fidzu : KDE

The past couple of weeks moved on to the other half of the editor work- the kded dialogs that pops up on NetworkManager's behalf - the secret prompt, the SIM PIN dialog, the mobile broadband wizard.

Why this needs doing

The Connection Editor isn't the only place libs/editor gets used. kded's network management module runs as NetworkManager's secret agent: whenever NetworkManager needs a password, a PIN, or a fresh mobile broadband connection, it asks the agent, and the agent has been popping up a QDialog ever since. PasswordDialog asks for Wi-Fi/PPP/VPN secrets, PinDialog unlocks a SIM, MobileConnectionWizard walks through adding a GSM/CDMA connection when you plug in a modem or pair a Bluetooth phone for DUN. All three are widgets, and the VPN half of PasswordDialog reuses the same VpnUiPlugin-returning-a-QWidget mechanism the editor already moved off of.

The straightforward half

The new module is kdedqml, structured the same way editorqml was: a small set of QObjects and a PromptWindow that hosts whichever QML file they back.

kdedqml/
├── passwordprompt.cpp / .h secrets for a plain setting or a VPN
├── pinprompt.cpp / .h SIM PIN/PUK unlock
├── mobilewizard.cpp / .h GSM/CDMA connection wizard
├── promptwindow.cpp / .h hosts one QML file + one backing QObject
└── qml/
├── PasswordPrompt.qml
├── PinPrompt.qml
└── MobileWizard.qml

PromptWindow is the one new idea here, and it's deliberately dumb - give it a QUrl and a QObject, and it loads the QML file into a QQmlApplicationEngine, exposes the object as a context property named prompt, and shows the window. Every one of the three prompts is just "construct the backing object, hand it to a PromptWindow":

m_promptWindow->show(QUrl(QStringLiteral("qrc:/plasma-nm/kdedqml/qml/PasswordPrompt.qml")), m_dialog);

PasswordPrompt itself does the boring 90% of the work first: it duplicates what PasswordDialog already did for plain secrets (Wi-Fi retry messages, WEP/WPA key validation via NetworkManagerQt rather than a regex, the same rule as last time) and, for VPNs, reuses the AuthSetting classes the editor already has:

if (shortName == QLatin1String("ssh")) {
 m_vpnAuth = createAuth<SshAuthSetting>(hints, this, vpnSetting, m_vpnSecrets);
} else if (shortName == QLatin1String("sstp")) {
 m_vpnAuth = createAuth<SstpAuthSetting>(hints, this, vpnSetting, m_vpnSecrets);
} ...

createAuth constructs the setting and calls loadSecrets(), just pointed at secrets instead of full config. Ten VPN types wired up this way, and PasswordPrompt.qml picks the matching Auth.qml from the editor with a Loader switching on service type, exactly like the editor's own VPN page switches on it.

The half that is actually interesting

OpenConnect doesn't fit that shape at all, because it was never really a settings-and-secrets dialog. The widget version, OpenconnectAuthWidget, runs a whole login session: it drives libopenconnect on a worker thread, and the C library calls back into Qt synchronously to ask for a login form, validate a server certificate, or open a browser for single sign-on - and it expects an answer before it returns, because it's still in the middle of openconnect_obtain_cookie().

The trick the widget uses, and the one I had to keep, is that the callback doesn't wait on the GUI thread's answer via a blocking Qt connection. It emits a signal, then blocks itself on a QWaitCondition:

int OpenconnectAuthWorkerThread::validatePeerCert(void *cert, const char *reason)
{
 ...
 bool accepted = false;
 m_mutex->lock();
 Q_EMIT validatePeerCert(qFingerprint, qCertinfo, qReason, &accepted);
 m_waitForUserInput->wait(m_mutex);
 m_mutex->unlock();
 ...
}

The worker thread is asleep inside wait(), so the bool *accepted pointer it handed across threads stays valid for however long the GUI takes to answer - which for a modal QDialog::exec() was instant, but for a QML dialog the answer only comes back later, from a separate button click. So OpenconnectAuth (the new QML-facing class) splits every one of these callbacks into two halves: the slot that receives the signal just records the state and returns immediately, and a separate Q_INVOKABLE - acceptCertificate(), submitForm() - does the actual wakeAll() once the user has answered:

void OpenconnectAuth::acceptCertificate(bool accept)
{
 *m_certAcceptedPtr = accept;
 ...
 m_mutex.lock();
 m_workerWaiting.wakeAll();
 m_mutex.unlock();
}

Everything else - the dynamic login form built from oc_auth_form, the "changing the group re-submits" behaviour, the SSO web login - is the same worker thread, copied unchanged, talking to a QML WebEngineView instead of a QWebEngineView widget. The two share the same underlying Qt WebEngine types (QWebEngineLoadingInfo, QWebEngineCookieStore, QWebEngineWebAuthUxRequest), so the bridge is mostly mechanical - a WebEngineView.onWebAuthUxRequested handler calling straight into the existing OpenconnectWebAuth helper from the editor's SSO work.

Wiring it together

secretagent.cpp picks between PasswordDialog and PasswordPrompt with a type alias behind HAVE_KDEDQML, so the rest of the file barely changes:

#ifdef HAVE_KDEDQML
using SecretsPrompt = PasswordPrompt;
#else
using SecretsPrompt = PasswordDialog;
#endif

The one real change is that closing a prompt used to be m_dialog->deleteLater() scattered across cancel, reject, and kill paths; those all go through one closePrompt() now, which also closes the shared PromptWindow if there is one. bluetoothmonitor.cpp and modemmonitor.cpp get the same treatment for the mobile wizard and the PIN dialog - and the PIN one loses something along the way: it no longer calls QDialog::exec(), so unlocking a SIM doesn't block kded on a nested event loop anymore.

OpenConnect gets one more property on top of that, selfDriven, because the worker thread accepts the dialog itself once it has a cookie - there's no Ok button to press, only Cancel:

standardButtons: prompt.selfDriven ? QQC2.DialogButtonBox.Cancel : QQC2.DialogButtonBox.Ok | QQC2.DialogButtonBox.Cancel

Same BUILD_EDITORQML flag as before, just gating one more directory now.

What is left

The mobile broadband wizard, PIN prompt, and OpenConnect are all wired up now. What's left is test coverage for the new kdedqml classes, and the actual port to Plasma Mobile, since PromptWindow and the three prompts were built with a phone-sized layout in mind but haven't been run on one yet.

HAVE_KDEDQML and HAVE_OPENCONNECT both mean the widget path is still there, on purpose - nothing gets to come out until the QML path has actually been exercised end to end, tests included. And this was only the kded side; the applet's Handler::showConnectionEditor() still opens the widget ConnectionEditorDialog directly for WPA-Enterprise networks it can't join with a password alone, which is the other loose thread from last time and still isn't pulled.

Thanks, see you soon.

16 Sep 2026 1:18pm GMT

It's been 7 years since I last posted such a banner, and just today I remembered how I was always excited about this kind of posts, so here we go. I've also been to Akademy in Würzburg 2 years ago, but didn't post the banner for some reason (silly me!).

I haven't really contributed to KDE for quite a while, but Akademy is always worth attending, even just to meet old friends again and make some new ones. Plus this year is KDE's 30th birthday. KDE has been such a huge part of my life, so I am not going to miss such an anniversary.

Can't wait to see you all in Graz soon!

15 Sep 2026 9:00pm GMT

Today we're releasing Krita 5.3.4 and 6.0.4, containing many bugfixes and improvements across the board. It also finally brings video exports to Android, which means you can now render animations and timelapses from the recorder. Apart from that, Arkady Flury has been improving Krita's icons at a steady rate. Thanks! Also of note: the GIMP XCF file import plugin has been removed. The plugin relied on a third party library that is no longer maintained and had many security issues.

Changelog

• Don't allow to record images that are too big (2^29spixels)
• Fix recorder export when some frames are missing
• Disable long-press on canvas widgets (Bug 525361)
• Fix layer thumbnails scaling when using display scaling
• Fix openening large exr files
• Fix writable resource path validator (Bug 521186)
• Fix channel flags when converting the image's color space
• Fix a rare crash when creating a new image on Windows (happens when the user holds a key while creating the image)
• Fix a crash when a python plugin specifies an invalid action path
• Fix resetting native touch gestures on configuration change
• Fix issues with adding resource bundles and resources on Android
• Fix a crash when "First Frame" shortcut is used when a file with a linked audio track is open. (Bug 524212)
• Fix the recorder interrupting using tools (Bug 488472)
• Fix potentional crashes with some fonts (Bug 523857)
• Do not warn the user about active global selections masks when exporting a file
• The comic manager plugin received several fixes for memory leaks and improved epub export
• Support to render animations and export timelapses on Android.
• Additional bundles in the Android supporter subscription: the latest SK3 pencil bundle, as well as the earlier SK1 and SK2 bundles.

⚠️ Warning

We consider Krita 5.3.4 suitable for productive work; 6.0.4 is, because of the many changes from Qt5 to Qt6 more experimental.

Download 5.3.4

Windows

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

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-5.3.4-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-5.3.4.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change. On Wayland, Krita is only tested against KDE Plasma's KWin. Other compositors may not be fully compatible.

⚠️ Warning

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

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.4-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

⚠️ Warning

With Krita 5.3.4 release minimum supported MacOS version has increased from 10.14 (Mojave) to 10.15 (Catalina)

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.4-signed.dmg

Android

Krita on Android is still beta; tablets only.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK

• 64 bits Arm CPU APK

• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

Source code is the same as 6.0.4. See the 6.0.4 section.

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.3.4/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

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

Download 6.0.4

Windows

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

ⓘ Note

We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-6.0.4-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-6.0.4.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

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

⚠️ Warning

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

• 64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.4-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.4-signed.dmg

Android

Krita 6.0.4 is not yet functional on Android, so we are not making APK's available for sideloading.

Source code

• krita-6.0.4.tar.gz

• krita-6.0.4.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/6.0.4/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

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

15 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation supporting the KDE community, is looking to hire a Software Infrastructure and Continuous Delivery Engineer to help improve our infrastructure that the KDE community relies on. Please see the call for proposals for more details about this contract opportunity. We are looking forward to your application.

The full call for proposals has more details.

14 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released a beta of Plasma 6.8, and it's ready for testing. Before branching, the team landed a lot of great improvements to make sure it's an awesome release. Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

The Kup backup system has moved to Plasma! That means it will get regular releases, and we're encouraging OS developers to start including it. It really works very well for off-device backups.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.7

Discover once again shows Snap versions of apps in the source selector menu rather than as separate apps. (Gabriel Kuznik, KDE Bugzilla #519204)

Plasma 6.8

The clipboard's settings for how to handle copied image data and "MIME actions" are now a lot more comprehensible. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #348932, KDE Bugzilla #502274, and KDE Bugzilla #473882)

New

Old

Changing the volume really quickly no longer causes irritating-sounding popping noises in the volume level preview sounds. (Jeremy Senkiw, plasma-pa MR #424)

On the lock and login screens, clicking the "Show On-Screen Keyboard" button (renamed from "Virtual Keyboard") now always shows the keyboard as you would expect, irrespective of its typical visibility settings. (Kristen McWilliam and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #467209 and plasma-workspace MR #7044)

The Input Method widget has been somewhat similarly overhauled. Now it's primarily used to switch between on-screen keyboard visibility modes, but also lets you manually show the keyboard while an XWayland-using app is focused, because these apps don't have support for making the keyboard appear automatically. (Kristen McWilliam, plasma-workspace MR #6876)

The Kickoff Application Launcher widget is now always big enough by default to fully accommodate all items in its sidebar, rather than sometimes being scrollable - occasionally by even just a few pixels, which was fairly silly. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515175)

Notifications' speed graphs now have better axis label padding. (Méven Car, plasma-workspace issue #151)

Spectacle no longer shows a weird and misleading message about successfully copying the image to the clipboard after you use the "Share…" feature to share the image elsewhere. (Tobias Fella, spectacle MR #586)

Improved the keyboard navigation behavior of the Digital Clock widget's calendar view. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR #6900)

On System Settings' Quick Settings page, the list of frequently-used pages is never just empty; now it shows a default set until you've used the app enough so that it knows what pages you frequently use. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #522711)

Changed the percentages shown on the Power & Battery widget to use fixed-width "tabular numerals", so other UI elements don't slightly jump around as the numbers change when using some fonts. (Christoph Wolk, powerdevil MR #674)

If you have multiple panels with System Tray widgets on them, clicking the "Show Notifications" button on the "You missed some notifications" notification now only opens the notification history widget on the first/main panel. (Ameen Al-Asady, plasma-workspace MR #7028)

In the Clipboard widget's history view, the inline buttons for the selected item now only appear when it's hovered or when any of the buttons have keyboard focus. This makes it possible to make the buttons disappear so you can read all of the selected item's text. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #520130)

Reduced a bit of awkwardness in the way you rename audio devices. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #508211)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a really weird bug in the Kickoff Application Launcher that could make phantom representations of apps in one category appear in other categories after you scrolled around there for a bit and then switched to the other category. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515229)

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a weird bug that prevented moving focus from the password field of a network shown in the Networks widget back up to the widget's search field. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #525321)

Plasma 6.8

Plasma no longer crashes if you query the wallpaper using D-Bus while the wallpaper settings dialog was open, and then switching wallpaper plugins. (Alperen Yildiz, KDE Bugzilla #525207)

Copying text in LibreOffice apps now adds it to the persistent history every single time, rather than only every other time. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #519510)

Middle-click-pasting text that was selected in a non-Qt-based app into a Qt-based app now works every time, rather than every other time. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #506325)

Fixed an issue that could make some tool settings in Spectacle's full-screen annotation UI appear off-screen. (Mirko Laruina, KDE Bugzilla #524499)

Fixed an issue that could leave the wallpaper previews in the Activity Switcher sidebar all black, instead of showing the wallpaper. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #378693)

An invalid XWayland configuration file inside /etc/xdg/Xwayland-session.d/ no longer prevents KWin from launching XWayland at all. (Ilya Katsnelson, kwin MR #9894)

Entering and exiting full-screen mode no longer makes Task Manager tasks' "I'm playing audio right now" indicators disappear or get stuck in a partially transparent state. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #522471)

Frameworks 6.31

Fixed a bug that made the "Frames and Outlines Contrast" theme setting not take effect in certain apps where it was expected to work. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #525364)

Manually setting your home folder to "Indexed" on System Settings's Search page no longer creates an un-removable clone of that entry. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #487212)

Qt 6.11.1

Fixed a serious QML issue that could make QML-based UIs break with nonsensical property errors. (Fabian Kosmale, Qt bug #149607 and Qt bug #146886)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

KWin has gained support for the commit_timing Wayland protocol. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #513283)

Remote desktop connections now benefit from even lower latency. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #237)

Gear 26.12

System Settings' KDE Wallet page has been ported to QML. (Nicolas Fella, kwalletmanager MR #78)

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.

12 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-37.

Making Social Media Social

Tags: tech, fediverse, social-media, community

Interesting approach. When friction to subscription is a good way to really build community.

https://tante.cc/2026/09/10/making-social-media-social/

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg Put on 'Leave of Absence'

Tags: tech, blog, wordpress, business

Looks like the drama continues. I wonder where this will land.

https://www.404media.co/wordpress-automattic-ceo-matt-mullenweg-put-on-leave-of-absence/

Doomscrolling ourselves to death

Tags: tech, book, reading, tv, social-media, attention-economy, politics, history

The argument presented is maybe a bit too mechanical for my taste. That said there's indeed something to be said about the decline in literacy and its consequences on our societies.

https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/doomscrolling-ourselves-to-death

Tristan Buckmaster's statement on the Navier-Stokes resolution

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

Shows some insights into the kerfuffle around the Navier-Stokes recent resolution. The behavior of OpenAI in this affair is ludicrous. In my opinion this is showing research malpractice… Why care about the scientific method when you have a shot at good PR?

https://cims.nyu.edu/~tristanb/statement.pdf

The function of LLM-based math "proofs"

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

Is it badly conducted research for PR purpose? Who would have expected anything different? I wish we'd fund real science instead…

https://tante.cc/2026/09/07/the-function-of-llm-based-math-proofs/

Soft-deprecating re.match()

Tags: tech, api, python

Interesting way to deal with deprecation in Python. Indeed sometimes it doesn't hurt to keep the not so ideal old name… but you want to push user code to know they miss an opportunity in readability by using the old name.

https://hugovk.dev/blog/2026/soft-deprecating-re.match/

A quick overview of atomics in C

Tags: tech, c, multithreading, atomics

Still need to understand atomics and memory barrier? This is a neat primer.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/09/09/a-quick-overview-of-atomics-in-c/

Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory

Tags: tech, c++, rust, memory, type-systems

Interesting exploration of how static and dynamic dispatchs work behind the scene in Rust. The chosen tradeoffs are different than in C++ and that's something to keep in mind.

https://sofiabelen.github.io/projects/visualizing-rusts-vtables-how-dyn-trait-works-in-memory/

My HTML Boilerplate

Tags: tech, web, html

There's a lot of important metadata in HTML pages nowadays… and there could be more than proposed here.

https://vale.rocks/posts/html-boilerplate

There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

Tags: tech, software, engineering, quality

Good point. The metaphors we use have obviously some limits. In the case of the "sinking ship" when used for software it doesn't quite work as there's no bottom…

https://zachkehs.com/blog/theres_no_limit_to_how_bad_code_can_get/

On Quality: What It Is and Why Products Get Worse

Tags: production, quality, craftsmanship

Very nice read about quality in general and why it's really hard to define. It also explores how it can degrade over time in existing products.

https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/on-quality

Degeneracy is a Symptom

Tags: history, economics, politics

Or why it's stupid to judge people on their non virtuous behavior while at the same time fostering the structures which ensure that virtue does not pay. So indeed, some people read the odds properly and act accordingly…

https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-symptom

The Last Person to Know the Dictator Is Screwed Is the Dictator

Tags: history, politics

Build a good enough echo chamber and you won't know you're toast before it's too late.

https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/the-last-person-to-know-the-dictator

When Death Was a Relief

Tags: history

Such a wonderful species we are… not. Things can get really nasty when someone starts exploiting beliefs and gains some sort of power. And then, the blame game begins. Unfortunately it regularly happens.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=205swuI0JlY

Bye for now!

11 Sep 2026 3:47pm GMT

So... Koko needed a new icon.

Koko is KDE's image viewer, sharing its name with the rather famous gorilla, and yes, putting a gorilla in the icon would have made perfect sense... but we all love cats, and so did KOKO, so here we are

And while making this ridiculously cute thing I kept thinking about something that has been bothering me more and more. Hopefully the cuteness of the cat will alleviate the ranty nature of what follows

Why is so much of what we design today so f...... boring?

We have incredible displays, GPUs doing absurd things, animation engines, shaders, QML, tools I could only dream about 20 years ago... and somehow so much of what we make with all of that looks like the same five rectangles arranged in slightly different ways.

Clean. and forgettable, austere but not in a brutalist way, its.... just booooring .

I've spent quite a bit of time recently bringing bits of old Oxygen back to life, and I know there is a temptation to read that as nostalgia, as if my answer is "look, things were better when we had shiny icons!"

It isn't.

I don't want the future to look like 2008.

In fact I think this sudden fascination with old interfaces, skeuomorphism, Winamp skins, old games, old icons and all the rest is a symptom of something else. People are looking backwards because they miss design having a personality. They miss opening something and actually having a reaction to it.

And now we have AI.

And f'ing..... makes the whole thing even more urgent to me. AI is spectacularly good at producing things that look like things that already exist. And if our design ambition was already reduced to producing safe, familiar, derivative variations of whatever everyone else is doing or that we have done... congratulations, they have automated it,.... and and I can't feel much more from such things... other than plain sadness.

So I don't want us to go backwards. I want us to go somewhere.

Make something NEW!!!

Make something strange. Make something excessive. Make something beautiful, ugly, funny, annoying, charming, stupid, brilliant, probably all of those at once. Make something somebody will hate enough to write a 14 rant bolg post about.

Just please make us feel something.

see you soon in aKademy for more ranting and maybe a beer or 2

Also played with this for the plasma-studio app. I think i can do better

OOOOO and OBVIUSLY if you want our sort of Crazy JOIN us in Oxygen, or KDE or anything

just go do stuf NEW stuf!!!!!!

11 Sep 2026 2:57pm GMT

The first maintenance release of the 26.08 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include a big batch of fixes for crashes when changing Timeline Preview settings, deleting sequences, stopping audio recordings, and using ripple editing when the Project Monitor is hidden. This release also fixes Effects Zones not being kept inside the clip boundary and tabs are now readable on theme changes on Windows.

Join us at Akademy

Some of the team members will be in Graz for Akademy, celebrating 30 years of KDE. Also Jean-Baptiste Mardelle will be giving a talk about Kdenlive.

Kdenlive needs your support

Our small team has been working for years to build an intuitive open source video editor that does not track you, does not use your data, and respects your privacy. However, to ensure a proper development requires resources, so please consider a donation if you enjoy using Kdenlive - even small amounts can make a big difference.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

11 Sep 2026 1:45pm GMT

Akademy-es 2026 is happening October 23 to 25 in Camping Arco Iris (Villaviciosa de Odón, Madrid)

For the 20th anniversary of the first Akademy-es, the organizers have chosen a campsite to do a slightly different event focusing on the community side of KDE.

There will still be of course talks, so remember you can submit one until this September 13th!

See you there!

10 Sep 2026 8:28pm GMT

Two weeks ago, I released AppStream 1.2.0. This release contains a lot of great changes, but one of the most important ones concerns how media are being handled, and AppStream's default image export format.

AppStream is a Freedesktop metadata standard to describe software components. That can be anything from system services over fonts to console and graphical applications. AppStream metadata is supposed to give users enough information to decide whether they want to install a piece of software, to represent that piece of software, and to give the operating system enough information to decide whether a software component should be installed automatically and (to some extent) what capabilities and relations it has, to provide the user with sensible options.

Especially for the first two goals, and especially for GUI applications, AppStream supports icons and screenshots, which are used to showcase applications. Today, AppStream is used by all kinds of services, from Linux distributions over firmware updates to Flatpak and desktops directly. AppStream's original design however comes from the perspective of Linux distributions in 2011, where you may want to browse the software catalog offline, without delay, and without pinging an external server (which could be a privacy concern).

Therefore, a common way to deploy an AppStream-enabled software repository is to ship all icons of all applications in the repository to the user as part of the repository metadata download. AppStream does support remote icon downloads nowadays, and for a while I thought that this would become the default eventually. However, especially in today's world, having a bandwidth-saving, instantly responsive, privacy-protecting application browsing experience seems more important that ever.

PNG images are great!

The only format that AppStream supports for icons and screenshots (which are downloaded on-demand from your distributor's CDN) has always been exclusively PNG. PNG images are perfect for icons, because they compress well (especially for common icon shapes), are fast and simple to load, and can be loaded anywhere, by any toolkit or webbrowser. They also ensure we deliver faithful screenshot images, even though we may have scaled or re-rendered them. Still though, PNG images are less great for screenshots, as they are not very efficient, which puts strain on any CDN that has to deliver them, as well as on people's internet connections when browsing screenshots. Having smaller thumbnails alleviates that problem a little, but does not fully solve it.

But even for icons, PNG could be improved upon: In many cases, icons are re-downloaded with the repository metadata again and again, so having a large icon tarball adds up to the data transferred during metadata refreshes. AppStream also now supports large 128x128px icons, which nobody in 2012 expected we would need, adding even more data that will be re-downloaded. Saving some space here translates directly to lower bandwidth costs as well as faster downloads for users.

To improve PNG file sizes, the AppStream Compose library, which handles all image processing and metadata catalog composition, was running optipng on all generated PNG images. That does create smaller PNG images, but they were still relatively large compared to other image formats.

For a long time though, there was no alternative to PNG images for icons: There was no lossless image compression format that could give us the same quality as PNG images and that was also widely supported.

JPEG-XL vs PNG in AppStream

Since 2021 we have JPEG-XL (JXL), which offers a true lossless mode with often better compression than PNG. The issue was that JPEG-XL wasn't widely supported. Then, in 2025, the PDF Association selected JPEG-XL as the preferred image format for HDR images in PDFs, and now we are finally getting browser support and more ubiquitous availability of the format (you can try it right now in Firefox!).

For screenshots, using JXL's lossy mode, it has obvious and extreme size advantages over PNG, so supporting JXL or WebP for screenshot images was an obvious choice. If JXL would support the lossless case very well as well though, we could serve many use cases with the same exported image format, which is very attractive to me.

So, the obvious next question was whether it was worth the pain of switching the icon format, so I did some measurements on real icons. For that I used the AppStream component icon pool that Debian Unstable ships, which is almost 5000 application icons of various sizes, and converted them to PNG:

PNG images saved with libpng at effort=4, compression=9, then optimized using optipng -o2, JXL images encoded using vips jxlsave lossless=1 effort=7 strip=1 via VIPS/libjxl.

As the table shows, using lossless JXL images over size-optimized PNG images (using optipng's default settings) provides a roughly 20% gain. This does not look like much, until you consider how often these files are downloaded: A 20% file size reduction may only save 1-2 MiB of disk space, but if they are downloaded over and over again by many clients, it will save a lot of bandwidth.

Interesting JXL encoding findings

As a sidequest, I was curious why some images were larger than their PNG counterparts when encoded with JXL, and what the ones that were significantly smaller were.

In short, the biggest size reductions for JXL existed on images that were already small as PNG, and contained large, flat color surfaces with hard edges and simple shapes. They were not very interesting, and much of JXL's wins come from accumulating smaller gains across all files, which compound the bigger icons get (especially at 128x128px, where JXL truly shines).

The events were JXL loses to PNG are more interesting: For example, it does quite poorly with pixel-art images that have a lot of repeating patterns. Those are encoded well by PNG, but less efficiently by JXL. Take for example Vonsh:

My guess is that while PNG can exploit the repeating pixel patterns for compression, JXL's predicts surrounding pixels from its neighbours, which fails too often and makes it pay almost full entropy per pixel. In this single rare case, the PNG is at 5.4 KiB, while the JXL is almost 8 KiB in size.

Other cases I looked at were arguably buggy input data, where color channels were hidden under the alpha channel of the input image. PNG could probably again exploit repeats, while we were forcing JXL to encode pixels that were invisible in the final image. This is arguably a problem with the original input data. Currently, AppStream does not make any changes to icons at all, but in future we might add a filter that removes invisible colors from images to solve this pathological case (it was only two icons out of 5000 though, so it is not a high priority).

The third case I found where JXL loses to PNG were icons with checkerboard-like patterns:

For those, PNG can likely again exploit the repeating patterns, while a checkerboard layout is pretty bad for left/top predictors like JXL's. However, in this case the size difference (and loss for JXL) is only 450 bytes, so even though JXL loses to PNG, it does so not by much.

JXL in AppStream

Given these findings, JPEG-XL is the default image format starting with AppStream 1.2.0. AppStream Compose will encode all images losslessly as JXL, while screenshots are encoded in lossy mode at Q=90 effort=7. Since the optipng step does not happen for JXL images, this comes at no speed penalty and is even a bit faster on modern x86_64 CPUs (where libjxl can use SIMD). PNG is still available, and Compose can be told to switch between the two formats.

Upsides of JXL in AppStream right now

If you use JXL in Compose or the recent release of appstream-generator, you will get much smaller images and, for screenshots, will benefit from other JPEG-XL features such as progressive decoding, providing a far nicer user experience. libAppStream has supported JXL icons since version 1.1.3, so your clients will need that version or a newer one, and all software centers will have to support loading JXL images (which all of them do, provided the right plugins are installed).

Downsides of switching to JXL too quickly

JXL is a very new format, so web browsers might not yet display it if you are serving webpages. Your clients may also have bugs in processing JXL images, as the format is still "new". For example, switching on JXL in Debian sent KDE Discover into an infinite loop on startup while trying to load the icons (an issue which has been fixed, but clients will need that patch first before JXL is switched on).

This currently makes JXL enablement only possible when you know that your clients can support it. This is the case for me in Debian Unstable and Debian 14, which are using JXL images for a few weeks now, but not for any older releases. Platforms like Flatpak have it even harder, because they do know even less about their clients. So, even though it has big advantages, you may want to hold off on using JXL right away, and force PNG by setting the ImageFormat key to png in appstream-generator's configuration, or passing --image-format=png to appstreamcli compose.

It is also worth mentioning that JPEG-XL is much, much slower on systems that do not have SIMD instructions or for which the libjxl/jxl-rs library does not have them (such as apparently riscv64 right now). If this is a concern, you might not want to switch to JXL right away.

Media pipeline improvements

Besides the JXL default change, AppStream 1.2.0 also comes with a complete overhaul of its media processing pipeline. While libappstream, AppStream's main library, does not do any media processing and comes with very minimal dependencies to be embedded in client applications and used on servers, the same can not be said about libappstream-compose, AppStream's library to build metadata generating applications (the server-side part, usually).

The compose library has to render fonts into font specimen cards, inspect translation files, render SVG images, decode all kinds of raster images, inspect video files, etc. Especially the fonts, and the fact that fonts can appear in SVG images, has caused issues in the past, as libappstream-compose is a heavily threaded library and most font libraries can only work from a single thread. This forced the library to essentially go into single-thread mode anytime anything that could touch a font was being processed.

AppStream also originally was created for a "safe world" where applications were vetted by the distributors before their metadata was processed. This is increasingly not the case, so it made sense to put at least a few guardrails on the most complex part of the pipeline: The media processing. As part of the change, media processing was split out into a separate worker process. This solved two problems at once: Font handling was isolated in a single-threaded binary - if we wanted to handle fonts in parallel, we could simply spawn more workers. And, being in a separate process, the media processing could now be sandboxed.

As part of the multiprocess changes, Compose also switched from using GdkPixbuf to VIPS for image processing. The latter allows for much more fine-grained control over the image output and encoding, and comes with a lot of well-maintained filters and operations, which made it possible to eliminate a fair chunk of AppStream's hand-rolled image processing operations. As part of this transition, we unfortunately lost the ability to read XPM images, which dropped about 20-30 applications from the pool at Debian. But in the name of security, this is a sensible choice, especially since most XPM icons were very small and low-resolution, and applications using them could benefit from adding a high-quality PNG icon anyway. With VIPS, we also now restrict the amount of image formats we can load to a sensible set, so extremely niche or unexpected formats will be outright rejected (this includes sane-but-unusual formats for screenshots and icons, such as TIFF images).

The Compose library, with all of these changes, will now just request high-level operations (e.g. "render a font card for this font to a JXL image") from the worker, and provide it with input data in sealed memfds and output locations as FDs as well. On Linux systems, the worker will use Landlock if available, to block all write access to the filesystem, deny device access and deny TCP and UDP as well. The sandbox can certainly be tightened a fair bit in future, but this was a good and safe start to gain some experience with it without having things break too easily, given the many places Compose is used in (also, Landlock's API is surprisingly nice to use, so it was easier than I thought to add in this early version).

With all of these changes, the libappstream-compose library is now also officially marked API-stable, so you should be able to rely on it in future to build new things (its API has barely changed in the past, and now with the new media API and defaults change in place, it was time to declare it stable).

I want to see / try this!

Currently, the easiest way to have a look at the new data is to check out Debian Unstable. If you have a JXL-enabled browser, you can also see the icons in AppStream Generator's HTML pages for Debian Sid. If you are using appstream-generator for your distribution, you will also get much more pleasant statistics and HTML pages, as well as fully deterministic media output and a whole bunch of security updates, so, update to its recent 1.0 release.

Please keep in mind that if you switch to JXL, the client tools receiving the image data have to support it. Support varies depending on the Linux distribution, so, test it first and switch the default back to PNG in case you encounter any issues.

What's next?

With so many features and changes landed, the next changes in AppStream will focus on improving what already exists and fixing any issues (there will be more blogposts about the other features 1.2.x delivers!). Testing with the entire Debian archive as data source makes me fairly confident though that there will not be many problems. In the longer term, tightening the media processing sandbox will also be something we might want to do, e.g. by hiding parts of the filesystem tree or filtering syscalls.

For JPEG-XL, one obvious question is "Will you add support for it to the Freedesktop icon-theme specification as supported format alongside PNG, SVG(Z), and XPM?". For on-disk icon repositories, JXL's space-savings are less compelling, and it being HDR-capable is also not necessarily a killer feature (PNG can go a long way!). However, JPEG-XL's ability to immediately decode larger images at reduced resolution without resampling could legitimately be very powerful here, as applications could ship a single large image and quickly decode it at 1/2, 1/4 or 1/8 the size for different purposes in their UI. JPEG-XL also supports spot-color extra channels, which applications could use as masks to recolor raster icons at render time. This could be incredibly nice to color symbolic icons on-the-fly without any SVG and CSS. JXL also provides richer metadata, which might be neat for (license/author) documentation. So, the answer here is: Maybe it makes sense to allow another format, but this will have to be discussed first, as it would force JXL into every toolkit and desktop, which is a much bigger ask than supporting it only in AppStream.

As always, let me know what you think and please report any issues or bugs directly against AppStream or AppStream Generator if you encounter problems that are with the tools, and not with a project's metadata.

10 Sep 2026 5:48pm GMT

Besides maintenance and debugging work, this year, my work on Kdenlive was mostly dedicated to refactoring the Kdenlive keyframes system to make it more powerful. This is part of a NGI Zero Commons grant via NLnet, see my last status report from february for some more context.

Previously, keyframes were set globally for an effect, touching all its parameters. With the updated logic, you can now decide to add keyframes only to a specific parameter, and parameters can have independant keyframes. This work will soon be made available for testing, and will be part of the next 26.12.0 Kdenlive release.

This new widget allows to move keyframes for several effects in one step, and also supports keyframe scaling, meaning that you can easily stretch a group of keyframes.

Effect Stack Before

Effect Stack After Refactoring

Basic keyframe features remain in the effect stack, like add/remove keyframe and seek to previous/next keyframe, but all other keyframe-related features have otherwise been removed from the effect stack into a dedicated Keyframes panel. The parameter values now have a colored background to indicate if you are currently on a keyframe or not.

One drawback is that it uses more space, but we plan to futher refine the interface in the next months before the final release.

New features

Beyond the obvious possibility to add per-parameter keyframes, and manage keyframes from several effects in one place, a few other features were included in the rewrite:

Move keyframes with keyboard

You can now grab the selected keyframes with the usual shortcut, then move them frame by frame using arrow keys.

Zoom and Keyframe scaling

Zooming and scrolling can be used with the standard mouse wheel events, and it is now possible to scale selected keyframes by selecting them and dragging with the Ctrl modifier.

And all the rest

The Keyframes interface also allows to filter parameters by name to only show matching parameters, useful if you have lots of effects on a clip. All this work will also make it much easier to add new keyframe features in the future.

Performance

"Adding new features is nice, but what about performance?" you may ask. Well, good news: this work also involved some cleanup and performance improvements. People working with lots of keyframes (for example with object tracking) will really enjoy the changes.

For example if you have a clip with more than 1000 keyframes, you will enjoy:

• Much faster project load time (can be as much as twice as fast)
• Much faster keyframe operation (changing a keyframe value was previously very laggy)
• Much better playback speed when the clip is selected (was previously very choppy)

And even if you don't use that many keyframes, the general workflow should be a lot smoother.

Meet us at Akademy

Part of the Kdenlive team will be in Graz for KDE's Akademy, celebrating 30 years of KDE. Be there to meet us!

Kdenlive needs your support

Our small team has been working for years to build an intuitive open source video editor that does not track you, does not use your data, and respects your privacy. However, to ensure a proper development requires resources, so please consider a donation if you enjoy using Kdenlive - even small amounts can make a big difference.

10 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

Here are the new modules available in the Plasma 6.8 beta:

• kup: Backup scheduler for the Plasma desktop

Some important features and changes included in 6.8 beta are highlighted on KDE community wiki page.

Help stress-test the Union theming system

This releases marks the second half of the Union theming system's public tech preview!

New in Plasma 6.8: Union now themes QtWidgets applications, such as Dolphin and Kate. Bear in mind this support is preliminary and you will encounter bugs. When you do, please report them here!

To test Union:

1. Make sure the union package is installed (name may differ depending on your distro)
2. Launch System Settings
3. In the sidebar, navigate to Colors & Themes → Application Style
4. Click "Breeze (Union)"
5. Click Apply

This will apply Union styling to both QtQuick and QtWidgets apps.

The intention is for these apps to look as similar as possible when styled with Union to how they look with Breeze - though any minor visual improvements should be considered intentional!

If you find any issues, make sure they're Union-specific by running the app with the Breeze style to compare the two. If the issue is Union-specific, report it here!

Everything else

View full changelog

10 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

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

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

• kdeconnect: Fix orientation of an arrow within the plasmoid (Commit, fixes bug #524889)
• kongress: Fix opening the room map from a talk (Commit)
• okular: Fix a crash when saving documents (Commit, fixes bugs #477153 and #505130)

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

• 26.08 release notes for information on tarballs and known issues.
• Package download wiki page
• 26.08.1 source info page
• 26.08.1 full changelog

10 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Wednesday, 9 September 2026

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.30.0.

This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.

New in this version

09 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Its been a minute since my last posts when I went over plasma-keyboard and its new diacritics feature, and the mega-sprint in Graz.

Overview​

I've been busy with a whole lot of things, but here's a brief highlight:

• Tons of bugfixes for plasma-keyboard and the diacritics feature after some distros set plasma-keyboard to be on by default. This unexpected new batch of testers found a host of bugs that warranted a bunch of frenetic bugfixing after the launch of Plasma 6.7; thankfully these were successful and the flow of bug reports slowed
• Improved the plasma-keyboard documentation for new contributors
• Added a bunch of unit tests for plasma-keyboard; a few months ago we had 0% test coverage and now we have 57% of C++ code covered by tests (would prefer it higher, but progress!)
• Added apidox to some difficult kwin code
• plasma-setup maintenance (we've had new contributors 🎉, bugs, proposals, etc)
• In relation to the STF grant to KDE, I've been doing technical review on behalf of the e.V. for all the changes being done (spoiler alert: a massive amount of amazing work has been/is being done!)
• A whole bunch of gardening, reviews, bug triage/fixing, etc - not so much of the fun stuff I would like such as the new plasma-keyboard features I have planned, but important work that has been needful
• Fixed the OSK (on-screen keyboard) button on the lock screen, and added a matching one to plasma-login-manager
• Hopefully being merged in time for 6.8: redesigned/fixed up system tray applet for plasma-keyboard

ci-healthcheck​

I created a utility to check the health of KDE CI along with a web dashboard to visualize the results, and began making weekly updates on the state of all Plasma's CI health on the mailing list.

In the beginning we regularly had a dozen or more repos with CI failing on master, dozens of repos whose CI hadn't been run in months or in a few cases years, and 14% of repos configured to report failing tests in the MR view.

Now we usually never have more than 1 or 2 repo with failing CI in master any given week and even had a few weeks in a row with no failing CI, every Plasma repo runs its CI against master at least once a week to catch issues, and fully 94% of Plasma repos are configured to report failing tests in the MR view.

I consider this a massive success! 🎉🎉🎉

Still more that can be done to improve the reports and CI health, but kudos to everyone for helping trim the fat and keep our software stack healthy and reliable! 🍪

plasma-morekeys​

There have been requests for plasma-keyboard to support full-sized keyboard layouts, however there has been debate about if that is appropriate to have in plasma-keyboard; such a feature seems like it would be rather niche, while adding a fair amount of complexity and maintenance burden.

Full-sized layouts wouldn't add any benefit for the vast majority of users who want a way to type in a search, a text message, etc - it seems like a much rarer user who would want to perform desktop keyboard shortcuts, use vim in a terminal, change tty from their OSK instead of a real keyboard, etc.

The super talented Aleix created plasma-morekeys as a solution for those who want a full keyboard layout that simply emulates a real keyboard and can do all of the above mentioned things like keyboard shortcuts, and more.

This is intended as a test; it was put together quickly so those who need this feature can try it and provide feedback. If it proves successful then we can transition it to an official project, perhaps provide integration with plasma-keyboard to make choosing/using it seamless.

If you are one of the people with interest in a full-size keyboard layout for your OSK, please give it a try:

• Install the plasma-morekeys flatpak (consider this alpha software!):

curl -L -o /tmp/plasma-morekeys.flatpak "https://nextcloud.merritt.codes/s/x4gqrs596NPYarF/download" && flatpak install --user --or-update --bundle /tmp/plasma-morekeys.flatpak

• Test out how it works for your usecases
• If you encounter bugs or find it isn't quite working how you require, report it and tell us what's wrong and what your usecase is so we can try and address it

Akademy​

Its just over a week until Akademy!! I'm looking forward to seeing a whole bunch of my KDE family again in Graz, and the chance to get some important work done together.

I have a bit of face blindness, so please don't be offended if I can't recognize everyone on sight! (I often rely on other cues like mannerisms, hair style, voice, etc)

I will try my best to be outgoing, but if I come across as a very anxious wallflower please know that I am friendly and super happy to see you all, and I appreciate the social butterflies pulling me into the mix! 😆

See you soon! 👋👋👋

08 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.7.5.

Plasma 6.7 was released in June 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:

View full changelog

08 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT