08 Jan 2026

feedPlanet KDE | English

Events in December 2025

December was quite an eventful month for me, with over 4,000 km travelled by train. This was in part caused by the holidays and visiting family, but also by the KDE PIM sprint in Paris and the 39th Chaos Communication Congress.

KDE PIM sprint in Paris

From the 12th to the 14th of December, I was in Paris. It was actually my first time there for more than a day trip, so I arrived a day earlier to explore the city a bit. I went on a walk across the city with Tobias and Nicolas, and I took some photos.

 

The weekend was also very productive. We advanced our goal of making KMime a proper KDE Framework; made Message-IDs in emails more privacy-conscious; and discussed various important topics such as the retirement of the Kolab resource and the switch to SQLite as the default backend for Akonadi.

 

Huge thanks to enioka Haute Couture for having us in their office in Paris.

The sprint being in Paris also allowed me to afterward go visit my grandma, 350 km further south of Paris, so this was particularly convenient.

39th Chaos Communication Congress (39c3)

Another event I went to was 39c3, which is the third year in a row that I attended, and this year again we had an assembly as part of the Bits und Bäume umbrella, thanks to Joseph.

 

I love the vibe of this event. It's not very dry or only tech-focused, but also has a big artistic and political aspect to it. And while the number of attendees is very large, at the same time it's very chill and I don't feel overwhelmed, unlike at FOSDEM.

At the KDE assembly, we met a lot of interested users, some GNOME friends, and since a bunch of KDE devs were there, we managed to work on a few productive things, like switching the map backend from Itinerary to MapLibre.

And this year, I even managed to go on national TV for a few seconds to speak about Nextcloud. My German grandma called me the day afterward, very happy to have seen me.

 

08 Jan 2026 10:00pm GMT

KDE Gear 25.12.1

Over 180 individual programs plus dozens of programmer libraries and feature plugins are released simultaneously as part of KDE Gear.

Today they all get new bugfix source releases with updated translations, including:

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

08 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

06 Jan 2026

feedPlanet KDE | English

Kraft 2.0 Announcement

Kraft 2.0 logo interpretationWith the start of the new year, I am very happy to announce the release of version Kraft 2.0.0.

Kraft provides effective invoicing and document management for small businesses on Linux. Check the feature list.

This new version is a big step ahead for the project. It does not only deliver the outstanding ports to Qt6 and KDE Frameworks 6 and tons of modernizations and cleanups, but for the first time, it also does some significant changes in the underlying architecture and drops outdated technology.

Kraft now stores documents not longer in a relational database, but as XML documents in the filesystem. While separate files are more natural for documents anyway, this is paving the way to let Kraft integrate with private cloud infrastructures like OpenCloud or Nextcloud via sync. That is not only for backup- and web-app-purposes, but also for synced data that enables to run Kraft as distributed system. An example is if office staff works from different home offices. Expect this and related usecases to be supported in the near future of Kraft.

But there are more features: For example, the document lifecycle was changed to be more compliant: Documents remain in a draft status now until they get finalized, when they get their final document number. From that point on, they can not longer be altered.

There is too much on the long Changes-List to mention here.

However, what is important is that after more than 20 years of developing and maintaining this app, I continue to be motivated to work on this bit. It is not a big project, but I think it is important that we have this kind of "productivity"-applications available for Linux to make it attractive for people to switch to Linux.

Around Kraft, a small but beautiful community has built up. I like to thank everybody who contributed in any way to Kraft over the years. It is big fun to work with you all!

If you are interested, please get in touch.

06 Jan 2026 10:14am GMT

04 Jan 2026

feedPlanet KDE | English

What does it mean to write in 2026?

I've been writing for something like 50 years now. I started by scribbling letters on paper as a child because I was fascinated that these expressed meaning. I wrote a lot for school, for university, for work, and privately. I wrote letters, emails, posts on social media, articles, papers, documentation, diaries, opinion pieces, and presentations. I've been writing my blog for more than 20 years.

Writing always has been a way for me to connect to the people, to the community, around me, communicating with my tribe. It also has always been a way to express, refine and archive my thoughts, a bit like building a memory of insights. It also has been a way to record some of my personal history and the history of the projects I'm involved with.

My writing has changed over the last couple of years. I'm writing less publicly and more focused on specific projects. It feels like it has become less personal and more utilitarian.

Part of this is that the Internet has lost a good part of its strength as a neutral platform to reach the world. For a long time I knew where to reach the people I wanted to address and had control about my content and how it was distributed. Nowadays social media platforms act as distributors, but we are prey to their algorithms. So while publishing content is still simple, it's much harder to get it to your audience without compromising to the mechanisms which make the algorithms tick.

Another part is the disrupting advance of AI writing capabilities. While I have relied on humans to give me feedback in the past, to get into a conversation on the topics of my posts to refine the thoughts in them, now there is this all-powerful-seeming assistant in my editor who is eager to take over those roles. And it would even write for me in my own style. So what's the value of writing in 2026? Is it even worth bothering with trying to express your thoughts in writing, when a machine can produce content which looks the same, much faster and in much larger quantity? What does this do to readers, do they still care about what I would write?

My feeling is that it's still worth to put in effort to create genuine, trustworthy, truthful writing. The format, the tools, the channels might change, but the values don't. The challenge will be to figure out how to create a signal which transports these values.

I have always liked the format and style of a blog, as a stream of thoughts, coming from a personal perspective, but focused on topics of relevance to others. I enjoy reading this from others and I enjoy writing in this style. And I don't have to rely on a platform I don't control, but can use my own.

So it looks like this blog won't go away, but will channel my thoughts in 2026 as well.

04 Jan 2026 9:58pm GMT

This Week in KDE Apps

A new whiteboard app, Vector-based map rendering in Itinerary, and new releases

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

We kick off the year with everything that's new in the KDE App scene. Let's dig in!

Travel Applications

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Jonah Brüchert added a MapLibre-based backend to Itinerary maps views. This allows us to render vector-based tiles, which means they can be displayed at any size without visible pixels. Zooming in and out should also be much smoother. Another advantage is that the map now shows labels in the local language as well as English. This makes the map much more useful in case you cannot read a locally used script. In the future, we might even be able to use map tiles that can display labels in your preferred language. (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #454)

Carl Schwan ported multiple dialogs to a convergent dialog/bottom drawer style (26.04.0 - pim/itinerary MR #413 and pim/itinerary MR #464).

Volker Krause added support for marking reservations as cancelled in your timeline, so that these reservations are not counted in your yearly statistics (26.04.0 - link).

Luca Weiss updated the KLM boarding passes extractor to also extract the boarding group (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #205). Thomas Arrow added an extractor for KLM's "Ticket for your trip" emails (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #206).

Tobias Fella added support for extracting GOMUS annual tickets (25.12.1 - pim/kitinerary MR #207).

PIM Applications

KMail A feature-rich email application

Albert Astals Cid made KMail's system tray icon also work when KMail is run inside Kontact (26.04.0 - pim/kmail MR #187).

Office Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Cody Neiman fixed the extreme downscaling of custom stamps, which resulted in pixelated stamp annotations (25.12.1 - graphics/okular MR #1280).

Creative Applications

Drawy Your handy, infinite, brainstorming tool

Thanks to Prayag Jain, KDE has a new whiteboard app called Drawy! It combines a simple interface with an infinite canvas, giving users the freedom to think and draw without limits.

Some of its features are:

Drawy is still under development, but you can already download a nightly flatpak. You are invited to test the app and share feedback to help shape Drawy as your handy, infinite brainstorming tool!

Since the incubation started, Prayag Jain has been fixing various performance issues (graphics/drawy MR #108 and graphics/drawy MR #115), and Laurent Montel did a lot of code cleanup to follow KDE best practices more closely (link).

Utilities Applications

Konsole Use the command line interface

Leonardo Malaman added a new "Force New Tabs" option to Konsole. This forces Konsole to open a new tab in an already open Konsole window instead of opening a new window (utilities/konsole MR #1112).

Kate Advanced text editor

Christoph Cullmann added out-of-the-box support for neocmakelsp, an LSP server for CMake (26.04.0 - utilities/kate MR #1974).

KAIChat AI Chat

Laurent Montel released KAiChat 0.6.0. This release introduces Wikipedia and weather integration, the capability to copy block code to the clipboard, and a quick search widget.

Network Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Károly Veres unified the space selection logic, so that using the quick switcher or clicking on a notification to jump to a room will now switch to correct space (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2551).

Nate Graham improved the hamburger menu button. Now the menu opens right beneath the button, the button has a pressed state while the menu is open, and the menu will close when clicking on the button again. (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2553)

Azhar Momin added a button to cycle through unread highlights (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2552).

Joshua Goins re-arranged the profile dialog and grouped similar actions together (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2544). And he made it possible to view the profile dialog when receiving an invitation (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2548).

Tobias Fella added some fixes for the new version of Matrix rooms (26.04.0 - network/neochat MR #2550).

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

Melvin Keskin released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release allow you to resend failed messages via the context menu, cancel and restart uploads, join group chats or add contacts by their XMPP URIs, and improves compatibility for servers using LDAP.

System Applications

KCron Task Scheduler

Alexander Wilms fixed running commands containing spaces in their path (26.04.0 - system/kcron MR #46).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you're hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE - you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don't have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

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

04 Jan 2026 5:21pm GMT

39C3

A few days ago I attended the 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) in Hamburg, Germany, as part of the KDE presence there.

39C3 Power Cycles

KDE

Like at 38C3 in the previous year we had a small KDE assembly as part of the Bits & Bäume Habitat.

There were two talks with KDE contributors in the main program:

The End of 10 campaign also had organized a meetup and a install party.

As Jonah has already reported we got very positive feedback from attendees about KDE's work.

KDE banner with colored LED decoration.
39C3 KDE Assembly (photo by Carl Schwan)

Itinerary

Itinerary was a frequent discussion topic for me, both with the KDE team and attendees in general.

Android

I also had the opportunity to talk to developers of F-Droid and other FOSS Android applications, who share a lot of the pain we are also dealing with in bringing KDE applications to Android.

A big concern especially for people not associated with a bigger umbrella organization is the upcoming requirements by Google for developer verification. While KDE might be less affected by this directly, any negative effect on the larger FOSS ecosystem is of course also bad for us. The continuous close-down of AOSP development is also not helping, making it significantly harder for Google-free Android variants.

None of that is entirely surprising, and it increases the pressure on fully open Linux systems becoming a viable alternative on more mobile devices. Both that as well as collaboration on adjacent infrastructure such as fully open push notification infrastructure has been making good progress in 2025 fortunately.

Transitous

We had a Transitous meetup on the last day at Wikimedia's assembly, hosted by Jonah, Julius and myself. We should organize and announce this earlier next time, but the space was nevertheless full. Meeting notes are in the wiki.

We had quite a few conversations around Transitous beyond this as well:

It also looks like we might have another iteration of the Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, next weekend already (January 9-11). That's very short notice and not entirely finalized yet. If you are interested in joining please get in touch in the Transitous Matrix channel.

OSM

The OSM assembly was conveniently directly next to the KDE one, so I could easily drop into conversations about indoor mapping, indoor routing or indoor positioning there. Interest in all parts of this seems to be increasing, we probably should improve the introduction material for this a bit.

There's also a plan to have an (offline) meeting in the next months to get some of the pending tagging proposals and open questions e.g. around "thick" walls, stairs and fractional levels sorted out and over the finishing line.

We also had the opportunity to discuss the FOSSGIS e.V. becoming a possible umbrella organization for Transitous and/or the Open Transport Community Conference. Especially the latter is becoming slightly more pressing as we got a few sponsorship offers while looking for a venue, and that's something we can only make use of with an organization behind us that can actually handle money.

Weather and Emergency Alerts

I also met with FOSSWarn to discuss the next steps on the public alert distribution server:

You can help!

Events like Chaos Communication Congress are enormously useful for bringing together, connecting and enabling collaboration between people from different areas or initiatives. The sheer size and diverse set of attendees help a lot with that.

Attending events however incurs cost for travel, accommodation and entrance. Your donation to organizations like KDE e.V. or FOSSGIS e.V. support such activities.

04 Jan 2026 9:45am GMT

03 Jan 2026

feedPlanet KDE | English

KDE Ni! OS – installing packages from source – Plasma Pass

This post will show the NixOS way of adding a custom package and explain the benefits of this approach in the context of system immutability.

Plasma Pass

KDE Ni! OS recently got a new package installed by default - Daniel Vrátil's Plasma Pass applet.

Plasma Pass is a Plasma applet to access passwords from pass, the standard UNIX password manager. You can find more information about the applet in Dan's blog post.

As NixOS doesn't currently offer Plasma Pass in its repositories, the package is installed in Ni! OS from the sources as in some other BTW, I use … distributions.

In NixOS, this is easily done via overlays. We can create an overlay that defines the plasma-pass package so that it can be installed as if it were a real NixOS package.

Package definition

This is the overlay definition used in Ni! (ni/packages/plasma-pass.nix):

self: prev: {
 kdePackages = prev.kdePackages.overrideScope (kdeSelf: kdeSuper: {
 plasma-pass = kdeSelf.mkKdeDerivation rec {
 pname = "plasma-pass";
 version = "1.3.0-git-59be3d64";

 src = prev.fetchFromGitLab {
 domain = "invent.kde.org";
 owner = "plasma";
 repo = "plasma-pass";
 rev = "59be3d6440b6afbacf466455430707deed2b2358";
 hash = "sha256-DocHlnF9VJyM1xqZx/hoQVMA/wLY+4RzAbVOGb293ME=";
 };

 buildInputs = [
 kdeSelf.plasma-workspace
 kdeSelf.qgpgme
 self.oath-toolkit
 ];

 meta = with prev.lib; {
 description = "Plasma applet for the Pass password manager";
 license = licenses.lgpl21Plus;
 platforms = platforms.linux;
 };
 };
 });
}

Most of this file is self-explanatory (except for the strange looking syntax of the Nix language :) ).

Since Plasma Pass is a KDE project, we want it visible as a part of kdePackages collection, and as it uses the common build setup that all KDE projects use (or should use), it uses mkKdeDerivation to define the plasma-pass package. This defines some basic dependencies, commonly used by KDE projects and adaptations needed for them to work properly in NixOS. For non-KDE-friendly packages, you'd base your package on the standard mkDerivation instead.

The project sources are located on the KDE's GitLab instance at invent.kde.org, therefore the package definition uses fetchFromGitLab to retrieve the sources. It is also possible to clone repositories on GitHub, fetch and use source tarballs, etc. All fetchers are described at NixOS Manual > Fetchers.

The rev field in the fetchFromGitLab command is the GIT revision that you want to install, and hash you can get by using the nix-prefetch-git command:

nix shell nixpkgs#nix-prefetch-git
nix-prefetch-git https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-pass \
 --rev 59be3d6440b6afbacf466455430707deed2b2358

The buildInputs part defines additional dependencies needed by Plasma Pass, and meta defines some meta information about the package such as the description and the license.

Using the definition

After defining the package, we have to add it to nixpkgs.overlays in any of our NixOS configuration files. In the case of Ni! OS, this is done in ni/modules/base.nix which defines the UI software that Ni! OS installs by default.

nixpkgs.overlays = [
 (import ../packages/plasma-pass.nix)
 ];

With this overlay, plasma-pass can be used as if it was a normal NixOS package.

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
 ...
 kdePackages.plasma-pass
 ...
 ];

When plasma-pass gets added to the nixpkgs repository, the only action that will be needed in Ni! OS to switch to the official version is to remove the import...plasma-pass.nix from the overlays (this is the reason why we explicitly placed it in kdePackages collection - otherwise, we could have just put it top-level).

Custom packages and immutability

The main point of this post is not really to announce that a single new package is added to the Ni! OS setup. Even if it is a cool one like Plasma Pass.

The point is to show how a custom package that is not available in the vast collection of nixpkgs can be added to a NixOS-based system.

The custom package becomes a proper regular Nix package and gets all the benefits of Nix's particular approach to immutability. If Plasma Pass gets broken after an update (either if new Plasma version breaks Plasma Pass, or if the new version of Plasma Pass no longer works as expected), you can always boot into the version before the bad update.

With distributions with immutable core and custom applications installed as Flatpaks, downgrading is possible, but a bit more involved and relies on 3rdparty keeping the old package versions still available for download.

With NixOS, all the previous versions remain on your system until you decide to remove them.

03 Jan 2026 6:30pm GMT

This Week in Plasma: new year, new accessibility features!

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Plasma developers are starting to trickle back from their vacations, and are polishing up and merging work that was nearing completion late last year. Among them are some impactful accessibility features, plus lots more holiday goodies!

Also, allow us to thank everyone who donated to KDE's 2025 end-of-year fundraiser. Thanks to all of you, we raised an additional €385,000 for KDE e.V. - a staggering, awe-inspiring sum of money! KDE e.V. will put it to good use keeping KDE financially and technically sustainable for years to come.

Finally, please welcome to TWiP John Veness, who has helped out with this week's post! Contributions here are warmly appreciated.

Anyway, let's check out the work:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The "Slow Keys" accessibility feature has been implemented for Plasma's Wayland session! (Martin Riethmayer, KDE bug #490826)

The Zoom effect now has a mode where the pointer never leaves the center of the physical screen. (Ritchie Frodomar, KDE bug #513145)

The Emoji Selector app now lets you choose a preferred skin tone for emojis of hands and people. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3399)

Emoji Selector app showing skin tone chooser menu

It's now possible to disable the visible timeout indicators on notifications if they stress you out. (Anton Birkel, KDE bug #411613)

Option on System Settings’ Notifications page to disable notification timeout indicators

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.5

When Discover prompts you to search the internet for an app that it couldn't find, the search string now includes the correct OS name if you're not using a Linux-based OS. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE bug #513366)

Plasma 6.6.0

Using a game controller will now count as "activity", stopping the system from automatically going to sleep or locking the screen. (Yelsin Sepulveda, KDE bug #328987)

When a laptop is plugged in or unplugged while asleep, it now wakes up being aware of the current state. (Nate Graham, KDE bug #507203)

System Settings' Touchscreen page now hides itself when there are no touchscreens connected. (Nicolas Fella, KDE bug #513566)

The screen chooser OSD now has a button to open the full System Settings page if none of the built-in options are relevant. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kscreen MR #442)

Button in screen chooser OSD to configure screen settings in more detail

Creating a sticky note on the desktop via middle-click paste now focuses the text area immediately, ready for editing. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kdeplasma-addons MR #967)

Subtly improved the appearance of overlay badges on Plasma widgets, particularly the ones in the system tray. (Noah Davis, plasma-workspace MR #6118)

Nicer-looking widget badges

In the Application Dashboard launcher widget, category highlights now span the full width of the area, making it more visually consistent. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3408)

The Large Icons Task Switcher style now does a better job of showing a large number of icons by wrapping them onto multiple rows rather than scrolling horizontally. (Christoph Wolk, KDE bug #513436)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed an issue that made some Plasma popups inappropriately stay open when they lost focus. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE bug #511187)

Plasma 6.6.0

Possibly fixed one of the most common panel-related Plasma crashes. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #6086)

Fixed an issue in Spectacle that could make some toolbars in Rectangular Region mode appear off-screen when using a multi-monitor setup where not all screens share a baseline. (Mario Roß, KDE bug #468794)

Fixed a bug that could make the "New!" badge on newly-installed apps in Kickoff overflow for apps with very long names. (Christoph Wolk, KDE bug #513272)

Fixed a weird issue that could make the Task Manager start a drag-and-drop operation when double-clicking a task right on the screen edge. (Aleksey Rochev, KDE bug #501922)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Improved and fixed support for OpenBSD in multiple places. (Rafael Sadowski, KPipeWire MR #229, KInfoCenter MR #284, Solid MR #228)

How You Can Help

"This Week in Plasma" needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

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 keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here

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

03 Jan 2026 12:01am GMT

KDE developer onboarding is good now

I made substantial changes in the KDE Developer Platform documentation over the years. I am effectively its docs maintainer and have the largest number of commits in the repository. This is due in large part because I started contributing to it in 2021, applied as a KDE documentation contractor in late 2023, and started officially working with KDE development onboarding docs in 2024. I'm one of multiple furries contributing to KDE. :3

03 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

02 Jan 2026

feedPlanet KDE | English

FreeBSD 14-to-15 Upgrade (Intel)

This post has the notes I made while upgrading another laptop from FreeBSD 14 to FreeBSD 15. Since my first upgrade was a long and annoying process, I figured I would take notes for the second round. These notes are "how not to do it", even if the end-result is KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD 15, as desired.

The laptop I have already upgraded is a Framework 13 with an AMD 7640U CPU and integrated AMD Radeon (Phoenix1) GPU. That ran into the problem that the amdgpu kernel driver would panic with the stock kernel. After building a world and kernel and packages of the driver that are all patched and consistent, the system works fine.

The laptop I'm going to upgrade is a Slimbook Base 14 with Intel i5-10210U and integrated Intel Comet Lake GT2 GPU. This laptop has a FreeBSD 14 install on it, but I'm pretty sure I never ran it as a laptop-daily-driver. This is my openSUSE laptop most of the time.

Preparations

There is no meaningful user data on the FreeBSD partition, so I'm not going to bother with a backup. The existing installation is on a UFS filesystem. It is running 14.0-CURRENT from .. um .. 2022. That's probably going to need upgrades before I can even use the external ZFS NVMe drive to get to the 15-update.

So now I'm going to stomp all over everything, which is exactly what the tool is preventing me from doing. Why else would there be a /rescue directory?

The base install doesn't have a root password and doesn't have any users defined and will overwrite password files, so after the reboot log in as root with no password, and ignore messages about missing user ID for dbus and avahi and whatever. This continues to be a bad-idea approach.

The next step is importing the ZFS pool with my patched world and kernel and 15.0 packages, such as they are. Unfortunately, ZFS in 15.0 has some new feature-flags that even 14.3 doesn't understand. The pool can be imported read-only, though.

The system has now, in the most cursed-possible way, been upgraded to FreeBSD 15.0-CURRENT.

Packages for 15.0

After doing the cursed upgrade to a new OS version, the rest is reasonably normal:

I removed all Qt ports from the system before starting this, so that it wouldn't have to deal with much in the way of desktop packages. There's still 2GiB to upgrade, though (including LLVM 13 and 19; I suppose I can clean up some of that).

Post-install Configuration

The sysrc(8) commmand should be used to edit rc.conf; no need to do everything in a cursed fashion.

I have a couple of extra steps and documentation written down from the last time I tried KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD. Don't bother with a display manager. SDDM isn't worth it.

Log out, log back in, run that script, and here's KDE Plasma Wayland running on FreeBSD 15 on Intel graphics:

KDE Plasma Wayland session information on FreeBSD 15
KDE Plasma Wayland session information on FreeBSD 15

This leaves just nVidia graphics to deal with, but for that I need to swap around some hardware in my workstation.

02 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

Carrot Cake Recipe

This is a recipe post. I've written this one down before, in 2010, but this time I used a scale and some measurements that make more sense in the Netherlands. Carrot cake in the Netherlands still elicits exactly two reactions: vies he? and oh, yummy!. That rabbit still doesn't get it.

For a vegan cake, use vegan egg (chia seed + some water). Kid[0] makes it that way sometimes, but I have not tried it myself.

Stir together:

Then beat in:

Finally, stir in:

This is enough for a small-ish pie dish or baking dish. I have a 24x24cm square tray that is way too big. The batter spreads too thin and it ends up baking too dry. A smaller tray is better.

The batter looks dreadful and runny when you pour it in the baking dish. Bake at 180℃ for 35 minutes or so.

02 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

Web Review, Week 2026-01

And we've finally reached 2026! I wish you all lots of nice Free Software contributions and good news regarding sustainability. Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-01.


How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

Tags: tech, social-media, communication, community

Indeed, social media even the fediverse isn't really about communication or community, it's about consuming content.

https://ploum.net/2025-12-15-communication-entertainment.html


I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now

Tags: tech, linux, foss, gaming

Another call for gamers to switch to Linux. Let's see if the numbers are following in 2026.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/im-brave-enough-to-say-it-linux-is-good-now-and-if-you-want-to-feel-like-you-actually-own-your-pc-make-2026-the-year-of-linux-on-your-desktop/


Europe gets serious about cutting US digital umbilical cord

Tags: tech, politics, business, europe

Looks like Europe is finally waking up. It needs to pick up the pace now.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/22/europe_gets_serious_about_cutting/


A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet

Tags: tech, business, politics, DRM, attention-economy, privacy, gafam, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, technical-debt

Probably one of the most important talks of 39C3. It's a powerful call to action for the European Union to wake up and do the right thing to ensure digital sovereignty for itself and everyone else in the world. The time is definitely right due to the unexpected allies to be found along the way. It'd be a way to turn the currently bad geopolitical landscape into a bunch of positive opportunities.

https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification-resistant-internet


Beyond the Machine

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, philosophy, music, art, programming

Long but interesting piece. There's indeed a lot to say about our relationships to tools in general and generative AI in particular. It's disheartening how it made obvious that collaborative initiatives are diminishing. In any case, ambivalence abounds in this text… for sure we can't trust the self-appointed stewards of the latest wave of such tools. The parallel with Spirited Away at the end of the article is very well chosen in my opinion. The context in which technologies are born and applied matters so much.

https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/


Thanks AI!

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

I think Rich Hickey hit that nail on the head.

https://gist.github.com/richhickey/ea94e3741ff0a4e3af55b9fe6287887f


My first meshtastic network

Tags: tech, radio, distributed, meshstatic

This is really fun tech. I need to find time to experiment with it.

https://rickcarlino.com/notes/electronics/my-first-meshtastic-network.html


Gaming Couch - Play Couch Co-Op Games Instantly

Tags: tech, gaming, indie, web

Looks like a neat option for quick party games.

https://gamingcouch.com/


Email Privacy Tester

Tags: tech, email, security, tools

This looms like a handy help to check your email client is doing the right thing and is not leaking information.

https://www.emailprivacytester.com/about


Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: Full Disclosure of Airoha RACE Vulnerabilities

Tags: tech, bluetooth, security

This is definitely a bad one, there seem to be quite a few popular devices affected. And there might be more devices affected of course.

https://insinuator.net/2025/12/bluetooth-headphone-jacking-full-disclosure-of-airoha-race-vulnerabilities/


A Modern Recommender Model Architecture

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, data-science

Very comprehensive resource to make your own recommender model.

https://cprimozic.net/blog/anime-recommender-model-architecture/


How uv got so fast

Tags: tech, rust, python, design, performance

Unsurprisingly, this is mostly not related to the use of Rust. The design choices are what male uv so fast.

https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/26/how-uv-got-so-fast.html


witr: Why is this running?

Tags: tech, processes, system, tools

Early days for this little system tool. I really like the idea though.

https://github.com/pranshuparmar/witr


TIL: Restarting systemd services on sustained CPU abuse

Tags: tech, system, processes, systemd

Might be an interesting pattern to avoid a service going awry.

https://taoofmac.com/space/til/2025/12/28/1400


Huge binaries

Tags: tech, system, assembly, hardware, cpu

Nice little introduction in the fascinating world of very large binaries.

https://fzakaria.com/2025/12/28/huge-binaries


On the Brokenness of File Locking

Tags: tech, linux, filesystem

It's been written a while ago now… and it's admittedly still a mess. Be sure to read the addendum as well.

https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/locking


Everything you never wanted to know about file locking

Tags: tech, unix, linux, filesystem, python

The situation about file locking is really complicated in the Unix systems family.

https://chris.improbable.org/2010/12/16/everything-you-never-wanted-to-know-about-file-locking/


By how much does your memory allocator overallocate?

Tags: tech, system, memory

A good reminder that allocators generally do more than you expect.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/12/30/by-how-much-does-your-memory-allocator-overallocates/


The production bug that made me care about undefined behavior

Tags: tech, c++, memory

Careful of undefined behaviours. They can be reached fairly quickly. Especially in C++ and its initialisation maze.

https://gaultier.github.io/blog/the_production_bug_that_made_me_care_about_undefined_behavior.html


Software taketh away faster than hardware giveth: Why C++ programmers keep growing fast despite competition, safety, and AI

Tags: tech, c++, community, safety

This piece is (unsurprisingly) biased. Still there's some truth there. C++ is here to stay, like it or not. The safety issues are overblown and are getting addressed. Now where the article is lacking is that the language has other issues. Also, will profiles ever become a real thing?

https://herbsutter.com/2025/12/30/software-taketh-away-faster-than-hardware-giveth-why-c-programmers-keep-growing-fast-despite-competition-safety-and-ai/


The Second Great Error Model Convergence

Tags: tech, exceptions, failure, go, zig, rust, type-systems

This is indeed interesting to see how the landscape evolved around error handling. There's clearly a tension between exceptions and the result types we've seen popping up everywhere now.

https://matklad.github.io/2025/12/29/second-error-model-convergence.html


Rust Errors Without Dependencies

Tags: tech, rust, failure, exceptions

A bit too unapologetic regarding Rust API choices for my taste. Still, it gives a good idea on how error handling works in Rust.

https://vincents.dev/blog/rust-errors-without-dependencies/


TIL: serde's borrowing can be treacherous

Tags: tech, rust, serialization, failure

You assumed you could deserialise in a zero copy fashion? Are you really sure about that? Think twice.

https://yossarian.net/til/post/serde-s-borrowing-can-be-treacherous/


Scratchapixel

Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, learning

Looks like a nice resource to get started with graphics and 3D.

https://www.scratchapixel.com/


A silly diffuse shading model

Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, shader

It's not that silly. It can come in useful in some cases, for artistic or debug reasons.

https://lisyarus.github.io/blog/posts/a-silly-diffuse-shading-model.html


You can't design software you don't work on

Tags: tech, design, architecture

I'm not sure I fully align with this piece. The core tenet of generic design advice vs concrete design advice makes sense though.

https://www.seangoedecke.com/you-cant-design-software-you-dont-work-on/


The 9 indispensable DEBUGGING RULES

Tags: tech, debugging

A good summary on the important rules to follow to debug something.

https://tpierrain.blogspot.com/2010/11/9-indispensable-debugging-rules.html


Pair Programming - What Works, What Breaks, & What's Next

Tags: tech, pairing, team

Interesting insights about pair programming.

https://spin.atomicobject.com/ten-years-of-pair-programming/


The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer

Tags: tech, maintenance, sustainability

This is a good praise for the work of maintainers. They're fighting off entropy and this should be well regarded.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-rime-of-the-ancient-maintainer/


Definition of Ready

Tags: tech, agile, product-management, tests

The definition of ready can be a big help avoiding too many questions about stories as they are implemented. They should be clear before hand.

https://blog.gdinwiddie.com/2014/03/27/definition-of-ready/


The Humanizing Work Guide to Splitting User Stories

Tags: tech, agile, project-management, product-management

This is a very good resource on the different ways to split user stories.

https://www.humanizingwork.com/the-humanizing-work-guide-to-splitting-user-stories/


Stop Using Story Points

Tags: tech, agile, estimates, project-management

Estimates are always the weak spot in project management in my opinion. Story points are generally confusing and there are better ways.

https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/stop-using-story-points/



Bye for now!

02 Jan 2026 4:58pm GMT

01 Jan 2026

feedPlanet KDE | English

Oliebollen Recipe

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

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

It's a thing.

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

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

Volkoren Herfstbok Oliebollen

Wets:

Drys:

Lumps:

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

01 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

FreeBSD upgrade-to-15

They say never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes, but a USB 3.2 NVMe enclosure with a 1TB stick in it is pretty slick, also. I've been moving it back-and-forth between FreeBSD machines to get everything updated, and here's some notes (for my future-self, mostly).

ZPool is cool

The stick has a GPT on it, and then a couple of partitions. I followed the example in the gpart(8) manpage under GPT. That creates a boot-partition, some swap, and a UFS partition - as if you want to create a bootable FreeBSD disk.

After that I put a rest-of-the-disk partition of type freebsd-zfs. Using glabel(8) I labeled that partition as zjail (ZFS pools traditionally start with the letter Z, and this one is going to be mostly-for-jails).

Then zpool can be used to create a pool from that labeled partition.

gpart add -t freebsd-zfs da0
glabel label zjail da0p4
zpool create zjail label/zjail

Sure, it's not got any redundancy, nothing special, but it's 1TB I can carry around, and it's easier than configuring NFS drives and/or WiFi on the laptop. To use the space, zpool import zjail (just don't forget to zpool export zjail before shutting down).

etcupdate, ugh

Initially, I had a zjail/src filesystem, and under that some directories like src/ and ports/. It is possible to buildworld and buildkernel there, but etcupdate (which is a tool that updates the things in /etc/ based on the newly-built world) needs extra handholding for that, and the error message isn't very informative. I forget what it is, even, because I ended up re-creating ZFS filesystems zjail/data/src and zjail/data/ports and then setting the mountpoint property for them to mount them in the traditional locations.

AMD graphics

The graphics drivers in FreeBSD are imported from Linux. There are some kernel shims, but basically we run the same graphics stack. However, the shim code is some tricky PCI-wrangling, and in my case with FreeBSD 15.0 I could get a text console, but loading the graphics drivers with kldload amdgpu would panic the kernel.

There are issues #391 and #393 which look similar to the panic that I would see. Bjorn has a proposed patch which simplifies the PCI-wrangling a little (to my eyes, anyway). I applied the patch and rebuilt "all the things", after which both slightly-older (drm-66-kmod) and newer (drm-latest-kmod, which corresponds to Linux 6.9) drivers seem to work.

I imagine some fixes will land soon, because "AMD graphics just doesn't work" does not seem like a long-term sustainable situation. With the fixes applied, I have a working graphics stack, so …

KDE Plasma Wayland on FreeBSD 15

Assuming the graphics stack works, then KDE Plasma can be installed with pkg install plasma6-plasma . You can't do much with only Plasma and no applications at all, so pkg install konsole is recommended as well.

After that "it just works", at least for the way that I use KDE Plasma. It takes a few clicks to change the settings to what I actually want (e.g. CTRL is next to the letter A) but after that it's … just the usual KDE Plasma session, which looks like this in KInfoCenter:

KDE Plasma Wayland session information on FreeBSD 15
KDE Plasma Wayland session information on FreeBSD 15

01 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

39C3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Projects

/img/itinerary/maplibre.png

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

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

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

Sessions

Talks

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

01 Jan 2026 9:12pm GMT

31 Dec 2025

feedPlanet KDE | English

Kaidan 0.14.0: Advanced Media Sharing and Registration Provider Filtering

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

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

Advanced Media Sharing

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

Offline media sharing queue

Filtering XMPP Providers for Account Creation

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

Provider filtering

Highlighted Messages

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

Highlighted message

XMPP URIs

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

Changelog

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

Features:

Bugfixes:

Notes:

Download

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

Packaging status

31 Dec 2025 11:00pm GMT