fidzu : KDE

After months of being completely consumed by my bachelor thesis and then giving myself some much needed rest, I finally have the time and headspace to sit down and write this post. And honestly, I have been waiting to write about this because Akademy 2025 was special.

This was my first in person Akademy after three years of attending remotely. Every year I would watch talks through a screen, imagining the energy in the room and the hallway conversations I was missing. This time, since my thesis brought me to Europe to work at CERN, I finally had the chance to join everyone in Berlin. KDE made it possible for me to attend in person, and I was also scheduled to give a talk on my Google Summer of Code project, KEcolab, which I currently maintain. So you can imagine how excited I was for this entire week. People say Akademy feels more like a KDE festival than a conference, and I was about to find out why.

I packed my bags in Switzerland and left for Berlin.

Arrival and Welcome Dinner

I reached Berlin on the fifth and went straight to the welcome dinner near Tiergarten. The restaurant had a relaxed vibe, and within minutes I was meeting people I had only ever known through Matrix usernames. Suddenly the names on my screen had real voices and real faces. We talked about everything from new KDE developments and the Banana release to personal side projects and long contribution journeys.

I finally met the KDE Eco team and the people working on the Endof10 campaign which is going amazingly well. We chatted over drinks, laughed a lot, and I might have invited half the table to visit CERN if they ever pass through Switzerland. Dinner was great. I had a pasta salad whose German name I still cannot pronounce, along with some very nice KDE drinks.

I returned late at night and realised that my slides were still not ready. My talk was scheduled for early morning on day one, so I stayed up finishing everything and managed only a few hours of sleep before the big day.

Day One

Day one opened with a keynote by Alexander Rosenthal on Open by Design. It set a very thoughtful tone for the conference. Right after that, I gave my talk titled KEcoLab: KDE's Automation Tool for Energy Consumption Measurements. You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/ybduSygg2Ns?si=tZlXN7XuGcfyux-Q The audience asked some great questions about expanding energy measurements to more applications and tools and how the process of measurement works behind the scenes.

Presenting KEcoLab at Akademy 2025

My talk overlapped with the Plasma talk, so I unfortunately could not attend that one. I spent the rest of the day listening to some very inspiring sessions. The KDE annual recap was a highlight, showing how far we have come as a community. It covered improvements across many applications, developments in Kirigami and updates to the new language bindings for Rust and Python. There was also a small peek into what is coming next such as improvements to drawing tablet support and the Plasma keyboard.

If you are interested in contributing to KDE, trust me when I say there are endless ways to do so even if you are not a technical person. You can explore opportunities here: https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved

Day Two

Day Two was packed with talks that focused on being thoughtful developers and maintainers. The keynote by Paloma Oliveira, titled The Politics of the Pull Request, stood out to me. It explored open source from angles we often overlook and gave me a lot to think about.

Paloma Oliveira's keynote on "The Politics of the Pull Request" - exploring the social and political dimensions of open source collaboration

I also enjoyed talks related to Wayland and Plasma Mobile, and in between sessions I helped volunteer at the welcome desk. At the end of the day, we all gathered at C Base for the social event. Great pizza, great people, great atmosphere.

Day Three

Day Three was dedicated to BoFs. I attended the KDE Goals BoF and then started preparing for the KEcolab BoF because we had to quickly fix a few last minute issues in the lab setup.

Our session was right after the Okular BoF, which turned out to be perfect timing. The Okular team gave us really helpful input since KEcolab and Okular are working on an ongoing integration. We talked about the possibility of running individual energy tests on different components and many other ideas. You can follow the issues we discussed here: https://invent.kde.org/sdk/kecolab/-/issues

Day Four

Day Four had more BoFs. I am sad I missed the You Can Dance BoF because it sounded like everyone had a lot of fun. I joined the KDE Out of Experience BoF and the KDE Flatpak BoF instead, both of which were genuinely interesting.

Day Five

Akademy day trip. This was incredibly fun. We were split into groups and had to complete different tasks around Berlin. We even had a bear themed challenge which led to some hilarious photos. We placed KDE stickers on poles, shared selfies and enjoyed the entire city.

Exploring Berlin with the KDE community - sticker missions, bear challenges, and unforgettable moments

Later we visited the Computer Museum which was heaven for anyone who loves old hardware. They had everything from retro consoles to the legendary 3dfx Voodoo chips. I spent way too long inside the museum and ended up missing the group that went to the dinner spot afterward.

Classic Macs - The originals that started it all

Day Six

The last official day included the Linux InstallFest. A few new contributors came in to install Fedora KDE on their laptops and it was a relaxing final day. People were packing, saying their goodbyes and heading home. I stayed for the after drinks event and spent the evening talking to more people before ending the day with bittersweet farewells.

But Akademy was not over for me yet.

Day Seven

I stayed an extra day to work on the KEcoLab lab with Joseph and Volker in KDAB, Berlin. Huge thanks to both of them. We switched the lab from KDE Neon to Fedora and set up Wayland. We are now testing ydotool so KEcoLab will run smoothly on Wayland as well. We did ran into few issues with the VNC but it was still productive, fun and a perfect ending to the week.

After lunch I said my final goodbye to Berlin and headed to the airport.

Final Thoughts

Akademy was one of the best conference experiences I have ever had. It was a week full of meeting incredible people, listening to inspiring talks, sharing ideas, social beers and feeling truly part of KDE.

KDE is one of the most welcoming open source communities and I am grateful to every single person who made my time there so special.

Thank you to KDE eV for sponsoring my attendance. Thank you to everyone I met for the warm conversations and kindness. I will not list names because I would definitely miss someone but you all made this Akademy unforgettable.

A special thanks to my KEcoLab team (Joseph, Volker, Kieryn (for the constant help throughout the event, Aakarsh and all past contributors). Also a big thank you to the KDE Eco Team, the EndOf10 team, KDE Promo and the entire KDE family. And of course thanks to the volunteers and organizers who made Akademy perfect from start to finish.

I already cannot wait for the next one.

The KDE community

08 Dec 2025 10:00am GMT

The attentive reader will note that yes, Akademy happened in September already. Not the most prolific blogger. Not the most prolific contributor either. But I had already drafted much of this post two months ago, so let's get it out the door. I'll cut all the paragraphs about fun social outings and focus on recapping stuff related to our Input Goal.

A special thank-you to Farid, of Kdenlive and KDE Goals coordination fame, who convinced me to take the trek when I thought perhaps I shouldn't cross the Atlantic twice in a year. I'm glad I went, tons of great sessions and conversations. Powered by your donations, KDE e.V. supported my travel costs and made it possible for me to coordinate with many KDE people in person. Thank you. Yes, you! Anyway.

Talking input

I met my fellow Input Goal co-initiator Gernot (Duha on Matrix) in person for the first time. Together, and alongside reports on the other KDE goals, we delivered our presentation summarizing one year of input improvements. The KDE community made some excellent progress since the goal was chosen, thanks to everyone who contributed towards it! At the same time, there is more work to do and we'd love to see further contributions. Watch the talk for more details.

Our third Input Goal champion, Joshua Goins, had so much to report on improvements for drawing tablet users that he held an entire presentation on that particular topic.

One particular highlight for me was running into Dorota. She has been pushing for improvements to Wayland's input method protocols and had joined our input handling community on Matrix over the past year. Listening to Dorota's cross-desktop experience and plans was super interesting, and I was happy to see her coordinate with KWin maintainers over the course of Akademy. In the time since, some of Dorota's work was included in the latest upstream release of Wayland Protocols as experimental addition. Hopefully this will be further refined and standardized over time.

Andy Betts sat down with me to discuss the UI designs for touchpad gesture customization, following earlier back-and-forth with Natalie and Nate over the summer. Xaver Hugl provided some great feedback at Akademy about my ongoing patch series to implement stroke gesture support in KWin. He also proposed a change that will help with integrating config file support for gesture customization into KWin. This is all still in the works - full disclosure, I've been having somewhat of a hard time recently for unrelated reasons. It now has path simplification (for performance reasons) plus a nice stroke drawing visualization, but still lacking tests and such. Christmas time seems as good a time as any to pick up some slack and push this forward.

In more exciting news, KDE's new on-screen keyboard has seen a significant amount of work in the last few months. Aleix Pol's initial prototype for Plasma Keyboard was supercharged by Devin Lin, who also made it to Akademy but had to take off early. We decided to release Plasma Keyboard independently first, then integrating it into regular Plasma releases in 2026. This 0.1 preview release is now available, you can check if your distribution already ships it, or you can grab the nightly Plasma Keyboard Flatpak to test its latest state. Yes, even input methods will run just fine as Flatpaks.

Meanwhile, somewhere far away across the ocean, a remote partipant was going full steam ahead on another important piece in the input handling puzzle.

GSoC project: Game controller support in KWin

For this year's Google Summer of Code, Yelsin Sepulveda was accepted to improve game controller support in KWin with mentorship by Xaver Hugl and myself. After a strong start, Yelsin was forced to delay the second part of his project due to personal circumstance and Google did not agree to a deadline extension. However! With an excellent work ethic, Yelsin still continued to work on the project and brought it to completion regardless of Google's official approval. The result is an opt-in KWin plugin that's close to getting merged, and will:

• Make KWin aware of game controllers in the first place,
• Prevent system sleep on controller activity,
• Emulate mouse and keyboard input when no other game (or app) uses the controller,
• Deal with the Steam Controller's idiosyncratic "Lizard Mode".
• Provide the foundation for future game controller customization in Plasma.

From the KDE side, we consider this GSoC project a resounding success. If you missed Yelsin's own posts on Planet KDE, his blog posts from mid September and early October cover a lot more detail.

Other exciting developments

Some presentations and conversations that I found particularly compelling, not focused on input.

Thanks to Bhushan Shah, Plasma now knows what made your system wake up from system sleep. Building on this, power management primarily for Plasma Mobile but also Plasma Desktop can improve even further, including the potential for scheduled background tasks and going right back to sleep.

Linux distros have been kind to KDE this year. Neal Gompa presented the Fedora KDE SIG's long-term efforts to ship a premium Plasma experience. Terrific work from these folks, this is now my current favorite distro suggestion for friends & family. Furthermore, Harald Sitter presented the Alpha release of KDE Linux, now happily chugging along on its way to becoming a Beta. This is what I hope to install on my parents' laptops one day. I took a banana from Harald in return for promising that I'll test it out myself. Didn't say when; nonetheless, the promise stands.

I was not expecting to find myself talking to GNOME contributors at Akademy, but Lorenz Wildberg from the GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors was a super interesting conversation partner. Long story short, both GNOME and KDE know about their respective shortcomings and are trying to learn from each other's experiences. Sometimes by adopting things that work, sometimes by taking a different route, sometimes just by focusing on our existing strengths and building on those. Either way, listening and reflecting will beat low-effort snark anytime. SDK evolution, contributor onboarding, governance, fun times.

Looking back and ahead

Yes, I lost a few weeks from getting a back injury soon after Akademy. The good news is that it's pretty much all healed at this point. But my contribution habits have remained out of whack since. I'm hoping to get this back on track asap, because I also really want to help KDE to reach the inflection point. Gamers, governments and many more people have something to gain if the Linux desktop breaks out of its niche into the mainstream. The tech industry has been disappointing to me on so many fronts. This here, though, is something I'm excited to see happening.

08 Dec 2025 12:30am GMT

Like in the years before, KDE does an end of the year fundraiser campaign.

Beside that Plasma will show some small popup to ask if you want to sponsor us with a donation.

It looks like this year that is already going well, below the state as of today, 7th December 2025.

I want to say to all that already donated: Thanks a lot!

I will not personally get any money from that, but I will benefit largely from the stuff KDE e.V. funds with it, like the infrastructure, some people working on our stuff and the very important sprints and conferences!

Keep the money flowing, money is not everything, but if you can not contribute in another way and you have some spare money, please consider a donation.

I wish you all a good end of the year :)

Discussion

Feel free to join the discussion at the Linux reddit.

07 Dec 2025 5:10pm GMT

A week full of fixes

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.

Our End of the Year fundraiser is still going on and we've raised more than €140,000 so far this month. Thanks to everyone who donated!

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

PIM Applications

Akonadi Background service for KDE PIM apps

Tobias Leupold fixed a compatibility issue with MariaDB 12.1 (25.12.0 - pim/akonadi MR #310)

Carl Schwan optimized some maintenance routines from Akonadi; this also fixes an issue when running on SQLite (25.12.0 - pim/akonadi MR #299).

KMail A feature-rich email application

Andreas Hartmetz fixed a bug where mail filters would be deleted in some situations (25.12.1 - pim/kmail MR #164).

Graphics Applications

Photos Image Gallery

Noah Davis added a setting that allows enlarging small images. Without this option the minimum zoom level is 100% (26.04.0 - graphics/koko MR #251).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Luna Lovecraft fixed a crash that occurred when the window was too small to fit a selection actions panel (graphics/krita MR #2548) and also fixed the selection panel blinking when making a new selection (graphics/krita MR #2551).

Wolthera van Hövell split the character and paragraph properties, making it more intuitive to apply text transformations to just one character or to a whole paragraph (graphics/krita MR #2470).

Joshua Goins fixed a crash in the Krita plugin manager when using Python 3.14 (graphics/krita MR #2451).

Utilities Applications

Calculator A feature rich calculator

Devin Lin cleaned up the sidebar and removed some custom code.

Mobile	Desktop

Recorder Audio recorder

Tobias Burnus made his first contribution to KDE and fixed an issue where the list of audio input sources contained duplicated entries (25.12.0 - utilities/krecorder MR #62).

Kate Advanced text editor

Leia uwu fixed a crash in the project tree view (25.12.0 - utilities/kate MR #1950).

Keysmith Two-factor code generator for Plasma Mobile and Desktop

Shubham Arora fixed an issue where the account name could overflow when it was too long (25.12.1 - utilities/keysmith MR #171).

Before	After

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you're hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

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.

07 Dec 2025 1:10pm GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a bunch of user interface improvements and bug fixing, especially for the drawing tablets, printers, and monitors. Hardware is quirky!

But of course that's not all; check out the rest, too:

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

You can now Alt+click/double-click on desktop items to see their properties, just like you can in Dolphin. (Méven Car, plasma-desktop MR #3349)

When a printer runs low on ink for multiple cartridges simultaneously, all the messages about this are now condensed into a single notification, instead of showing a separate notification for each low ink cartridge. (Mike Noe, print-manager MR #291)

System Settings' Drawing Tablet page now makes it more obvious when the lack of configurable pad buttons is due to a missing driver. (Joshua Goins, plasma-desktop MR #3234)

Spectacle now offers a Cancel button in the rectangular region overlay, so you can get out of it without having to press the Esc key. (Taras Oleksyn, bug #490980)

Locking the screen from the Application Launcher widget now closes it before locking so it's not somewhat awkwardly left open after you unlock. (Christoph Wolk, bug #508725)

On distros that make you authenticate to toggle the feature to set the date and time automatically, closing the authentication window without authenticating no longer makes the page complain about an error. (David Edmundson, bug #501966)

Apps launched from the Favorites view of the Kickoff, Kicker, and Dashboard widgets are now added to the "Recent Apps" section. (Christoph Wolk, bug #449834 and bug #435356)

Did a pass over several pages in System Settings to make sure they follow the KDE Human Interface Guidelines more closely. (Nate Graham, plasma-desktop MR #3309)

You're no longer allowed to try to change the usernames of logged-in users, since this doesn't work anyway. (Nate Graham bug #469665)

You're now warned about the potential consequences if you try to disable the System Tray's built-in Notifications widget, since those consequences may not be obvious. (Nate Graham, plasma-workspace MR #6044)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed an issue that made the Orca screen reader's "learn" mode speak too much and send extraneous keystrokes to apps. (Nicolas Fella, bug #512189)

Fixed an issue that could occasionally cause a crash when charging your system after the critical battery level notification appeared. (Anthony Fieroni, powerdevil MR #594)

Fixed an issue that made the screen turn black with certain older monitors directly connected via an analog VGA cable. (Xaver Hugl, bug #512146)

Fixed another source of the issue that made desktop icons move to the wrong screen of a multi-screen arrangement on login. (Błażej Szczygieł, bug #512381)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to configure certain buttons of the Wacom Pen Pro 3D stylus. (Joshua Goins, bug #511488)

System Settings' Drawing Tablet page now does a better job of handling weird tablets that say they have two styluses when they really only have one. (Joshua Goins, bug #508084)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma inaccurately warn that your printer was low on ink when it sent an unexpected ink level code but wasn't actually low on ink. (Mike Noe, bug #512602)

Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget's "Forget recent [thing]" menu items unreliable for certain apps. (Méven Car, bug #480276)

Fixed a visual glitch in the Track Mouse effect when using a high DPI scale factor. (Xaver Hugl, bug #510029)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that made the Task Manager widget's "Forget" action for specific files only take effect after Plasma was restarted. (Christoph Wolk, bug #503840)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that could crash the open/save dialogs when you double-clicked on a column header while in Details mode. (David Edmundson, frameworks-kio MR #2070)

Fixed an issue that could make popups invoked from folders on the desktop misbehave when created from symlinks. (Lluc Simó Margalef, bug #479350)

Frameworks 6.22

Fixed an issue in the Quick Launch widget that made icons start dragging after right-clicking them. (Jonathan Marten, bug #384009)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (same as last week). Current list of bugs
• 37 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 36 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for for per-DRM-plane color pipelines. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #6600)

Plasma now re-checks the battery level after waking from sleep, which handles the case of the battery draining (or charging) while asleep in such a manner that it would be appropriate to show or hide a notification about the battery level. (Ramil Nurmanov, powerdevil MR #592)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE's 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, the fundraiser has topped €100,000! And that's just for the fundraiser itself; the yearly donation pop-up has also raised another €100k in just the past five days (!!!).

It's kind of amazing. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I'm just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. 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.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

06 Dec 2025 12:01am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2025-49.

Steam Machine today, Steam Phones tomorrow

Tags: tech, valve, gaming, foss

Don't trust the title, it misrepresent the content in my opinion. Still the interview is interesting, it shows quite well all the effort Valve is pouring into the Free Software ecosystem.

https://www.theverge.com/report/820656/valve-interview-arm-gaming-steamos-pierre-loup-griffais

Reranking partisan animosity in algorithmic social media feeds alters affective polarization

Tags: tech, social-media, politics, science, research, psychology

A paper showing that social media algorithms foster political polarization and societal division. Who knew?? Sarcasm aside, the real value of the paper is showing that by modifying those algorithms we could quickly have positive effects. Most of the participants didn't even notice they changed how they perceive others.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adu5584

How Should We Peer Review Software?

Tags: tech, science, research, politics

This is indeed one of the big issues of the computer science research community. It's also something of importance in fields relying on simulations… which is almost all scientific fields nowadays. Peer reviewing the paper is well practiced, but the software is another story entirely. It'd require some investment in research… but that's not where we're headed at all.

https://mirawelner.com/posts/peer_review.html

How big tech is creating its own friendly media bubble to 'win the narrative battle online'

Tags: tech, business, politics, journalism

Unsurprisingly the big tech players want their own information bubble too. This kind of propaganda machine isn't really new, but they feel like they need their own now.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/29/big-tech-silicon-valley-ceo-media

Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.

Tags: tech, hardware, geospatial

I don't even get why this became a topic of conversation but here we go. At least this thought experiment is a good way to learn about electronics in space.

https://taranis.ie/datacenters-in-space-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-idea/

AI Is still making code worse: A new CMU study confirms

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

The trend keep being the same… And when the newer models will be trained on FOSS code which degraded in quality due to the use of the previous generation of models, things are going to get "interesting".

https://blog.robbowley.net/2025/12/04/ai-is-still-making-code-worse-a-new-cmu-study-confirms/

Google Antigravity Exfiltrates Data

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

IDEs allowing to spawn actions in the user environment are still a big security risk.

https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/google-antigravity-exfiltrates-data

GitHub → Codeberg: my experience

Tags: tech, git, tools, forgejo, github

This kind of migration is apparently easier than it sounds.

https://eldred.fr/blog/forge-migration/

pgFirstAid - PostgreSQL Health Check

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, reliability, performance, health

Looks like a nice kit to add to your tool belt. Does some handy checks if you have a Postgres database to manage.

https://randoneering.tech/blog/pgfirstaid/pgfirstaid/

So you wanna build a local RAG?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, search, self-hosting, foss

This is getting more and more accessible. It's also one of the uses which makes sense for LLMs.

https://blog.yakkomajuri.com/blog/local-rag

Landlock-ing Linux

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, security, sandbox

This is a nice application level sandboxing feature on Linux. We should probably have more applications use it.

https://blog.prizrak.me/post/landlock/

How CRDTs and Rust are revolutionizing distributed systems and real-time applications

Tags: tech, rust, crdt, distributed

I admit I like CRDTs as well. They really are the foundation of cool use cases. Of course it raises questions related to security to broker properly the sessions between users. Still, it's nice to see them more and more used.

https://kerkour.com/rust-crdt

In defense of lock poisoning in Rust

Tags: tech, multithreading, rust, safety, failure

Very Rust focused, still it's an interesting debate. It gives a good overview of the different types of lock behaviors in case of failures. It's very much advocating for the poisoning approach which is indeed an interesting one (coming with its own tradeoffs of course).

https://sunshowers.io/posts/on-poisoning/#fnref:1

Rust pattern: Display adapter

Tags: tech, rust, design, pattern

Another illustration of how to use a new type to declare intent for display of values.

https://articles.bchlr.de/display-adapter-pattern

Out of the Box Dynamic Dispatch

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

Shows that you don't always need to put stuff in Box to get dynamic dispatch.

https://llogiq.github.io/2020/03/14/ootb.html

An Array of Pointers vs. a Multidimensional Array

Tags: tech, c, c++, memory

A reminder that small details at declaration can have large impacts on memory layouts.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/10/27/

Standard Ranges

Tags: tech, c++

An old one now, but still a very good overview of what C++ ranges brought to the table.

https://ericniebler.com/2018/12/05/standard-ranges/

How to choose good names in your code

Tags: tech, quality, craftsmanship, c++

It's all written oriented toward C++ use. That said I think most of it equally applies whatever the language.

https://www.fluentcpp.com/2017/01/30/how-to-choose-good-names/

Treat test code like production code

Tags: tech, tests, quality

This needs repeating but yes, quality matters in test code too.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/12/01/treat-test-code-like-production-code/

Architectural debt is not just technical debt

Tags: tech, architecture, business, organization

This is a good way to see that the architecture questions are multi-layered. And yes, in enterprise contexts they go all the way to the company strategy level.

https://frederickvanbrabant.com/blog/2025-10-31-architectural-debt-is-not-just-technical-debt/

Maximizing Developer Effectiveness

Tags: tech, organization, team, productivity, devops, developer-experience

A bit too high on the "positive caricature scale" to my taste. That said there's a kernel of truth there, focusing on the developer experience will lead to improved impact.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/developer-effectiveness.html

How to do effective video calls

Tags: tech, remote-working, video, conference

I agree with most of the points here. They make all the difference. The audio is too often underestimated.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/effective-video-calls.html

Reflections of an "Old" Programmer

Tags: tech, engineering, career, learning, knowledge

Some areas of our industry are more prone to the "fashion of the day" madness than others. Still there's indeed some potential decay in what we learn, what matters is finding and focusing on what will last.

https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2016/reflections-of-an-old-programmer.php

On Being A Senior Engineer

Tags: tech, engineering, craftsmanship, expertise, knowledge, learning

An old one and a bit all over the place. Still, plenty of interesting advice and insights.

https://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/

Software Failures and IT Management's Repeated Mistakes

Tags: tech, quality, project-management, ethics, risk, failure

Decades that our industry doesn't improve its track record. But there are real consequences for users. Some more ethics would be welcome in our profession.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures

We see something that works, and then we understand it

Tags: science, research, knowledge, innovation

Indeed, innovation is far from being a linear process. It's actually messy, the breakthroughs already happened already and we describe it after the facts.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/12/04/we-see-something-that-works-and-then-we-understand-it/

Lazy Expert Syndrome: How to Stay on Top of Your Game

Tags: learning, teaching, mentoring

Or why it's important to mentor others and not stay in your own bubble.

https://www.riskology.co/lazy-expert-syndrome/

Grow slowly, stay small

Tags: business, management, life, work, craftsmanship

An excellent piece, I like this kind of thinking. It works in fact as several level in your life.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/grow-slowly-stay-small/

Interviewing for Evidence

Tags: hr, interviews

Lots of good advice for better interviews. I like the structure it brings making sure you got balanced evidences.

https://dannorth.net/blog/interviewing-for-evidence/

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Tags: tech, programming, language, satire, funny

OK, this is old so I wish it'd go beyond 2003. Still, that's quite a funny read.

http://www.nerdware.org/doc/abriefhistory.html

Your next gaming dice could be shaped like a dragon or armadillo

Tags: tech, physics, mathematics, funny, research

Definitely fun research. Let's not be fooled though it also has practical use.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/05/your-next-gaming-dice-could-be-shaped-like-a-dragon-or-armadillo/

Bye for now!

05 Dec 2025 11:59am GMT

A new version of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings have been released

We have a new release of Plasma Camera and Plasma Settings!

Plasma Camera changes:

• Fix compile with libcamera 0.6.0 (MR)
• New translations

Plasma Settings changes:

• Fix issues with loading pages in some KCMs (MR)
• Respect kiosk restrictions in modules model (MR)

Visit /info/independent-releases-25-12 for the tarballs.

Please note: most Plasma Mobile software is now shipped under the Plasma or KDE Gear release cycles.

05 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

KStars v3.8.0 is released on 2025.12.03 for Windows & Linux. MacOS release is expected in one week due to build issue on KDE CI infrastructure.

For Linux users, it's highly recommended to use the official KStars Flatpak hosted at Flathub. You can install the stable flatpak or try out new features by downloading the KStars Nightly Flatpak for x86_64 and arm64 architectures.

Live Stacker: LRGB Stacking

John Evans implemented generation of RGB and LRGB images from individual mono subframes. Watch R, G, B and optionally L directories and combine the individual stacks into RGB or LRGB images.

Live Stacker: ImageMM Stacking Method

The purpose is to allow analysis of Live Stacker, for example to allow investigation of bottlenecks in the stacking process.

When a sub is added to the watched directory, the sub is added to the Monitor's table. As the sub is processed by each step of the process information is updated in the table:

• Waiting to load. The sub is in the queue to be processed but Live Stacker is busy with other subs.
• Loading. The sub is loaded into memory.
• Plate solving. The sub is undergoing plate solving (if appropriate).
• Waiting to stack. The sub is waiting to be stacked (e.g. currently there are insufficient subs loaded to start a stack).
• Calibration. Dark / Flat calibration.
• Alignment.
• Stacking.

Table columns and sort order are configurable. Changing cells can be highlighted (or not)

Task Queue system

Observatory startup and shutdown steps are now replaced by the new highly configurable Task Queue system. The Task Queue System is a modern, flexible automation framework that replaces traditional startup and shutdown scripts with a template-based, configurable task execution system. It provides a visual interface for building sequences of automated operations that can control your observatory equipment through INDI. It is accessible from Ekos Scheduler.

Why use it? The Task Queue system offers several advantages over traditional scripting:

• Visual Management: Build and monitor task sequences through an intuitive graphical interface
• Reusability: Use pre-built templates for common operations without writing code
• Error Handling: Built-in retry logic and configurable failure responses
• Device Compatibility: Automatic matching of templates to available devices
• Progress Monitoring: Real-time status updates and detailed execution logs
• Collections: Pre-defined task sets for startup, shutdown, and other common scenarios
• Flexibility: Combine templates or create custom variations without programming

Safety Monitor

KStars scheduler now fully supports INDI Safety Monitor driver released part of INDI v2.1.7. A standalone driver may be used (independent of the equipment profile) that is running on a different INDI server to provide 24/7 safety monitor updates to the scheduler. No observatory operations shall take place unless it is deemed safe by the safety monitor.

The INDI Safety Monitor can listen to any number of sources including weather stations, UPS (uninterruptible power supply) monitors, and any auxiliary device that support the INDI's standard SAFETY_STATUS property.

Push-To Assistant

Wolfgang Reissenberger added an incredibly useful tool for users with manual mounts: Push-To Assistant. Just attached a camera to your dobsonian and use this tool to center the target in the eyepiece. This tool assumes that both the camera center and eyepiece center are already aligned.

The new push-to assistant is intended as plate solving support for mechanical mounts in combination with a digital camera on a finder scope.

Setup: Create an optical train with the Telescope Simulator as mount and configure your combination of finder scope and digital camera.

Usage

• Start Ekos
• open the Push-to Assistant located in the Tools menu
• move your scope as good as possible to the target you want to find
• select the target from the catalog or enter its coordinates manually and press "Select target"
• press "Solve position" to determine the position your scope is currently pointing at
• as soon as the position has been solved, the assistant displays hints in which direction you should move your mount to be closer to the target
• correct your mount position and press "Solve position" again

if you want to automatically repeat plate solving, configure the delay and press the "Repeat" button.

Bug Fixes

• Fix crash when connecting to remote host because the clientManager was not set.
• When restarting capture, update job captured frame map from module state.
• Fix issue with J2000 getting set by default in Mount Control Panel.
• Fix regression where capture format and encoding are reset whenever they are changed in INDI.
• Use the offline HIPS path since it can be a custom location
• Prevent premature alignment run if there are no more light frames in the job
• Do not cover dust cap when capturing sky flats.
• Fix setFrame when loaded from XML as DARK was incorrectly decoded as BIAS frame.
• Remove parents from constructors of objects pointed to by QSharedPointer
• Fix issue in FITS Solver, need to disconnect signals in callbacks
• Fix bug in one-pulse-dither, update logging
• Fix issue in analyze stats font size
• Placeholder %cam removed
  
  

03 Dec 2025 7:24pm GMT

Huh, I started a blog post on November 11th, and then got distracted. What I was going to write was about KDE Plasma 6 on FreeBSD 14, how it does with Wayland, what kind of configuration surprises there are. And since then FreeBSD 15 has been released, which makes this title kind of moot, and I still need to write all the things down. The summary is short: with AMD graphics, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland is just fine for my workflow.

02 Dec 2025 11:00pm GMT

Performance improvement in Krita, Trust and Safety in NeoChat and files actions in Photos

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 are still doing our fundraisers and in the past 48 hours, thanks to the crazy support from our users we managed to raise more than €90,000. Keep it going and if you can afford it, donate at kde.org/donate! Any amount helps.

Getting back to all that's new in the KDE App scene, let's dig in!

Travel Applications

Volker Krause published a blog post about the current progress of KDE Itinerary in October and November. This includes an improved journey search page, fine-grained deletion control of tickets, altitude information in the live status view, and more! You can read all of that on his blog.

Grapics Applications

Okular View and annotate documents

Mohammad Kazemi added a "Copy Without Line Breaks" action to remove line breaks when copying text (26.04.0 - link).

Quinten Kock added native pinch gestures with a touchpad in Okular (26.04.0 - link).

Photos Image Gallery

Noah Davis added more standard file actions in Photos when viewing a picture (26.04.0 - link).

KPhotoAlbum KDE image management software

Randall Rude made the metadata extractor also extract the creation date and time for videos (link).

Creative Applications

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

Agata Cacko improved the performance of the Liquify Transform tool making it a lot more smooth to use (link).

Agata also added a knife tool prototype to Krita (link).

Joshua Goins removed the error dialog when cancelling an export (link).

Utilities Applications

Konsole Use the command line interface

Matan Ziv-Av added two keyboard actions in Konsole for focusing on the next/previous view in split view mode (26.04.0 - link).

Sune Vuorela added an option to enable or disable whether Konsole listens to zmodem terminal codes, which might happen accidentally when outputting a binary file. (26.04.0 - link)

Kate Advanced text editor

Héctor Mesa Jiménez added some default configuration for netcoredbg, a standalone debug server for .NET Core. (26.04.0 - link)

Alligator RSS feed reader

Oula V improved the feed group feature of Alligator. Now when creating a feed group, you will get an error if another one exists with the same name. They also cleaned up the list of feed groups (26.04.0 - link).

Oula also fixed some crashes in Alligator after editing a feed (25.12.0 - link) and Stephan Seitz fixed some conformance issues with the OPML export feature (25.12.0 - link).

Salvo Tomaselli reordered the buttons in the menu, and now opening the current article in an external browser is the first button (25.12.0 - link).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Alex Hermann made KIO-powered applications like Dolphin keep the permissions of files copied from an SFTP server (link 1, link 2, link 3).

Social Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins continued efforts to improve Trust and Safety in NeoChat and added support for reporting rooms and users (26.04.0 - link).

"renner 03" fixed the KRunner integration of NeoChat when running the application in Flatpak (25.12.0 - link)

Browsers

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

Stefano Crocco added a configuration page to configure Speed Dials in Konqueror. These speed dials are buttons that allow you to quickly open pre-configured links (26.04.0 - link).

Falkon Web Browser

Juraj Oravec added support to add items in the sidebar menu to the Falkon plugin API (link).

Angelfish Webbrowser for mobile devices

Rinigus Saar fixed an issue with retrieving the last visited entries (25.12.0 - link)

PIM Applications

Trojitá IMAP E-mail Client

Sandøy Hustad started pushing some work to make Trojita support Qt 6 (link).

Third-party Applications

Deskflow - Keyboard and mouse sharing app

Chris Rizzitello released Deskflow 1.25.0! The main changes are support for a symbolic tray icon which is recolored correctly even when using Plasma's Twilight theme; support for changing the application's language without restarting it; and initial support for the wl-clipboard Wayland protocol.

EasyEffect

Giusy Digital continued working on unifying the wording of the various physical units (e.g. dB, Hz, ...) all over the application (link).

Wellington Wallace ported some overlay sheets to Kirigami dialogs (link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you're hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

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.

02 Dec 2025 9:11pm GMT

STF needed a scalable, secure, and asynchronous collaboration system for representatives across multiple time zones. This article explains why AnyType was selected, how it is used today, and which features and challenges matter most as the Software Transparency Foundation.

02 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

In a recent series of blog posts, we have demonstrated that Python and Qt fit together very well. Due to its accessibility, ease-of-use and third-party ecosystem, it is really straightforward to prototype and productize applications. Still, Python has one significant disadvantage: It is not necessarily the most performant programming language.

Continue reading Boosting PySide with C++ models at basysKom GmbH.

01 Dec 2025 1:03pm GMT

In the past two months since the last post, KDE Itinerary's journey search UI got simplified, you got more control over deleting individual entries and altitude information is shown on the live status page when available, among many other things.

New Features

Improved journey search page

The interface for manual public transport searches as been simplified. Filters for specific modes of transportation are now on a secondary page, and you don't have to specify a trip to add the results to in the first step anymore. Instead, that's now queried when actually saving a result.

Fine-grained deletion control

For multi-ticket or multi-traveler reservations, it's now possible to delete just individual tickets or travelers rather than the entire entry.

Altitude information in live status view

The live map on services with the corresponding onboard API now also shows the current altitude information when available.

Infrastructure Work

Automatic geocoding for reservation data

For many of Itinerary's features to work properly we need to know geo locations of the involved places, such as departure and arrival stops of a train trip. In many cases we get those from being able to recognize stop identifiers found in e.g. ticket barcodes. There's a bunch of heuristics as fallback (such as knowing in which areas a train company operates), but that's also not covering all cases.

To address this properly, Itinerary can now resolve those remaining locations by using OSM's geocoder Nominatim. As this involves querying an online service, this is conditional on having online data sources enabled in the settings, same as for querying for delay information.

Transitous upgrade to MOTIS v2.7

Upgrading MOTIS, the software behind Transitous brought us a number of new features, with the following ones particularly relevant for Itinerary:

• State and positions of currently available rental vehicles such as bikes and scooters can now be queried.
• Support for GBFS station booking URLs.
• Support for multiple language preferences. That means that secondary languages are now also considered when picking the best option for multi-lingual content such as disruption notes.
• Location searches include the modes of transportation served at stops now.

Android platform support

KDE's Android build infrastructure (which Itinerary relies on) has been updated to Android's NDK r28, which enabled compliance with the 16kB page size requirement enforced by the Google Play Store since November 1st.

While this is something that went mostly unnoticed by users, the next required update (to Qt 6.10) is unfortunately going to have some more side-effects. For the first time in many years this will require a higher minimum Android version, going from currently 21 (Android 5, from 2014, 99.8% cumulative use) to then 28 (Android 9, from 2018, 91.7% cumulative use).

This means any newer build of any KDE Android app would no longer run on anything older than Android 9. It's unclear how many of our users would be affected by this, but it unfortunately does look like we have very little choice here beyond delaying this a bit.

If you have thoughts or feedback on this, feel free to join the KDE Android Matrix channel.

Events

There also were several events with Itinerary-adjacent topics in the past two months:

• The Open Transport Community Conference in Vienna.
• Two OSM Hack Weekends in Berlin and Karlsruhe.

Itinerary also got mentioned in the whirlwind tour through the land of Wikidata-powered_apps at Wikimania in Nairobi.

And more is coming up, members of the Itinerary and Transitous teams will be at 39C3 end of December in Hamburg, Germany as well as FOSDEM at the beginning of February in Brussels, Belgium.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Added or improved travel document extractors for Booking.com, CFR, citycity.se, Comboios de Portugal, Eurostar, Flixbus, FooEvents, GlobalTicket, Inviton, MÁV, NH Hotels, Predpredaj, Prioticket, Ryanair, TicketCounter, United, Ventra, Wiener Linien and ZSSK.
• Consider bus stations and try harder to discard freight terminals when locating airport entrances.
• Ignore seat qualifiers ("window", "aisle", etc) when comparing seat numbers.
• Merge common parts of all elements of the same incidence such as a multi-ticket booking.
• Consider names with swapped given/family name as equivalent as well

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Add a vehicle feature flag for night trains (supported with MOTIS and Hafas backends).
• Add support for agency/operator URLs (supported with MOTIS and OTP backends). This can be useful as this is the most widely available way towards actually booking something at this point.
• Improved onboard API support for Frecciarossa and RailJet trains.
• Improved performance of the location search page.

All of this also directly benefits KTrip.

Itinerary app

• Editing now affects the currently selected reservation in a multi-ticket or multi-traveler batch.
• Only load reservation data for the current trip group.
• Re-add the top-level import action.
• Fix performance issues and hangs when displaying journey search results.
• Fix online updates for standalone Apple Wallet pass tickets such as Zügli D-Tickets.
• Fix timer overflow in transfer monitoring with Qt 6.10.
• Adding a journey search result when there's no existing trip will now directly ask to create a new trip.
• Fix updating platform information from scheduled online data in case the platform in the original ticket was wrong.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

29 Nov 2025 10:00am GMT

The Kdenlive 25.12 Release Candidate is ready for testing. We made several changes to the user interface to improve your workflow, including a new widget docking system that makes rearranging panels much easier and more powerful, an enhanced audio display in the clip monitor with a waveform overview for faster navigation and zooming, and a new Startup and Welcome screen allowing to easily select a few options when launching the program.

Other highlights:

• Added an editing layout and safe areas for vertical formats
• Reordering of the menus to make them more logical
• Introduction of markers with a time span (GSoC 2025)

Feedback Needed

Now is your chance to test it and let us know if you encounter any bugs or have suggestions to help us polish the final release. Share your feedback either in the comments below or directly with the team during our online Café, where we'll be discussing this upcoming release. Join us next Wednesday, 3rd of December at 21:00 CET, on meet.kde.org

Update 30th of November 2025

The original RC Appimage for Linux was broken on X11, we have now fixed it and the download link will give you the RC2 version.

Download the binaries from below and give it a spin!

Pre-release binaries can be downloaded here.

29 Nov 2025 6:00am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw quite a lot of feature work and user interface polish for Plasma 6.6! Have a look:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

There are now global actions for seeking forwards or backwards 5 or 30 seconds in the currently playing media. These work as long as the current media player supports letting other apps control seeking via MPRIS. The actions don't have keyboard shortcuts assigned by default, but you can set them yourself. (Christoph Wolk, link)

You can now configure the Window List widget to show its menu on hover, or to hide the icon and only show the name of the active window. (Shubham Arora, link 1 and link 2)

You can now configure the order of the icons shown in the Lock/Logout widget. (Shubham Arora, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

Continued to polish up the XDG portal dialogs. This time the screen & window chooser dialog has been simplified and improved some more. (Harald Sitter, link)

Canceling a paste of some files onto Plasma's desktop no longer produces a pointless error notification. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Added pin buttons to the Web Browser and Audio Volume widgets so that if you have either them in standalone form on a panel, you can keep their popups open while you're still using them. (Alexander Lohnau and Nate Graham, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the usability of searching using the Kickoff Application Launcher widget in several ways: now you can use the arrow keys to navigate from the search results view back to the search field, and new search results that come in late don't cause the selection highlight to jump around. (Christoph Wolk, link 1 and link 2)

Improved the appearance and usability of the disks shown in Info Center's S.M.A.R.T. Status page. (Joshua Goins, link)

Clearing the clipboard while it happens to be showing a QR code for one of the now-cleared items now dismisses the QR code, too. (Fushan Wen, link)

The Kicker Application Menu widget no longer very briefly flashes a message saying "No matches found" right after you search for things. (Christoph Wolk, link)

Improved the experience of rapidly moving the pointer over top-level menu items in the Kicker Application widget; now the sub-menus appear in the same way they do for other menus in apps. (Christoph Wolk, link)

When using the Kicker Application Menu widget on a right screen-edge panel, sub-sub-menus now open to the left of their parent, rather than on the right where they cover up the main menu. This also now works properly with an RTL language and a left screen-edge panel. (Christoph Wolk, link 1, link 2)

Frameworks 6.21, with the full effect arriving in Plasma 6.6.0

The headers of Kirigami-based apps are now the same height as those of QtWidgets-based apps. In the process of improving this, we also managed to equalize the padding on all four sides of highlighted list items, and make them consistent with the outer padding of header items, too. (Marco Martin, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, link 6, and link 7)

The Fifteen Puzzle widget now has a nice new icon, and also uses a symbolic icon when placed on a panel. (Martin Sh, link 1 and link 2)

Frameworks 6.21

Reverted a change made a few months ago that hid .desktop files with NoDisplay=true set on them from apps' "Open with" menus. While the original change seemed technically correct, it had negative side effects outweighing its advantages. (Nate Graham, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a random Plasma crash. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Fixed a case where turning on automatic updates in Discover would just make Discover crash in the background rather than running the updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed an issue that broke pasting images from the clipboard into Dolphin. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where drawing using certain oddly-behaving drawing tablets would draw outside of the screen area. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a case where re-mapping drawing tablet stylus buttons didn't work. (Joshua Goins, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed an issue that mangled the desktop icon arrangement when dragging something to the desktop while it was using one of the automatic sorting modes. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that made certain GPUs get displayed as "llvmpipe" in Info Center. (Oleg Gorobets and Harald Sitter, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed some issues that made Plasma's desktop sometimes fail to notice newly-created, -deleted, or -changed files. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Fixed an issue that prevented re-opening the virtual keyboard immediately after closing it, but before clicking or re-focusing anything else. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Frameworks 6.21

Fixed an issue that mangled the display of devices whose names contain Unicode characters in USB plug/unplug notifications. (Nicolas Fella, link)

When you drag and drop an item from a Dolphin window that's accessing a network location that requires Kerberos authentication, dropping it on the desktop now successfully downloads the file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Other bug information of note:

• 5 very high priority Plasma bugs (up from 4 last week). Current list of bugs
• 36 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 31 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented support for XRandr emulation in KWin, which allows it to behave sensibly when running XWayland-using apps that make use of X11 APIs to change the screen resolution in a way that requires letterboxing or pillarboxing. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Improved the performance of the rectangular box you can drag on the desktop to select items. (Błażej Szczygieł, link)

Implemented support for the standard "reduced motion" setting that lets apps know that you'd like animations minimized. Now it's toggled on automatically when you disable animations in System Settings. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.4

Fixed a memory leak in Plasma. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE's 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference. Believe it or not, we're up to almost €90,000 raised in a month and a half. This money will help keep KDE strong and independent for years to come, and I'm just in awe of the generosity of the KDE community and userbase. Thank you all for helping KDE to grow and prosper!

If money is tight, you can help KDE by directly getting involved. 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.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

29 Nov 2025 12:01am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2025-48.

Open Source Power

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, business, economics, politics, commons, criticism

This debate around licensing, politics and making our FOSS efforts sustainable need to happen. It looks like for now to some people the path forward is defensive licensing? I wish at least we'd first attempt to have more strong copyleft use…

https://blog.muni.town/open-source-power/

Open Source Has Too Many Parasocial Relationships

Tags: tech, foss, maintenance, sustainability, supply-chain, commons

Indeed, if you benefit from Free Software you'd better engage with it. Maintainers should stop bending backwards to please free loaders.

https://pivotnine.com/blog/open-source-has-too-many-parasocial-relationships/

What They Don't Tell You About Maintaining an Open Source Project

Tags: tech, foss, maintenance

Want to start a new project? Here is what you're signing for.

https://andrej.sh/blog/maintaining-open-source-project/

A Message to the Computing Community About ACM's Transition to Full Open Access

Tags: tech, science, research, open-access

Excellent news! It is long overdue that such organisations switch to open access.

https://cacm.acm.org/news/a-message-to-the-computing-community-about-acms-transition-to-full-open-access/

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

Tags: tech, blog, web, culture

This would probably be a good thing indeed. We'll see of the web culture will evolve next.

https://disassociated.com/personal-blogs-back-niche-blogs-next/

Zig: Migrating from GitHub to Codeberg

Tags: tech, git, forgejo, foss, community, vendor-lockin

Very good move on their part. It's time more people do so. Beside, Forgejo (powering Codeberg) looks very interesting. I plan to play with it more next year.

https://ziglang.org/news/migrating-from-github-to-codeberg/

s&box is a modern game engine, built on Valve's Source 2 and the latest .NET technology

Tags: tech, 3d, game, foss

Nice to see another game engine go the Free Software route. This one is particularly feature packed.

https://github.com/Facepunch/sbox-public

libfive

Tags: tech, framework, geometry, 3d

Looks like a neat software library for procedural geometry.

https://libfive.com/

How Cloudflare uses Rust to serve (and break) millions of websites at 50+ millions requests per second

Tags: tech, cloudflare, rust, reliability, failure

A bit of a shameless plug toward the end. That said the explanations of why Cloudflare is banking on Rust so much or how the recent downtime could have been avoided are spot on.

https://kerkour.com/how-cloudflare-uses-rust

Rust unit testing: file reading

Tags: tech, rust, tests

Nice approach to stub standard types in Rust. The article is a bit confusing the different types of test doubles though.

https://jorgeortiz.dev/posts/rust_unit_testing_file_reading/

Linux Kernel Explorer

Tags: tech, linux, kernel

Looks like a neat code explorer for the kernel. It's nice that it comes with a guide to point you to the right places per topic.

https://reverser.dev/linux-kernel-explorer

The Input Stack on Linux - An End-To-End Architecture Overview

Tags: tech, linux, kernel, system, input

A long article which seems to be a good reference document on the Linux input stack. There's a lot to cover as it's quite fragmented.

https://venam.net/blog/unix/2025/11/27/input_devices_linux.html

Solving Fizz Buzz with Cosines

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics, funny

Ever wondered if we could solve the Fizz Buzz with a Fourier series? Trigonometry is magic.

https://susam.net/fizz-buzz-with-cosines.html

Fifty Shades of OOP

Tags: tech, object-oriented, type-systems

Another post which reminds everyone what object oriented programming is about. And yes, there's indeed a variety of different tools in there, not all object oriented languages are equivalent.

https://lesleylai.info/en/fifty_shades_of_oop/

What Now? Handling Errors in Large Systems

Tags: tech, reliability, failure, complexity

Error handling is not easy. Having simple rules to apply for complex systems is a good thing. Of course the difficulty is to apply them consistently.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/11/20/what-now.html

10 Years of thinking about Pair Programming

Tags: tech, pairing, programming

Gives an idea of what pair programming looks like when practiced properly.

https://salfreudenberg.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/10-years-of-thinking-about-pair-programming/

We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed 189 bugs

Tags: tech, programming, quality, craftsmanship, engineering

I'm not really a fan of the leaderboard part of their approach. That said, if the maturity of the organisation allows it, having such bug squashing sessions is a good idea.

https://lalitm.com/fixits-are-good-for-the-soul/

"Good engineering management" is a fad

Tags: tech, engineering, management

Interesting thinking, indeed expectations are changing quite a bit for engineering managers over time. Thus the proposed list of core and growth skills is interesting. It is likely a good framing for the job, then the art is finding the right balance for your organisation.

https://lethain.com/good-eng-mgmt-is-a-fad/

Solve problems with experiments

Tags: tech, team, organization, agile, problem-solving

You can also have experiments on your organisation. This is actually a good thing and probably should be done when something keeps popping up as a problem.

https://www.viktorcessan.com/solve-problems-with-experiments/

Invert, always invert

Tags: tech, planning, risk, project-management

Interesting approach I didn't know about. Definitely worth trying. I like how it seems to bake risk management in.

https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/invert-always-invert/

Bye for now!

28 Nov 2025 11:57am GMT