Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week, Plasma 6.8 continues to pass through the bug-fixing process in preparation for its release on October 14th, including the release of a second beta version. So far we still don't have many reported regressions, so again either Plasma 6.8 is amazing already, or else people aren't testing it enough!

In addition to bug fixing and polishing, Plasma contributors also began landing some features and UI improvements for Plasma 6.9. Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

The context menu for Task Manager tasks now includes a "Move to Screen" feature, mirroring the similar one already accessible from windows' titlebar context menus. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #465058)

System Settings' Firewall page can now display comments associated with custom firewall rules made with the ufw firewall backend. (Arie Miller, plasma-firewall MR #109)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

Tiled windows now have square corners, so they fit together nicely. (Ethan Chappel, KDE Bugzilla #490716)

The Dictionary widget now fully adjusts its colors when the active color scheme or Plasma style changes, and looks more "Plasma-style" in general. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1141)

New

Old

System Monitor's Processes and Applications pages no longer sometimes show double scrollbars. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-systemmonitor MR #466)

Plasma now sends fewer notifications about the screen configuration changing - particularly for cases where they offer no real value. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7094 and plasma-workspace MR #7148)

Plasma 6.9

System Settings' Touchpad page now expresses the available options for right- and middle-clicking in a more natural way. (Jakob Petsovits, plasma-desktop MR #4041)

On System Settings' Notifications page, some icons on the list items for configuring individual notifications now have tooltips to explain what they do, in case their icons aren't comprehensible enough. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6785)

If you've configured any custom clipboard actions in the Clipboard widget's settings, they're now placed above the standard MIME type actions, rather than below them. (Paul Wise, plasma-workspace MR #6107)

The "In rows" and "In columns" arrangement options for desktop icons now arrange icons the way they say they will, rather than according to the opposite option. (Daniel Pflager, KDE Bugzilla #512993)

Notifications with speed graphs no longer redundantly show the current speed twice while expanded. (Méven Car, plasma-workspace MR #7050)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze on systems where the Wi-Fi adapter is disabled and re-enabled frequently. (Jay Fleischer, plasma-nm MR #669)

Fixed an issue in the Comics widget that could make it occasionally get stuck in an infinite loop and waste system resources. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #525856)

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a case where KWin could crash on systems with NVIDIA GPUs using version 610.57.04 or later of the proprietary driver. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #524840)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when you dragged a widget to a panel. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #501289)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while trying to fetch weather data from Environment Canada. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #512054)

Fixed a memory leak in the Process Table widget. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525978)

Worked around an upstream issue in version 9.12 or later of the coreutils library that prevented KWallet from being unlocked at login as expected. (Omid Kordbache, KDE Bugzilla #525805)

Fixed a recent regression that made the names of touchpads vanish from the device chooser combobox on System Settings' Touchpad page. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #521800)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash in response to apps closing or crashing in very specific ways. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #506562)

Fixed an issue that made Spectacle sometimes fail to save screen recordings. (Zhora Zmeykin, KDE Bugzilla #516848)

Spectacle's "Share" feature once again works. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #525413)

When you drag the thumbnail of a file or screenshot from a notification to somewhere else, the drop menu once again includes "Move" as an option. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #508520)

Remote desktop authentication now works with version 3.32 or later of the freerdp library. (Ben Marshall, krdp MR #248)

Fixed an issue that could cause remote desktop sessions closed remotely while in progressive mode to get stuck and block starting new sessions. (Oliver Beard, krdp MR #246)

The Brightness & Color widget is now fully screen-reader-friendly. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #508485)

Fixed a bizarre clipboard issue that mis-rendered certain Unicode characters in the 100th position of a piece of copied text. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #508224)

Plasma 6.9

Text in a right-to-left language that you copy to the clipboard while using a left-to-right language is no longer covered up by the hover buttons in the clipboard history. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #440349)

Fixed a visual glitch affecting notifications with speed graphs that could appear when you sent them to the history, and then restored them. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #514677)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

The Task Manager widget's feature to filter tasks by virtual desktop has been made compatible with the "per-screen virtual desktops" feature. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7147)

System Monitor and its widgets now measure GPU memory usage more accurately. (Roan Bukaci, KDE Bugzilla #525481)

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.

03 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-40.

NVIDIA's Greenwashing Tactics & Hidden Emissions

Tags: tech, nvidia, hardware, economics, ecology

Are we surprised? Unfortunately not, they almost increased their indirect emissions 8 folds in a few years. And it could get worse still.

https://www.aigreenwashing.org/news/new-ai-report-reveals-nvidias-greenwashing-tactics-and-hidden-emissions/

AI's Unsustainable impacts to grow x7 by 2030

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

There's clearly a major issue in terms of environmental impacts with the AI industrial complex. Yes it's also about electricity consumption but not only. We have at last a comprehensive study on the matter. Without major changes it's just unsustainable and something we can't collectively afford.

https://www.greenit.fr/2026/09/30/ais-unsustainable-impacts-to-grow-x7-by-2030/

Micron CEO Says Memory Supply Will Be Much Tighter in 2027 and 2028 Than in 2026

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, hardware, memory, business, economics

Looks like the mess on hardware prices will continue for a while…

https://www.techpowerup.com/353296/micron-ceo-says-memory-supply-will-be-much-tighter-in-2027-and-2028-than-in-2026

The AI Pascal's Wager

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, foss, community

It makes sense to me, it's better to not fall prey to the marketing induced FOMO. Instead projects have a chance to do the right thing.

https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal_wager.html

If we do not stop to help each other, what do we become?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, community

Aren't we loosing sense of community and our humanity indeed?

https://blog.codinghorror.com/if-we-do-not-stop-to-help-each-other-what-do-we-become/

The opposite of the apocalypse is a neighborhood

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, community, politics

Kind of an unusual read. But I think the message is powerful. We should definitely favor community over tools controlled by the new robber barons.

https://thewhitepages.net/p/the-opposite-of-the-apocalypse-is

One month without AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, productivity, quality

The slippery slop seems clear… If you start generating a bit you'll be pushed to loose full control in the end. Do you think you can learn this way? Improve? I doubt it.

https://blog.bustikiller.com/2026/09/25/one-month-without-ai.html

This study looks at how and with whom connected cars share your data

Tags: tech, automotive, privacy

The automakers still don't care about privacy apparently…

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/09/connected-car-data-privacy-is-still-abysmal-study-finds/

File Notification Attacks

Tags: tech, security

Interesting new family of side channel attacks. Surprising it lingered for so long before being noticed.

https://inoti.fyi/

Don't couple your Go code to GitHub

Tags: tech, go, supply-chain, vendor-lockin

This is clearly something which bugs me about the Go ecosystem. It's way too coupled to a single Git provider. The approach to dependency management is neat otherwise but more care should be taken about avoiding this GitHub lock in.

https://iain.rocks/blog/dont-couple-your-go-code-to-github

Taking Out The Garbage In Postgres

Tags: tech, postgresql, databases, performance

Interesting issues around cascading deletes in Postgres and how the indices are managed.

https://www.dbos.dev/blog/scaling-deletions-in-postgres

DTAP - Text and Test Anything Protocol

Tags: tech, tests, infrastructure, shell

Looks like an interesting tool for black box testing. Seems especially suited for full system tests.

https://dtap.sparrowhub.io/doc/README

Reducing C++ template bloat by factoring out the type-dependent portions of the function

Tags: tech, c++

This is indeed a good way to reduce the code generated by templates.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260820-00/?p=112629/

We Have Named Arguments at Home

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

It's indeed not urgent to have this language feature in Rust. I'm less convinced about the case put forth regarding function overloading not being necessary though. Feels a bit like post-hoc justification in this case.

https://corrode.dev/blog/named-arguments-at-home/

Rusty thoughts on "Parse, don't validate"

Tags: tech, type-systems, reliability, rust

This is indeed an important pattern to build reliable systems. It's worth exploring in various languages. Here is the Rust perspective.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2026/rusty-thoughts-on-parse-dont-validate/

What makes Lisp difficult to read?

Tags: tech, lisp, vision

Interesting take and exploration for the reasons which might make Lisp harder to read than other languages.

https://paultm.nl/paren-thesis

Keep if clauses side-effect free

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship

You're not paying for a couple more intermediate variables. For sure they make things more readable though.

https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/keep-if-clauses-side-effect-free.html

Modern Motherfucking Website

Tags: tech, web, frontend, framework, complexity

Indeed web frameworks are not needed for everything.

https://modernmotherfuckingwebsite.dreamstation.systems/

A Staff Engineer's Guide to Inventing Work

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

Interesting points. If you're making a platform you can't really figure out what to do next in the same way than when usual product management is possible. There are signals to look for to feed your roadmap though.

https://sujithjay.com/inventing-work

Even at 100 meters, PV makes neighbours more likely to go green

Tags: tech, energy, ecology

This finding is kind of surprising to me. Time to install solar systems at home I guess?

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/08/20/even-at-100-meters-pv-makes-neighbours-more-likely-to-go-green/

Sodium-Ion Batteries May Be Close to Market Readiness

Tags: tech, energy, battery

Let's see if it really takes off. It'd be a step in the right direction for sure.

https://en.reset.org/electric-cars-powered-by-salt-instead-of-lithium-sodium-ion-batteries-may-be-close-to-market-readiness/

Pirating the Pirates

Tags: movie, culture, copyright

Fascinating account of what people must go through for proper film preservation. It's kind of weird that it is still illegal. You'd wish there'd be more recognition for such passion.

https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/pirating-the-pirates

Bye for now!

02 Oct 2026 11:23am GMT

Sometimes, as a developer, you need to find out why your application is misbehaving. The usual advice is to add tracing or use a profiler.

01 Oct 2026 4:10pm GMT

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 21 Beta!

01 Oct 2026 10:45am GMT

Welcome to this edition of This Month in KDE Linux, dedicated to KDE's next-generation operating system.

September was a bit of a slow month for KDE Linux, the result of multiple contributors preparing for, attending, and recovering from Akademy 2026, and then later All Systems Go! 2026.

But it was hopefully not all for naught; Harald and Nate gave a presentation about the project at Akademy:

…And then Harald gave another one at All Systems Go!

Anyway, most work consisted of infrastructure and code maintenance, documentation improvements, and small bug fixes. Sky Poincet and Philip Grant did a lot of the heavy lifting while Harald and Nate were absent, which is much appreciated.

Despite us still calling KDE Linux an alpha release, the project is maturing to focus on stability and polish, a classic application of the Pareto principle (colloquially known as the "80/20" rule).

One interesting project did land in September, though: Hadi Chokr replaced sudo and pkexec with wrappers that call the more modern and secure run0 tool. This reduces the number of SUID binaries that can be used for privilege escalation attacks.

BuildStream

This is probably a good time to talk about BuildStream. What's BuildStream?

If you know what Yocto is, BuildStream is basically Yocto but stewarded by the Apache Foundation.

If you don't, then the easiest wasy to explain BuildStream is that it's a tool for compiling and packaging software from arbitrary sources. In the same way that mkosi currently builds KDE Linux an OS image from distro packages, BuildStream builds an OS image from individual projects' source code - bypassing distro packages entirely.

KDE Linux has had a skunkworks project going on in the background that replaces the base OS's Arch Linux packages with basically the same software stack, but built by us, using BuildStream. The project is quite close to a "shall we integrate it or not?" decision point.

If we do, the result should behave identically and users won't even notice the change - an advantage of KDE Linux being image-based rather than package-based.

So here's an obvious question: why are we considering doing a huge amount of work ourselves to rebuild what we're already getting for free with Arch? KDE Linux has been able to inherit everything that makes Arch awesome, really accelerating its development.

But ultimately Arch is a rolling release OS, and KDE Linux does not plan to be a rolling release OS. The user and stable editions will have discrete, time-based releases. If we stick with Arch, at the moment we branch for a new release, we have to either accept whatever's in Arch (which could include regressions that we miss) or polish a fork of Arch for some amount of time (which entails doing a bunch of packaging work ourselves anyway).

So while BuildStream offers other advantages too, the big win would be allowing us to have total control over the software versions we build, and making it easier for us to add new things that aren't currently packaged by Arch (here are some examples).

We wouldn't be doing it all ourselves, either. The BuildStream-based KDE Linux variant is based on the FreeDesktop Flatpak SDK, same as GNOME OS. So maintenance will be shared across all three projects' contributors.

This project has consumed quite a bit of time over the past few months, and we'll be plugging away in October, hopefully to the point where we can make a decision about it one way or another.

How you can help

KDE Linux is making steady progress towards its Beta milestone, and remains 85% of the way there.

There's lots to do! If you're a fan of the project, please help out; there are many ways:

• User support: help support people on discuss.kde.org using KDE Linux.
• Issue reporting: install KDE Linux and report issues.
• Documentation: improve the docs by submitting merge requests.
• Flatpak: fix packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps.
• OS development: help build KDE Linux! There's plenty to do.

01 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

30 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Last week was a great Akademy in Graz!

Welcome Event​

First up was the welcome event on Friday evening, which took place at a rooftop bar overlooking Jakominiplatz; this was lovely in the evening light, and spectacular at night with parts of the city lit up!

I had fun helping to prepare and hand out lanyards to everyone as they arrived. This was also where Nico introduced many of us to Sturm - young, lightly fermented wine; sweet and flavorful. This became a hit at the welcome event and indeed all of Akademy!

Conference Talks​

Saturday and Sunday saw a deluge of great talks; more than I could possibly cover in a little blog post!

A couple highlights briefly:

I am really happy that Scott Jenson accepted my invite to do a talk at Akademy, and I thought it was very well received! Has also created a fair bit of buzz online. Unfortunately did not manage talk much directly - Akademy is hectic and I lost track of him.. oh well, maybe he'll come again! :)

Tracey Clark gave a great talk about QA and testing.. superhero work! It was great stuff and I hope inspires more people to both submit good bug reports as well as to help with triaging.

Gerald Senarclens de Grancy told us about using KDE software to teach kids about computers, linux, programming, and much more. Really interesting stuff. I expect it makes a huge impact to reach people so young!

Markus Feilner told us the crazy tale of exposing how the Bavarian government tried to make a €1 billion+ contract with Microsoft without any sort of consultation, alternatives, bidding, etc.. wild stuff. I'd like to see such consideration for open source options in Canadian government back home!

Eike Hein told us all about how he's been exploring the great pyramids powered by KDE technology - wow that is so cool! That honestly sounds like a dream come true; it had never even occurred to me people like us were doing such things! I'd really love to hear more details on this. hint hint :D

So many other great talks! Only 2 downsides: I couldn't attend them all and had to catch up on some later (with this year's excellent recordings), and the schedule was so tightly packed that there was often only 5 minutes between talks to run to the bathroom; quite the fast pace when trying to keep hydrated! 😵‍💫

Social event​

So many people! Good times were had, many interesting chats with great people. Although, poor Konqi had a rough time…

BoFs​

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday were the BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions - smaller and more informal talks/hackathons/brainstorming/etc.

Definitely far too much to cover, but we had good sessions with the Penpot folks and have some ideas how to help move things forwards there, we have hope for exciting updates to Bugzilla, we traded and talked about some really cool stickers... and a laundry list of other cool stuff, tons of work happening/planned.

Rocket lab​

We noticed some students working on rockets as we were leaving the venue one day, and they gave a few of us a little tour! So cool! Also, their launch computer runs Linux with KDE. 😎

Day trip​

On Wednesday the KDE folks took a short breather from the hectic schedule to do something fun together - visit a fancy Austrian chocolate factory called Zotter!

They started with a short film explaining some of who they are and how they work, which was shockingly well-produced; it looked and sounded amazing!

I really tried to pace myself because the tour includes apparently 300+ tasting stations, and even so by the end I was a bit sick of chocolate. 🤯 🍫 😵

It was super interesting though and very tasty. I ended up buying a bunch from the gift shop to bring home as souvenirs of course! My favorites were the white chocolates and the ones with coffee; specifically the coffee & dates one is amazing. 😋

After Zotter we all went to enjoy some food and drinks (no chocolate!), and the weather was being perfectly accommodating for us!

After we got back to Graz proper several of us ended up sharing some excellent Fella-brewed liqueur in the hotel lobby, and getting very loud and silly and generally having a fun evening together to wrap up an absolutely lovely day.

Wrap up​

Of course I got sick right at the end of Akademy, and after getting home have slept most of 3 days, feeling quite terrible. I am just grateful getting sick waited until after all the great work and fun day trip, conversations and socializing with lovely people!

This was the Akademy for KDE's 30th birthday, and it was appropriately amazing! Thank you to everyone for being such an amazing community. Extra special thanks to the many people that helped to organize everything and make this happen at all, you did such an fantastic job! 🤩 💙

30 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

The Challenge: Getting AI Agents to Draw Correct Canvas2D

Qt 6.12 introduces Qt Canvas2D. Its API echoes the HTML5 canvas and the older Qt Quick Canvas element, both of which developers and AI models have seen many times in training data.

29 Sep 2026 1:06pm GMT

Hello everyone! I hope you're all doing great.

Right after my GSoC tenure ended, I headed off to Austria to attend Akademy. This was my first time traveling outside my country, so I was really excited to experience everything - from the journey itself to meeting people from the KDE community.

Traveling to Graz

My flight first landed in Vienna, which is a beautiful city. I spent a day exploring Vienna before making my way to Graz by train.

The moment I arrived in Graz, we had our welcome event on top of a building. I met a lot of KDE people, received my badge, and got to enjoy a beautiful view of central Graz.

That night was a great start to the trip - we had food, drinks, conversations, and lots of opportunities to meet other KDE contributors.

The First Day of Talks

After the delicious dinner at the welcome event, I was ready for the talks the very next day.

Not this! 😆 BTW, cool graffiti.

The Birthday Party

The next day was a special one - it was KDE's 30th birthday!

After a great day of talks and meeting people from the KDE community, everyone gathered to celebrate this incredible milestone. It was amazing to see so many KDE contributors, developers, and friends from around the world come together in one place.

There was plenty of food, drinks, music, and, of course, a birthday cake! It was a great opportunity to relax, have some fun, and get to know people outside of the usual technical discussions.

The great Konqi couldn't survive the event. 🥺

BoFs​

Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday were the BoFs (Birds of a Feather) sessions - smaller and more informal talks/hackathons/brainstorming/etc.

Day Trip

On Wednesday, we went on a day trip to Zotter Erlebniswelt, a famous Austrian chocolate factory near Riegersburg.

The tour began with a short film in the factory's mini-theatre, introducing us to the history of Zotter and its approach to chocolate-making. After that, we got to explore the factory and sample around 300 different varieties of chocolate. The best part? We could watch the chocolates being made right in front of us!

It was a really fun experience, and everything was delicious. Of course, I couldn't leave without picking up a bunch of chocolates from the gift shop!

Wrap Up

Akademy was an incredible experience, but it was also exhausting! Between attending talks, participating in BoFs, exploring Graz, meeting new people, and enjoying the day trip, there was always something happening.

I barely managed to get 4-5 hours of sleep each night because I didn't want to miss out on anything.

I'm really grateful to KDE for making this experience possible. I came back with wonderful memories and new friendships.

Until next time, Akademy! 💙

29 Sep 2026 10:00am GMT

Another Akademy attended, here's some photos!

Hello hello! It was that time of the year where I go to KDE Akademy, talk to fellow nerds, almost lose my voice due to socializing and eat a lot of nice food.

This time Akademy was in Graz, Austria. I had never been in Austria before. This time I also had to travel alone due to my wife being busy with studying.

Traveling alone was nervewracking for sure, but somehow I managed to do it. Unless I am dreaming and wake up under a bench in Frankfurt airport or something.

Now I do not have a lot of photos, but I tried. I am bad at photos, many of them are super shakey or bad. But maybe these are interesting anyway.

Let me know if you want me to blur your face, I tried my best avoid those who had red lanyards!!!

Traveling to Graz

I spent first 6h in a midnight train from home to Helsinki and could not sleep. Then I went from Helsinki to Frankfurt on a plane, I slept like two hours maybe. And from Frankfurt I went to Graz on a plane, also managed to sleep a bit.

At airport I met fellow KDE people and we managed to figure out our way to the hotel together.

The moment I arrived there, there was a welcome event on top of some building with bunch of food and drink. I had good time though I was super tired and the place was fully packed so I had barely any energy or will to try to properly socialize.

I genuinely do not remember much, it was a lot of travel and brain fog due to sleep deprivation lol.

First day of speeches

Akademy finally properly begins and I go to the venue after good nights sleep. I didn't take much photos at the venue as I spent time just watching the talks, but I managed to take couple photos.

At evening we went for a dinner, and there was A LOT of people around Graz as apparently there was some festival. More chaos, I do not like crowds, but it was interesting.

Second day of speeches and goals

During day two I spent most of the time at the venue as well, and the new KDE Goals were announced: I am one of the KDE Goal champions now! Yay!

The goal I am champion of is Next Generation Styling for KDE.

See the youtube video of the goals, our little speech timestamped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwv4SQSvx9g&t=2559

(I am the guy in full black with the Xenia shirt.)

So yes, make Union bug reports! :)

After the talks and goal stuff, we had a KDE birthday party! KDE is 30 years old now, so we had food and cake.

(The first image is just me being stupid dont mind me)

Konqi sadly did not survive the party....

BoF days

No photos from these, as I spent all my time in them. BoFs are tiny group hacking/discussion/etc sessions about stuff. I attended Union related BoFs but I also held my own: Desktop icons!

There will be it's own blogpost about the desktop icon BoF soon:tm:.

Otherwise I do not have much as I spent a lot of time just hacking on Union and less listening lol.

Daytrip: Chocolate

We went to a chocolate factory!!!

I've never been in one but it was very fun. And chocolatey.

There was like 300 tasting things for different processing phases of chocolate, from the chocolate beans to the full product.

I tried to taste it all. I really, really tried. At the end of it though I felt rather sick and did not want any more lol.

Despite feeling like I never want to see any more chocolate in my life, it was very fun. Apparently there was some other part of the place too that was like a zoo full of chocolate but I was so tired of it at the end I kinda skipped it and just drank water outside.

Yes, the theme of this trip is pretty much "i was very tired."

After stuffing ourselves full of chocolate, we went to another place nearby that was really pretty, on top of a hill, where we had a lunch. A lot of bread and cheese and ham and whatnot to put on the bread, and a lot of drinks too.

Last day(s)

Thursday I spent hacking on Union together with Arjen and Noah. We are still trying to get the widgets side work nicely, though it works rather well already.

After that, I said goodbye to Konqi (and other people) and had a weird pizza that was half regular and half calzone.

On Friday, we travelled together to airport and went eventually our separate ways to wherever we went.

I got home at midnight and finally could say hi to our snek Mochi again.

It was fun!

Akademy was really fun. I will make more technical post about the desktop icon stuff when I can. It was very great to meet fellow nerds and discuss all things KDE.

I had great time. Even as someone who really does not like traveling.

See you at Akademy 2027! Or KDE Goal sprints! :)

28 Sep 2026 10:33pm GMT

Right after my GSoC tenure ended, I took off to Austria for attending Akademy. This was my first time outside my country and also my first birthday in another country!

Meeting New People

I met Albert Astals Cid and Sune Vuorela who mentored and helped me during my GSoC tenure on Poppler and Okular.

I also got to meet Christoper Cullman who had merged my first contributions into KDE to the Kate editor.

Attending talks and BoFs

I attended some talks that I could mostly understand. For example, "Are we really going to use the same Desktop UX forever?" by Scott Jensen

Some talks of which I knew 50-60% of what's going on,

And then some talks, I had no idea about what's happening lol (but they sounded interesting anyways)

I also attended some BoFs like i18n, NFC (which sounded interesting), and one BoF which was about organizing Akademy. The "organizing Akademy" BoF was especially helpful because Bhushan Shah talked with me and other fellow contributors about doing a cki (conf kde india) so I learned some things there.

Chocolate factory experience

When they said in the movie that there are roughly 300 varieties of chocolates we can try, I thought I could try all of them. But I couldn't eat anymore than 30 -_-

Closing Remarks

It was a good event and I enjoyed my time there. Thanks KDE for making it happen.

28 Sep 2026 2:59pm GMT

As usual, crossing the Atlantic is tough for me. I'm just too tall, and the seats are, well... just too small. Not to mention the stress of receiving a message on the day of the trip saying that my flight had been moved four hours earlier! I dropped everything I was doing and ran to the airport, only to dicover that it was a mistake in the "system". Add to that the delays and the the risk of missing the connection... Lufthansa did not play well this trip but everything worked out in the end!

My second Akademy was simply amazing. It was also more special beacause it was the KDE 30th anniversary edition. Unfortunately I did not get to try the Konqi cake.

I am very proud to be part of the KDE community - a welcoming, friendly, diverse and free group of people who are making the world a better place. I you ask me what is KDE in one word, I would say hope.

Camille, from the Kdenlive team, asked us to document our trip, so I did a short edit.

Habemus Champions

One of the highlights of my trip was to announce the new KDE Goals. This cycle, the community voted for:

• KDE for Enterprise and Deployments - championed by: David Edmundson, Neal Gompa, and Kai Uwe Broulik
• Better documentation - championed by: Nate Graham, Thiago Masato Costa Sueto, and Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss
• Next Generation Styling for KDE - championed by: Arjen Hiemstra, Akseli Lahtinen, and Andy Betts

We are currently scheduling our kickoff meeting to get things organized. I am sure many of you are eager to contribute, so stay tuned for further news.

We also did a recap of the last cycle and handed the certificates of appreciation to the champions. Congrats to them, they really raised the bar!

My favorite accomplishments, in no particular order:

• Improved graphics tablet support. This made it possible to switch all the computers at our studio to KDE Plasma. We are a 100% KDE studio now. We Care About Your Input goal
• Plasma Keyboard. It was so cool to have seen this being born. We got a lot of community feedback and it will definitely be a cherry on top for Plasma. There are also many improvements and features coming. We Care About Your Input goal
• Ship Kirigami via pip. This is something that is still in a very initial state, but there has been recent progress by a community member. Streamlined Application Development Experience goal
• I love that KDE Mentorship now has a visual identity and it is getting a new website. KDE Needs You goal
• Beacon Program is a new mentorship program that I've been working to setup for ther last months. It is currrently entering a beta phase and will share more info soon. KDE Needs You goal

BOFs

I only got to participate in two BOFs.

The first was the Mentorships one hosted by Paul and Ansh, where I got to give a preview of the Beacon Program, the work that I've been building with universities for the last two semesters.

I also participated in Drunk KDE - Brand personality of KDE hosted by Aniqa and Kieryn. Boy that was a fun one! We got to think about KDE's branding and it contemplated lot's of issues that need to be worked on. Aniqa is compiling all our input and we'll hopefully get things moving afterwards.

Kdenlive at Akademy

The second highlight was getting together with the Kdenlive crew. Although it was a very quick, as most of the team stayed only for the weekend, we managed to get a lot done. We organized future sprints, started planning our upcoming fundraising campaign, discussed some promo tasks, and we even finally managed to merge the features section of the Kdenlive home page.

We also did a lot of testing and UX brainstorming for the upcoming keyframe timeline.

Unfortunately, for most of the trip, Jean-Baptiste was under the weather, so Julius and I had to fill in for his talk.

Graz

I loved Graz, Austria's second largest city. It is so welcoming and chill. I bought a weekly transport pass but ended up using it so little... did a lot of walking.

I was happy that I got to do some last minute sightseeing before catching the plane back home. After all the clock tower and the mountains were the inspiration for this year's edition.

A nice surprise was the Steirisches Backhendl served at TU Graz was just delicious. Styrian fried chicken (in pumpkin seed oil) served with a tangy potato salad and lingonberry jam.

Behind the scenes

This was my second Akademy, not only as a participant but also part of the organizing team.

We've been meeting religiously every Tuesday to organize this edition. Each time with different background lights from Harald's streaming setup.

All the graphics of this edition were made using free software programs like Inkscape for the general graphics creation, Scribus to export the PDF for printing, Blender for the intro graphics animations, and Kdenlive for video editing.

Also a HUGE shoutout to the CCC Video Operation Center (C3VOC) team. I really hope that we have consolidated this partership with them and can continue partnering with them for future Akademies. Speaking of which, the call for hosts is still open.

Lot's of luv to the beautiful, lean, mean Akademy-making team who put together such a fantastic edition. Can't wait for the next one with you all.

Some of the team. <3

28 Sep 2026 2:50pm GMT

August 6th - 9th 2026

FOSSY was held in Vancouver, Canada this year on the University of British Columbia campus.

This was my first conference as a KDE representative sitting at the KDE sponsors table. I don't know if we were the biggest sponsor at FOSSY, but we certainly had the most people and tables in the sponsors area. We also had the most things to play with. A drawing tablet, a surface table with drawing pen, a steam deck, a rpi4 with small touchscreen, as well a various types of laptops.

28 Sep 2026 1:15pm GMT

Tellico 4.3 is available, with some additional capabilities, improvements, and bug fixes. I've received several code contributions from new people in the last few months and I wanted to say thanks. Depending a little on how I count it, Tellico turns 25 years old next month. It's always been a hobby; I'm not a programmer by trade or training, and so I'm always gratified when other folks find my little tool useful and provide feedback, bug fixes, and even code contributions.

Improvements:

• Added new data sources for Goodreads and Hardcover.
• Updated MusicBrainz (Bug 524735), IMDB (Bug 525019), Numista (Bug 474986), DarkHorse, Kino-Teatr, and Kinopoisk (Bug 525687) data sources.
• Added appropriate data rate limiting to many data sources.
• Added option to read composer during audio file import (Bug 524734).
• Added option to disable ISBN auto-formatting.
• Added option to include filters and loans when importing a collection.
• Updated file exporting to include default file extensions.
• Updated Number fields to allow 64-bit values.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed bug with MusicBrainz keyword search (Bug 524735).
• Fixed bug when exporting HTML files for collection with no title.
• Fixed bug with restoring entry values after undoing a collection append or merge.

27 Sep 2026 7:52pm GMT

Recently Michael Tunnell interviewed Aleix and I on the subject of KDE's 30th birthday, Wayland, LTS software, the new Union theming engine, and more! If you're interested, you can check it out here. Note: if you work at Microsoft, please don't watch and get any big ideas!

27 Sep 2026 4:50pm GMT

Last weekend I had the privilege of attending Akademy - the yearly gathering of the KDE community. Taking place in Graz, it was a special one, marking the 30th anniversary of the email that set the Kool Desktop Environment in motion. We got to see the trailer for a documentary that, come October 14th, will...... Continue Reading →

27 Sep 2026 7:06am GMT