminal, the changes can be observed in the GUI, showing a change in the number of shells.

The API exposes two endpoints:

GET /api/status - Returns the full game state as JSON: whose turn it is, the seeds in every pit, each player's store, whether the game is over, and who won.
POST /api/move - Accepts a JSON body with player ("player1" or "player2") and pit_index (0-indexed), validates the move, executes it, and returns the updated state.

A list of documentation with all the endpoints present has also been added as part of the Help section present in the game, which also contains predefined scripts to run 1 bot or even 2 bots simultaneously, automating the entire game.

OpenAPI documentation:

openapi: 3.1.0
info:
title: Mankala Bot API
description: API to programmatically control and play Mankala.
version: 1.0.0
paths:
/api/status:
get:
summary: Get the current game status
description: Retrieves the full state of the board, scores, and turn information.
responses:
"200":
description: OK
content:
application/json:
schema:
type: object
required: [in_progress, game_over, winner, turn, variant, pit_count, player1_pits, player2_pits, player1_store, player2_store, board]
properties:
in_progress: { type: boolean }
game_over: { type: boolean }
winner: { type: string, enum: ["", "player1", "player2"] }
turn: { type: string, enum: ["player1", "player2"] }
variant: { type: string, enum: ["Bohnenspiel", "Oware", "Pallanguli"] }
pit_count: { type: integer, minimum: 1 }
player1_pits: { type: array, items: { type: integer, minimum: 0 } }
player2_pits: { type: array, items: { type: integer, minimum: 0 } }
player1_store: { type: integer, minimum: 0 }
player2_store: { type: integer, minimum: 0 }
board: { type: array, items: { type: integer, minimum: 0 } }
/api/move:
post:
summary: Make a move
description: Executes a move for the specified player at the given pit index.
requestBody:
required: true
content:
application/json:
schema:
type: object
required: [player, pit_index]
properties:
player: { type: string, enum: ["player1", "player2"] }
pit_index: { type: integer, minimum: 0 }
responses:
"200":
description: OK
content:
application/json:
schema:
type: object
required: [status, turn, game_over]
properties:
status: { type: string, enum: ["ok"] }
turn: { type: string, enum: ["player1", "player2"] }
game_over: { type: boolean }
winner: { type: string, enum: ["", "player1", "player2"] }
"400":
description: Bad Request (Invalid Move, Not Your Turn, Invalid JSON)
content:
application/json:
schema:
type: object
properties:
error: { type: string }

Here we can observe a Python script for a `player vs bot` game:

import urllib.request, json, time
API = "http://localhost:8080/api"
def status():
return json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(f"{API}/status").read())
def move(player, pit):
req = urllib.request.Request(f"{API}/move",
data=json.dumps({"player": player, "pit_index": pit}).encode(), method="POST")
req.add_header("Content-Type", "application/json")
return json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen(req).read())
# Bot plays as player2, waits for human player1
while True:
st = status()
if st["game_over"] or not st["in_progress"]:
print(f"Game Over! Winner: {st['winner']}")
break
if st["turn"] != "player2":
time.sleep(0.5) # wait for human
continue
pits = st["player2_pits"]
# pick first non-empty pit
pit = next((i for i, v in enumerate(pits) if v > 0), -1)
if pit == -1:
break
print(f"Bot moves pit {pit}")
move("player2", pit)
time.sleep(1.5) # animation delay

For the above code, we can adjust the localhost port and the animation speed based on our needs and save it.

Challenges I faced:

I would say the synchronization of the GUI with the server was hard. So to make the GUI animations correctly incorporated, I made the apiMoveMade signal using which the change in game state was listened in GameWindowLandscape.qml and GameWindowPortrait.qml files. This was something really new that I have done till now and was a fun experience for me.

Thanks for reading 🚀....

24 Jul 2026 1:59pm GMT

Web Review, Week 2026-30

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-30.

Online Friends Are Real Friends

Tags: tech, internet, culture, life, friendship

Indeed, friends we make online are no less real than the ones we see in the flesh first. I would know… guess how I made friends with KDE people?

https://blog.absurdpirate.com/online-friends-are-real-friends/

Europe's digital sovereignty needs challenges

Tags: tech, europe, politics, foss, commons

Excellent piece. I'm feeling unease at this widespread confusion between european ownership and digital freedom. What we collectively need is the latter. There's no sovereignty to be had in a proprietary ecosystem, be it owned by an European company or not.

https://hamishcampbell.com/europes-digital-sovereignty-needs-challenges/

Mullvad and Daniel Berntsson's Failed Cleanup

Tags: tech, ethics, politics, vpn

No the technology we use isn't neutral… In this case it directly funds fascists. Whatever the technical merits from the Mullvad VPN, such ties disqualify them to be used.

https://markwrites.io/mullvad-and-daniel-berntssons-failed-cleanup/

Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics

Tags: tech, mathematics, science, research, ai, machine-learning, gpt

This is a very good declaration and call to actions from the mathematics field. I wish we'd have something well thought out like this for computer science and software engineering as well.

https://leidendeclaration.ai/

AI advice suppresses people's willingness to say "I don't know"

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, linguistics, cognition, bias

Interesting study which measures our propensity to be more confident while being more wrong when using LLMs to answer questions. Those models really tap into our cognitive bias to mistake linguistic fluency for competence.

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/5y6m4_v1

Not enough water for UK's datacentre plans, trade body says

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, water, ecology, politics

If you still don't think data centres have a water consumption problem, especially since the LLM weapon race… Think again.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/21/not-enough-water-for-uks-datacentre-plans-trade-body-says

The Week of Sandbox Escapes

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

In other words: the security boundaries of coding agents are very porous and not where you expect. Handle with extreme care until they have a proper security model.

https://www.pillar.security/blog/the-week-of-sandbox-escapes

email encryption

Tags: tech, email, cryptography, history

Wondering about the landscape of email encryption? This gives a good historical tour.

https://computer.rip/2026-07-19-email-encryption.html

Minimal Git CI using hooks

Tags: tech, git, tools, ci, complexity

Little reminder that a got forge doesn't and shouldn't need much. Sprinkle gitolite if you need to manage rights, maybe gitweb and then you're all set.

https://mccd.space/posts/26-06-29/simple-git-ci

The startup's Postgres survival guide

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql

Quite a few nice Postgres tips. The first ones are rather basics the less common tips are toward the end. Could have a few more details at times, but that's a good starting point.

https://hatchet.run/blog/postgres-survival-guide

When 'if' slows you down, avoid it

Tags: tech, programming, performance

This is too often forgotten. If you can avoid the "if" and your CPU will thank you for it.

https://easylang.online/blog/branchless

Everyone Should Know SIMD

Tags: tech, simd, cpu, performance, zig

Nice post on how to approach problems suitable for SIMD.

https://mitchellh.com/writing/everyone-should-know-simd

Static search trees: 40x faster than binary search

Tags: tech, cpu, simd, performance, optimisation

Excellent piece diving deep into the opportunities to optimise an algorithm. The final speed up is impressive.

https://curiouscoding.nl/posts/static-search-tree/

Rust service hardening and production checklist

Tags: tech, rust, containers, security

Good checklist to reduce your attack surface as much as possible when deploying your service.

https://kerkour.com/rust-service-hardening-and-production-checklist

Hardening Rust Code For Production

Tags: tech, rust, containers, security

More ideas of things to check to harden a service, goes beyond just what's deployed. Many good points on how to handle errors and such.

https://corrode.dev/blog/hardening-rust/

The PImpl idiom and the C++26 std::indirect type

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Looks like a nice improvement over std::unique_ptr for managing pimpl indeed. Really interesting stuff coming in C++26.

https://mariusbancila.ro/blog/2026/07/23/the-pimpl-idiom-and-the-cpp26-stdindirect-type/

Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++

Tags: tech, graphics, 3d, shader

Wondering how the graphics pipeline works for 3D rendering? This is a nice lecture on how to implement a purely software one. If gives a good idea of what needs to happen.

https://haqr.eu/tinyrenderer/

Prefactoring: Clear the Way for Your New Feature

Tags: tech, refactoring

Short and to the point to illustrate the use of refactoring at the beginning of the work on a feature.

https://testing.googleblog.com/2026/07/prefactoring-clear-way-for-your-new.html

The Value of Domain Knowledge in Software

Tags: tech, knowledge, craftsmanship

This is too often forgotten by developers. Our job isn't only about the technical side of things, we must also understand the domain the users are working in. It's a part of the craft.

https://www.gustavwengel.dk/value-of-domain-knowledge

The Most Ridiculous War Humans Ever Fought

Tags: history, funny

OK, didn't know about this one. It was indeed ridiculous… we're really a weird species.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv5qQu0yMaU

The Deadliest Thing in Your Kitchen

Tags: biology, science, funny

You won't look at your kitchen the same way after this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cK8l5Yg5w8

Bye for now!

24 Jul 2026 11:38am GMT

22 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Opt Green Has Ended. Long Live Opt Green!

Part I: Repair Cafés

As May came to an end, so did KDE Eco's "Opt Green: Sustainable Software For Sustainable Hardware" (German: Nachhaltige Software Für Nachhaltige Hardware) project. Read the announcement from 2024 at the project's start. It has been a full and exciting two years. Together with a wonderful team at KDE, dozens of supportive communities, and thousands of volunteers, we really achieved a whole lot. Highlights include: The project organized stands at environmental festivals, markets and the Long Night of the Sciences. We did outreach at international conferences. We hosted install parties for adults and children, as well as taught upcycling courses in high school. We published ads, advertorials, and articles in Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) and eco-consumer magazines, and even co-authored an academic paper. We built new networks between FOSS and repair communities. And we mobilized volunteers worldwide to offer in-person Linux support in a global campaign against e-waste driven by Microsoft's software policies.

I only wish we had another two years!

I will not attempt to write a retrospective of everything the project did. Instead, I would like to focus on two aspects of the project which I believe will result in the main goals of the project not only continuing, but thriving well beyond the project's end. This post will be published in two parts. Here, in Part I, I will present Opt Green's activities in networking and collaborating with Repair Cafés. In Part II, to be published soon, I will take a closer look at the End Of 10 campaign and what comes next after the unexpected two-year extension of Windows 10 support.

Networking With Repair Cafés

Repair collectives provide community spaces to fix stuff. There exist many groups offering workshops to make and repair things, such as Hackerspaces, Makerspaces, FabLabs, and Linux User Groups. Repair Cafés will be the focus here, though. Free & Open Source Software, and the role it plays in keeping computers in use after vendor support ends, is for the most part a new topic for these communities. Moreover, Repair Cafés generally serve a different demographic than Hackerspaces, Fablabs, LUGs, etc. Working with Repair Cafés provides a great opportunity to reach people well outside the FOSS bubble.

Repair Cafés are a place to repair objects used in everyday life, such as clothing, electronics, bicycles, and so on. The first Repair Café was launched in Holland in 2009 by Dutch journalist Martine Postma. Since then thousands have popped up around the world with support from organizations such as Repair Cafe International (started by Martine Postma), the Restart Project (creators of Right To Repair and Open Repair Alliance), iFixit, anstiftung, among others.

From Skepticism, To Support

The project's outreach to Repair Cafés in Germany started at the end of 2024 and early 2025. We were initially met with some skepticism. Software was simply not seen as being of interest to repair communities. Hardware, yes; anything related to real physical objects, sure. But software, not so much.

One of Opt Green's goals was to raise awareness about how software is as important to hardware longevity as physical components like batteries, cables, and screens. The repair motto "Repair Instead Of Throw Away" (in German: "Reparieren statt Wegwerfen") was perfectly in line with Opt Green's goals. The project had even adopted mottos with similar messages: "The most environmentally-friendly device is the one you already own!" and "You don't need a new computer-you just need the right software!" So we kept at it.

The project's first major platform to reach the German repair community was at an online presentation in March 2025 organized by Opt Green with the repair organization anstiftung. In the talk, we underscored how software drives e-waste along with other forms of energy and resource consumption. We showed how software repair-which FOSS licenses make possible-could extend the operating life of devices to reduce the environmental harm of hardware production, transportation, and disposal.

Around 180 Repair Café volunteers participated … and we were pleasantly suprised to learn that a handful of volunteers were already offering FOSS support in their Repair Cafés!

The first meetup was such a success that together with anstiftung we organized a follow-up webinar in May with End Of 10 contributors Varut & Herbert. A heartfelt thank you to both for presenting! What a joy to see at the second event again over 100 Repair Café volunteers interested to learn how to install and use FOSS on their own devices.

It seems that software is indeed of interest to repair communities!

As of July 2026, a little over one year after that second webinar, on the End Of 10 website there are 85+ places and 170+ events listed from Repair Cafés, Linux Cafés (i.e., repair cafés focused specifically on Linux), and similar organizations like IT-Cafés, Technik-Cafés, etc. (Once you include the Makerspaces, Hackerspaces, Fablabs, LUGs, and other initiatives that stepped up to help out, there are over 1180 places and events in total on the End Of 10 website-more on that in Part II.) Moreover, Repair Café International, an End Of 10 supporting organization, now lists 40 Linux Repair Cafés on their website. And the Restart Project published their own "End Of Windows 10 toolkit" to promote FOSS among repair groups as a way to keep unsupported Windows devices in use.

One End Of 10 contributor came up with a slogan which I feel captures this connection between repair and Free & Open Source Software beautifully, namely:

"FOSS Instead Of Toss!"

Snippet of a community poster for the End Of 10 campaign. (Image from Finnjan Hofmann published under a <a href=\

Let's Bring FOSS and Repair Communities Together

In order to further strengthen the ties between FOSS and repair communities, the Opt Green project organized three in-person workshops from December 2025 to March 2026 with support from the funders UBA and BMUKN. The idea was to bring together local Repair Cafés, Fablabs, Linux User Groups, and related communities for a skills and information exchange. Each event took place in a different part of Germany: Hannover (middle), Nürnberg (south), and Dessau (east). Half of participants at each event were repair community members, half FOSS enthusiasts, and some belonged to both communities.

In the workshops a wide range of topics were covered, such as:

How can the FOSS community support Repair Cafés, and vice versa?
What are the barriers to adoption of Linux? What do new users need to succeed?
After installation, how much support can Repair Cafés realistically offer? Would user support fit into regular opening times? Could more technical problems be directed to collaborators in local FOSS groups?
How can Linux be promoted in local communities? What are the target groups? How does one reach them?
What platforms are there for Repair Café volunteers to exchange tips and support each other?

And more.

Before the workshops, we also held an install event for Repair Café volunteers new to Linux. That way they could roll their sleeves up and get some hands-on experience.

Clearly there is not one right answer to any of the above questions, while just having two days for an exchange between locally-networked groups was as important as any one comment or reply. Even though there is, as always, room for improvement, the feedback from these workshops from all involved was overall very positive. If you live in an area with active Repair Cafés and Linux User Groups I strongly recommend organizing similar cross-community workshops in your town. Don't hesitate to be in touch if you want some guidance!

You can read the minutes from all three workshops here (Hannover), here (Nürnberg), and here (Dessau). Discussions from the Repair Café workshops also informed the new KDE Eco handbook "Opting Green: Sustainable Software For Sustainable Hardware-And How Repair Collectives Can Bring Free & Open Source Software To Communities". The handbook provides an overview of environmental harm driven by software and how FOSS provides a solution, including many tips for organizing install and support events. Check it out!

After The Workshops

Since March, several exciting updates have made it into our inbox.

We learned that four repair cafe volunteers from Repair-Café Wendelstein who attended the workshop have now started offering Linux support. Also, attendees from Reparatur Café Helmstedt have organized two install events and one Linux User Training in their café since the workshops. The Repair Café at the neighborhood cultural center Haus Drei in Hamburg now holds regular Linux installation workshops as well.

What is more, Repair Café Hilpoltstein, one of the groups that was already offering Linux support (their website is full of helpful information), has launched a Discourse forum (in German) to provide community support for Repair Café volunteers. If you help out at a Repair Café and want some guidance with Linux, this will be an excellent resource!

We also brought KDE Eco materials to the workshops in order to distribute them to interested groups around Germany and Austria. So it was great to see that Repair Café Hilpoltstein had an info stand at a local market in May, featuring among other things the "Environmentally-Friendly Software" leaflet (German version) from the Opt Green project.

Photo from the Pentecost Market in Hilpoltstein, Germany. One can see the KDE Eco flyer spread across the <em>Repair Café Hilpoltstein</em> table.

The Repair Café workshops also led to other outreach opportunities. The Hilpoltstein group organized an info-meetup for FOSS in Volunteer Work in the Nürnberg region in June, with KDE Eco as a presentation partner. They are planning more local outreach in the near future as well, especially since Bavaria announced in June that no new deals will be made with Microsoft, at least for now.

FOSS and repair go together-and it is exciting to see FOSS and repair communities connect and grow. I am proud of the work Opt Green did in contributing to this. If there are Repair Cafés in your town or city, reach out to see how you can support their work!

Keep your eyes on this blog for the second installment about End Of 10, the global campaign started by Opt Green to promote FOSS as a way to prevent e-waste. As some of us in the community are saying: "FOSS instead of toss!"

Starting A Linux Repair Cafe

If you would like to start a Repair Café in your town or city, Repair Cafe International has some helpful information at the "Start Your Own" and "Linux Repair Café" webpages. Restart Project has prepared a "End of Windows 10: A Toolkit for Community Repair Groups". You may also enjoy reading up on some strategies to getting started in the Opt Green handbook.

When Repair Is Not Possible

When you need to buy new hardware, look into one of many Linux-supported devices on the market. That way you can use the computer for as long as the hardware keeps working. With devices made for Linux you will have a better out-of-the-box experience too, with less tinkering and fewer workarounds needed to get pesky proprietary-software components working.

KDE supporting members like Slimbook, Kubuntu Focus, Tuxedo Computers, framework all sell hardware with native Linux support. Many offer hardware replacement parts and repair guides too, so you can easily swap out broken pieces when needed.

If you instead decide to buy a new computer with Microsoft pre-installed but plan to install Linux instead, check out the Refund 4 Freedom initiative. Here you can learn how to get a refund for that Windows license you paid for even when you did not want it.

If you buy used hardware, you may also want to head over to the h-node project to learn how well that hardware will work with Free & Open Source Software.

Contact

We would love to hear from you! Sign up, say hello, and let us know what you are interested in.

Repair Café support at "Forum Werkstätten RC-Hip": https://forum.makes-hacks-hip.de/
KDE Eco Matrix room: https://matrix.to/#/#endof10-en:kde.org
KDE Eco on Mastodon: https://floss.social/@be4foss
End Of 10 working room: https://matrix.to/#/#endof10:kde.org
End Of 10 on Mastodon: https://floss.social/@endof10

The Code of Conduct for KDE communication channels can be found here.

Funding Notice

The Opt Green project was funded by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMUKN¹). The funds are made available by resolution of the German Bundestag.

The publisher is responsible for the content of this publication.

22 Jul 2026 12:00am GMT

21 Jul 2026

Planet KDE | English

Legal obligations vs social contracts

My post about responsibility for bug reports on old software versions the other day stirred up quite some discussion, and I wanted to drill a bit more into what I think is the crux of the dispute: the difference between legal obligations and the social contract.

When you package and distribute free open source software (FOSS), you legally have to comply with the terms of the license: "make the source code available," "don't change the license," and so on.

You might also notice the absence of a warranty, or silence about responsibility for bug reports.

So let's return to the question:

Who's responsible for bug reports on old software versions?

An accurate legal reading is "Nobody, unless you've signed a work contract with a developer or purchased a commercially-sold OS." But it's also not the whole picture, because there's another potential non-obvious legal obligation:

Trademark

Trademark law varies across the world, but at least where I live in the USA, "unregistered trademarks" are a thing, and in a professional context, you've got a legal obligation not to violate a product's trademark - registered or unregistered - by referring to it as something that it isn't, or changing it and saying it's still what it originally was.

Ah, but how much to you have to change it before that kicks in? That's definitely not something that I - a non-lawyer - am qualified to assess. And my understanding is that this varies a lot across the world's legal regimes, too.

But my layman non-lawyer perception is that applying bug fixes (especially backports of the developer's own bug fixes) probably doesn't count, while making visual or functional changes not from the developer probably does press closer to that fuzzy line.

Which brings me to what I think is the most important part:

Doing only the legal minimum

"Follow the terms of the license agreement." "Don't mis-represent trademarks you don't control." "Don't steal." "Don't murder."

These are good places to start. But what if that's all anyone ever did - the bare legal minimum?

I think the world would be a pretty miserable place. There's no law requiring anyone to love you or soothe your feelings when you're upset. There's no law requiring you to find a source of joy or direction in life, or help others unbidden.

What makes life worth living is everything beyond the legal minimum: politeness, kindness, friends, love, pleasure, purpose, art, music, entertainment, faithfulness, professionalism, and so on.

Everything desirable but not required by law comprises the social contract: a set of unwritten rules that, the more people follow them, the better their society is to live in. It helps personally, too: follow the social contract, and you'll end up calmer and happier, be perceived more positively, and things will just kind of start going your way, as if by magic. Break it, and the opposite starts to happen.

Applying the social contract to this situation

Let's say that I write an app, and someone distributes it with a feature patched in that I didn't write, or a visual change that I didn't make. How mad at them am I going to be?

If we have a bad relationship due to previous perceived violations of the FOSS social contract, I might be very mad. I might complain publicly, or even threaten to enforce my trademark and demand they change the branding to reflect the fact that they've created what I believe to be a derivative work that reflects poorly on the original.

No matter what, we can be sure it will escalate into a fight with a winner and a loser. And that loser might be me.

But if we have a good relationship and view each other as pro-social upholders of the FOSS social contract? I might be really happy about this, or at least tolerate it. Maybe I'll even reach out and ask them to submit their change upstream and help maintain it. There's a 0% chance I'm going to threaten to invoke trademark law or give them a hard time about it.

That's the power of respecting the social contract that exists between us.

But what is the FOSS social contract?

Like the definition of "derivative work", it's unsatisfyingly fuzzy and nebulous. But like a cloud, even if we can't contain 100% of it in a jar, we can probably identify many of its features. So here are some pro-social behaviors that I hope we can all agree are squarely within the "FOSS social contract":

Using FOSS

If you didn't pay any money, appreciate what you've gotten for free. It's a modern miracle.
Understand the basic software lifecycle of the OS you're using, and choose the one that suits your needs the best.
Accept the "no warranty" clause. Understand that support may be slow, and that if you need it fast, you'll need to pay for it.
If you don't like the software you're using, use something else.

Bug reporting

Endeavor to report bugs in the right place, to the best of your ability.
Phrase your bug reports gently, and articulate a real problem to be solved, rather than making demands or suggesting solutions.
Be understanding of the fact that your request might be a big ask that might not get done soon, or might be better done in a different place or in a different way.
Treat people kindly with the benefit of the doubt, even if they don't respond to your bug report in a timely manner, or at all.
If your needs are urgent, pay a person or company to address them; don't make demands of people working for free.

Software development

Do your best to respond to polite and helpful bug reports in a timely manner. Read your email. Don't ghost people.
If you aren't distributing your own software in a way that's suitable for 100% of your users, appreciate the free efforts of distributors who are doing it for you, even if they aren't doing it in exactly the way you would prefer.
Work with your distributors to help them showcase your software in the best light. They don't know it as well as you do.
Don't piss off too many of your users. You're doing this for them, not just for yourself.
Only make your software publicly available via a FOSS license if you're willing to accept people using it or distributing it in ways you might not have expected or preferred.

Software distribution

Do your best to respond to polite and helpful bug reports in a timely manner. Read your email. Don't ghost people.
Respect the reasonable wishes of the developers whose software you distribute. Keep up good relationships with them as much as possible.
Clearly communicate your OS's software lifecycle and release schedule. Curate your users so everyone using your OS is within its intended audience.
If you meaningfully change the software you distribute (outside of backporting the developers' own bug fixes or similar), accept that you've created a derivative work that needs to be presented accordingly: At the minimum, change the name, icon, and metadata (like the bug report URL).
If you distribute software that you know is or soon will be outside of its developers' support window, change the bug report URL to your own, or remove it entirely if you don't have the resources to offer support for old software.
Only create an OS in the first place if you're willing to take responsibility for the support needs of the people who will use and depend on it.

Hopefully we can all agree that if everyone considered the above ideas to be part of the social contract they follow, our world would be a very friendly and pleasant place! We'd end up with way fewer arguments and disputes, and could more and more get on with doing the fun part of what we do. And it's my hope that we can all aspire towards these ideal with our actions and words.

21 Jul 2026 10:35pm GMT

Minuet 26.08: call for testers

Minuet is a KDE's application for music education. It helps students and musicians train their ears with exercises for intervals, chords, scales, and rhythms. Minuet 26.08 is shaping up to be a particularly exciting release, with new ways to practice, a redesigned interface, and support for more platforms. We would love your help testing these changes before the final release. Try the exercises described below, explore the application on your devices, and tell us about any problems you find.

CI builds are beta snapshots rather than finished releases, so please do not rely on them for important work. Installation instructions are at the end of this post.

A redesigned, responsive interface

Minuet has a new interface built to work well on both desktop and mobile screens. The home page and navigation drawer make exercise categories easier to find, while the exercise browser presents each activity as a card with a short description. Your current category remains highlighted, and the new search field filters exercises by their translated names and descriptions. Exercise pages have also been reorganized to use the available space better on narrow windows and phones.

Things to test:

Browse every category from the drawer and return to the home page.
Search using full and partial exercise names, descriptions, different letter cases, and your system language.
Check the empty-search-results message and clear the search afterward.
Resize the window from very wide to very narrow and look for clipped controls, overlapping text, unnecessary scrollbars, or lost navigation state.
Try keyboard, mouse, and touch input where available, as well as both light and dark color schemes.
Answer questions correctly and incorrectly and check the answer animation, keyboard, staff, and controls.

The new exercise browser with several descriptive cards visible and a search term entered in the drawer

Guides for first-time users

The first melodic, rhythmic, singing, or clapping exercise you open now offers a short interactive guide (based on new Kirigami-addons onboard module). Each guide points out the controls and feedback relevant to that type of practice. You can decline the guide, finish or cancel it, and open it again later with the Help button.

Things to test:

Accept and complete each of the four guides: melodic, rhythmic, singing, and clapping.
Choose Not Now, leave the exercise, and confirm that Minuet does not repeatedly interrupt you.
Cancel a running guide and check that the exercise returns to its normal state.
Start a guide again from the Help button after completing or declining it.
Check that callouts point to the correct controls at different window sizes.

An exercise page with an onboarding callout highlighting the answer controls

More control over practice and sound

The new settings page gathers Minuet's everyday controls into Practice, Sound, and Microphone groups. You can change exercise speed, rhythm tempo, the number of rhythm patterns, test length, playback volume, melodic instrument, and percussion sound. Singing and clapping settings include the microphone input, voice class, pitch tolerance, timing tolerance, and calibration guidance. A collapsed Advanced section exposes detection algorithms and thresholds for difficult microphones or noisy rooms, with an option to restore the defaults.

Settings are persistent, so your choices should still be present the next time Minuet starts.

Things to test:

Change each basic setting and confirm that the next exercise uses the new value.
Select instruments from different General MIDI groups and try several percussion sounds.
Restart Minuet and confirm that your choices were saved.
Test microphone selection with no input device, one device, and multiple devices if possible.
Expand and collapse the Advanced section, adjust its controls, and use Reset to Defaults.
Check helper text, control labels, ranges, keyboard navigation, and layouts on narrow screens.

The settings page showing the basic controls sections

New melodic-interval exercises

Minuet previously separated ascending and descending melodic intervals. The new Melodic intervals collection mixes both directions, requiring you to identify the interval itself rather than anticipate its direction. It includes focused groups such as seconds or sixths, combinations such as fourths and fifths, and broader challenges covering compound intervals all the way through the fifteenth.

Things to test:

Confirm that questions include both ascending and descending intervals.
Work through focused, mixed, and compound-interval groups, including Second to 15th.
Replay questions and compare what you hear with the piano keyboard and staff.
Check enharmonic spellings, accidentals, ledger lines, answer choices, and scoring.
Start and stop a test run and verify that its length matches the configured number of exercises.

A compound melodic-interval question with its notes visible on both the staff and piano keyboard

Read and sing

Intervals and scales can now be practiced with your voice. After you choose Read and sing, Minuet plays a count-in and a reference note, listens through the microphone, and compares your pitch and timing with the target. The exercise view provides live input, pitch, and onset feedback. Scale exercises extend the same feedback across a complete sequence of notes.

Things to test:

Sing intervals and scales in each voice class: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.
Try accurate notes, notes that are deliberately sharp or flat, early or late entries, and incomplete scales.
Change the pitch tolerance and confirm that the result becomes stricter or more forgiving.
Calibrate silence in a quiet room and with moderate background noise.
Try built-in, USB, and Bluetooth microphones where available, including switching devices while Minuet is running.
Deny and later grant microphone permission on platforms that request it.
Check that the interface remains responsive while audio is being analyzed.

A scale-singing exercise showing the target notes, live input meter, and pitch feedback

Read and clap

Rhythm exercises now offer a Read and clap mode. Minuet displays a rhythm, gives you a four-beat count-in, records your claps, and compares their onsets with the expected beats. The view includes an input meter, silence calibration, and timing feedback, while the settings let you tune the accepted timing tolerance.

Things to test:

Clap easy and medium patterns at slow, moderate, and fast tempos.
Try clapping exactly on the beat, near the tolerance boundary, and deliberately early or late.
Add, omit, or double a clap and check that the feedback identifies the mistake.
Change the timing tolerance and verify that scoring changes accordingly.
Calibrate in quiet and noisy environments and watch the input-level meter.
Check that the count-in finishes before Minuet begins evaluating your claps.

A completed clapping exercise with the rhythm cards, input meter, and timing feedback visible

Rhythms with rests

New Easy with rests and Medium with rests categories mix sounded notes with silent positions. You can identify these patterns by ear or read and clap them. In listening mode, Minuet avoids presenting answer choices that would sound identical; in clapping mode, every note-and-rest combination remains available.

Things to test:

Listen to easy and medium patterns and verify that notes and rests occur in the displayed positions.
Check that the available listening answers are audibly distinct.
Clap through the rests without adding sounds and confirm that silent beats are evaluated correctly.
Replay patterns, vary the rhythm tempo and pattern count, and try both single questions and test runs.
Look for incorrect rest symbols, spacing, playback duration, or answer evaluation.

An Easy rhythm question containing several clearly visible rests

Minuet on more devices

Minuet's interface and audio stack have been made more portable. Android builds now use FluidSynth and share the same streamlined interface as the desktop version. macOS builds are available for both Intel and Apple Silicon, with fixes for application data, translations, icons, audio, and microphone permissions. This cycle also introduces initial iOS build support, although iOS packages are not yet published by the CI pipeline.

Things to test:

Install, launch, close, and reopen Minuet on as many supported devices as possible.
Check the application icon, splash screen, About page, system language, light/dark theme, and screen rotation where applicable.
Run listening, singing, and clapping exercises and check playback, latency, recording permissions, and device selection.
On mobile, test drawer gestures, the on-screen keyboard, compact layouts, safe areas, and back navigation.
On macOS, compare Intel and Apple Silicon builds if both kinds of hardware are available.

Minuet's home shown side by side with desktop and mobile form factors

Under the hood

The visible changes are backed by a substantial technical update. Staff rendering now follows the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) metadata from the Bravura music font, improving the placement of noteheads, stems, accidentals, ledger lines, clefs, and braces. FluidSynth support has been improved across platforms, while Aubio microphone analysis runs in a worker thread to keep the interface responsive. The QML and C++ code has also been split into more focused controllers and components, and automated coverage has grown for exercise evaluation, rests, audio analysis, and settings.

Things to test:

Inspect simple and dense notation, including chords, accidentals, compound intervals, ledger lines, treble and bass staves, and narrow layouts.
Listen for missing notes, wrong instruments, stuck sounds, timing drift, or audio that continues after leaving an exercise.
Navigate rapidly between exercises and settings while audio is playing or the microphone is active.
Run long singing and clapping sessions and watch for freezes, delayed feedback, excessive CPU use, or crashes.
Check that existing chord, scale, interval, rhythm, test, replay, and give-up workflows still behave as they did before.

A dense staff containing a chord, accidentals, and stems

Installing a CI build

Open the list of successful release/26.08 pipelines and select the newest pipeline. On its Jobs page, find the deployment job for your platform and use its download-artifacts button. Extract the downloaded ZIP archive before following the platform-specific steps below.

Artifacts are temporary: the Windows, macOS, and Android packages normally expire after three days, and the Flatpak packages after seven days. If a download is no longer available, return to the pipeline list and choose a newer successful pipeline. These packages are development snapshots and may trigger warnings about installing software outside an app store.

Linux

Download the artifact from the flatpak-amd64 job. The archive is named Flatpak_artifacts.zip.
Extract the archive and open a terminal in the extracted directory.

Launch Minuet from your application menu or run:

flatpak run org.kde.minuet

To test translations, also install the locale bundle:

flatpak install --user ./minuet-locale.flatpak

Install the application bundle:

flatpak install --user ./minuet.flatpak

The archive also contains minuet-debug.flatpak, which is useful for debugging but is not required for normal testing.

Windows

Download the artifact from craft_windows_qt6_x86_64.
Extract the archive and open its kde-ci-packages directory.
Run the included Minuet installer and follow its prompts.
If Windows displays a security warning for the development build, review the publisher and file details before choosing to continue.

The CI package targets 64-bit Windows on x86-64 processors.

NOTE: audio drivers are particularly worse on Windows, you can find some false negatives on such platform when compared to Linux, Android, and macOS.

macOS

Choose the job that matches your Mac:

craft_macos_qt6_arm64 for Apple Silicon Macs;
craft_macos_qt6_x86_64 for Intel Macs.

Download and extract the artifact, open kde-ci-packages, then open the included Minuet disk image or package and install the application. Because this is a development snapshot, macOS may show a Gatekeeper confirmation the first time you open it. Please also check that Minuet requests microphone access when starting a singing or clapping exercise.

Android

Choose the package matching your device:

craft_android_qt611_arm64 for most current phones and tablets;
craft_android_qt611_x86_64 for a compatible x86-64 device or emulator.

Download and extract the artifact, locate the Minuet APK in the package directories, and open it on the device. Android may ask you to permit installations from the application that opened the APK. Review the prompt, install Minuet, and disable that permission again afterward if you do not normally sideload applications.

Alternatively, developers with Android platform tools can connect a device or emulator and run:

adb install /path/to/minuet.apk

If an older development build is already installed and Android rejects the update because its signature differs, uninstall that build first. This removes its local Minuet settings and data.

iOS and FreeBSD

The 26.08 branch contains initial iOS support and is checked by the FreeBSD CI build, but the pipeline does not currently publish an installable package for either platform. The download instructions above therefore cover Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android only.

Send us your results

Please report bugs through KDE's Minuet bug tracker. Include the pipeline or commit you tested, your operating system and hardware architecture, clear steps to reproduce the problem, and what you expected to happen. For singing, clapping, or sound problems, microphone and audio-device details are especially helpful. Screenshots, short screen recordings, and relevant terminal output can make layout and audio issues much easier to diagnose.

A special shoutout and thanks to the KDE Sysadmin team for handling dependency additions, regenerating the CI images, and providing support with all the required CI/CD infrastructure.

Thank you for helping us make Minuet 26.08 a solid release for music learners everywhere!

21 Jul 2026 4:41pm GMT

fidzu : KDE

31 Jul 2026

Sovereignty is a substrate

Do LLMs know how to make software? (No.)

Getting access to the /tmp of a systemd service with PrivateTmp=yes

The Hamburger Database Design Pattern

Memory-level parallelism: AMD is the king

C++26: Reducing undefined behaviour

C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior

Learn WebGPU for C++ documentation

The Website Specification

What even are microservices?

Code Review Responses: Add Context When It Counts

How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer

Your harddrive is probably full

The Crossover Project

Kaizen Board: A Reply on Every Sheet

How Multi-GPU even works

Why it's slow

How to fix it

The actual performance gains

When does this work?

30 Jul 2026

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 20.0.1!

29 Jul 2026

Android Donations and Supporter benefits

Changelog

Download 5.3.3

Windows

Linux

MacOS

Android

Source code

md5sum

Key

Download 6.0.3

Windows

Linux

MacOS

Android

Source code

md5sum

Key

GSoC Alumni Camp Delhi 2026 - My Experience

Unconference Session - From GSoC Student to Maintainer/Mentor

Discussion Points (Noted by an org admin)

Leverage Contributors as Subject Matter Experts

Improve Communication Around Pull Request Reviews

Using Organization Stipends for Contributor Retention

Recognizing Mentor Contributions

KDE's Community Support

Lightning Talk

Conversations Throughout the Event

SU2 Foundation

After Party

New Contributors

Overall Thoughts

Event Gallery

28 Jul 2026

A little history

No socket between the thread and the app (6.29)

Next: batching the copy and the stat (under review)

Numbers

Caveats and what is next

Some context

26 Jul 2026

Gradient widget merged

Speed Ramp: starting the third widget

Finding the right pattern to reuse

Implementation

What's next

User Guide (!37)

Find Action (!39)

Close entry panel when switching wallets (!41)

Delete key shortcut (!43)

25 Jul 2026

How It All Started

The Project

The Challenge

Key Contributions

Here we can observe a Python script for a `player vs bot` game: