Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week many widgets shipped with Plasma got quite a bit of polish. Feature work and performance work were also notable this week… really, a bit of everything! Have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

There's a new picture of the day wallpaper plugin that displays art made by noted FOSS artist David Revoy. (Guillermo Villafuerte, kdeplasma-addons MR #1150)

You can now choose the position of OSD popups on the screen, if the default position doesn't work for you. (Matthias Schuh, KDE Bugzilla #501654)

Running systemd-ask-password --no-tty in systemd-257 or higher now shows a nice KDE-style password prompt. (Daan De Meyer, plasma-workspace #6433)

Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Glide browser. (Jan Buchar, plasma-browser-integration MR #178)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.8

You can now click to focus the Calculator widget and then interact with it using the keyboard as expected. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1191)

The Media Frame widget now changes the image displayed in its compact form immediately when the slideshow displayed in the popup advances to the next image, rather than after a delay. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1199)

Plasma 6.8.3

Opening the font dialog from the Digital Clock widget now pre-selects the currently-used font. (Niccolò Venerandi, plasma-workspace MR #7348)

Plasma 6.9

Widgets added to the desktop are now created at a size that makes them large enough to be useful without any cut-off content. (Felix Desyatirikov, plasma-workspace MR #7342 and bluedevil MR #274)

Spinning a mouse wheel over a scrollable horizontal row of Task Manager thumbnails now scrolls them, as expected. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #448504)

The way multiple panels interact with one another at screen corners has been improved in a variety of ways. (Niccolò Venerandi, plasma-workspace MR #7330)

Multiple graph styles used in System Monitor widgets are now presented in a nicer and more appropriate way when used on a panel. (Niccolò Venerandi, libksysguard MR #498)

New

Old

The Calculator widget now animates the buttons being pressed when you interact with it using the keyboard rather than the pointer. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1190)

The Dictionary, Disk Quota, and Konsole Profiles widgets now use up-to-date behaviors and styling for their list views. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1192, kdeplasma-addons MR #1193, and kdeplasma-addons MR #1220)

Launcher menus now use "natural sorting", meaning something like "Transformers 10" is shown after "Transformers 9", rather than after "Transformers 1". (Peder Bergan, KDE Bugzilla #524466)

Searching for a keyboard layout on System Settings' Keyboard Layouts page now works a lot more intuitively. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #4060)

You can now use the "Forward" button on your fancy mouse to trigger actions on the desktop. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #494216)

You can now open the clipboard settings from its Meta+V popup, just like you already can from its panel widget popup. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7345)

Frameworks 6.32

When using a non-integer scale factor, icons throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now a little bit less blurry and pixelated, and also don't wiggle around so much while their parent window is being resized. (Arjen Hiemstra, Ilya Fedin, and Eike Hein, KDE Bugzilla #522336, KDE Bugzilla #527335, and kirigami MR #2225 respectively)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.8

Keyboard navigation within the list of timers in the Timers widget now works as expected. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1247)

The "Timer finished" message you can configure the Timer widget to show is no longer hardcoded to English by default. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #413374)

Plasma 6.8.3

Fixed a recent regression that made KWin crash when a DisplayLink screen was connected. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #527984)

Fixed a case where System Monitor could crash when you scrolled around after killing some processes. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #502879)

Plasma no longer lets you use scripting to set a panel's spacing value to 0, since that would make Plasma freeze when its widgets were dragged to rearrange them. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #528228)

Using the Pager widget's "Selecting current virtual desktop: Shows the desktop" setting no longer triggers rapid flashing when you scroll over it. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #471241)

Using the Minimize All widget to minimize and then restore all windows now restores focus to the previously-focused window as well. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #450137)

Fixed an issue that could make icon positions sometimes get scrambled on multi-screen setups when one screen was disconnected at the same time as another one was connected. (Błażej Szczygieł, plasma-desktop MR #4163)

Fixed an issue that could break the layout on System Settings' Display Configuration page if you used it to turn off a screen and then immediately reverted that change. (Błażej Szczygieł, KDE Bugzilla #527131)

Timers saved in the Timer widget can once again be dragged around to re-order them. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1224)

Plasma 6.9

Fixed an issue that could freeze an RDP stream initiated from the very confusingly-named "Windows App" RDP client app for macOS. (Chris Maria, krdp MR #289)

Opening the color dialog from the Color Picker widget no longer makes Plasma freeze while it's open. (Madhur Dhillon, KDE Bugzilla #525094)

When the Timer widget is placed in a vertical panel, it no longer acts as a trap for the Up and Down arrow keys when focusing widgets with the keyboard. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1225)

Rapidly clicking on the "Previous Image" and "Next Image" buttons on the Media Frame widget no longer sometimes tries to open the current image in an external app. (Niccolò Venerandi, KDE Bugzilla #371832)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8.3

Spectacle's "background mode" feature is now a little bit faster to launch and consumes less memory. (Frog Chen, spectacle MR #621)

Plasma 6.9

Plasma no longer leaks a little bit of memory when you right-click on files or folders on the desktop. (Zühtü Eren İncekara, plasma-desktop MR #4152)

Fixed a couple of memory leaks in System Monitor. (Méven Car, libksysguard MR #479)

Spectacle is now faster to launch in general. (Kai Uwe Broulik, spectacle MR #618, spectacle MR #619, and spectacle MR #620)

System Settings' Accessibility page is now much faster to load. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #4183)

System Settings' Spell Check page was ported to Qt Quick, giving it a more modern UI and opening the door for faster and easier future improvements. (Tobias Fella, plasma-desktop MR #3975)

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.

KDE's annual fundraiser has raised 35% of the funds we're hoping for, but with two months left in the year, we need your help to get it over the finish line! If you can, consider making a donation.

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.

07 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

Here's the data!

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

Thank you all for filling the survey I mentioned in my other post here. We got 1518 full responses total, which is a lot!

Without further ado, here's the data in charts.

FYI: I am not a data scientist, just a random guy trying to piece up something.

General usage statistics

First I want to go through some general usage stuff.

What is your desktop icon usage like?

In general, people tend to actually not use them much. They still may have some icons, but they get mostly ignored.

A lot of people use the desktop as a place to store temporary files they're working on, then presumably move them somewhere else when done with them. As a to-do list of sorts.

Then there's shortcuts to applications people use a daily.

Lastly, not as many store files on desktop regularly.

So to me it seems that people ignore them most of the time, but use them as shortcuts for apps to do work, or just need a temporary place for something they're working on.

Note that this was a multichoice question. I allowed people to pick "I don't really use desktop icons", because I believed all these could be true at the same time: People don't necessarily think about them often, but they use them.

Average desktop icon amount

I calculated the average of the icon values, and it seems the average of everyone is 9 icons on desktop.

There were some people typing in 128937128973987 or similar so I removed those. Sorry, I don't believe you! Send me proof!

But the largest amount I'm willing to believe was 150 icons. That's a lot!

Automatic or manual sorting?

This is surprisingly even. I expected way more people move icons around, but it's literally 60/40 situation.

Icons on side of monitor when screen changes

Here's the real juicy parts: How do we want icons to behave when something happens?

When icons are placed on the side of the monitor, and screen resolution changes, we did not really know what users want the icons to actually do.. Until now!

The survey had users to make choice between example images. I have added the images here as a refresher.

Monitor resolution expands

Leave icons at current position.

Move icons to the new resolution.

Overwhelming majority of you want the icons to move to the new resolution and not stay in the current position, which I find interesting, as some might find that a bit jarring! But in a way, it makes sense.

Monitor resolution shrinks

Rearrange icons to fit the new resolution in their original form.

Rearrange them automatically to new position, from start.

This had even more overwhelming majority! Only 71 of you want the automated arrangement. So this preference is quite clear!

Monitor resolution shrinks, but the area where you move new icons has already some icons

Move all icons, to make room for the others.

Rearrange them automatically to new position, from start.

Here 1/3 of the people wanted them to be automatic and start over from the beginning. Moving all icons makes sense, but I think it's going to be more difficult to make and more bug prone.

Desktop is full of icons

You have added so many files on the desktop that it's full, then you add some more! We wanted to know what should happen in this case.

Add a scrollbar so you can scroll for more icons!

Tell user the desktop cant show more icons, but they can be found from Desktop folder.

Show user an "overflow menu" that has the icons that do not fit inside a popup.

Most of you seem to want the popup, which makes sense as this is very much what happens on mobile: When there's a lot of icons on the screen, and you try to add more, they turn into folders instead.

I was surprised the scrollbar was the second choice, as that's already what happens on Plasma, and I have heard so many times that it's confusing.

My personal favorite, the warning, is at third. It's my favorite because it's the least complex. :)

Monitor is changed to vertical mode

A usecase I very rarely encounter, but felt like we should look into anyway.

Keep icons where they are, just rotate them in place.

Rearrange icons so that they are somewhat close to the original arrangement.

Most of you want a rearrangement, though rotating in place seems to fit many as well. I would prefer rotating in place as implementor as it's the simplest, since we do not have to relayout everything.

Monitor disconnection

This is one of the most difficult ones to solve, as screens often behave weirdly when plugged/unplugged. Sometimes we do not know fully if the screen is ready or not, reporting back weird resolution, etc..

As a note for this question, the reverse would happen: The icons would be back on the reconnected screen.

They move to the remaining screen.

They aren't visible on the remaining screen.

I was expecting most to vote for the moving to the remaining screen, and I was right! However, I did not expect it to be this small divide.. A lot of you are fine with the icons not showing on the remaining screen!

Conclusions

Most of these things are what I expected, though I did not expect as much divide: I was expecting 90/10 divisions, not 60/40!

But thank you all for answering to the survey. I will have to properly mull over and plan now with all this data in my hands.

Note that this data does not decide anything, but it works as a guidance for us.

There's a lot of writing for me to read about the icons, so I will go through that over time. But thank you for these responses, as it will help us KDE folk figure out how to fix the desktop icon situation, as it's still bit flakey.

No promises when, but I want to get into it when I have gotten more Union bug fixes done.

Thank you again! Your help has been very valuable. <3

ps. Hope you don't mind my crappy charts. I am using chartjs for it, but if you have javascript off, you should see the images I took instead.

A script element has been removed to ensure Planet works properly. Please find it in the original post.

06 Nov 2026 7:52pm GMT

I didn't post last week, but I did read a bit. Between this and some catching up this week… Behold the web review double issue for the week 2026-45!

Reading in decline? Barnes & Noble is un-Daunt-ed

Tags: tech, book

Bookshops still have a future and it can be bright. It looks like ebooks can't displace regular books further.

https://chadcomello.com/reading-in-decline-barnes-noble-is-un-daunt-ed/

I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere)

Tags: tech, physics, mathematics, osint

Very impressive stuff. This is an extremely powerful OSINT method to narrow down where some sound might have been recorded.

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

Serbia just elected the world's brainiest parliament

Tags: politics, science, sociology

I guess this will be an interesting social experiment to follow in the coming years.

https://www.science.org/content/article/serbia-just-elected-world-s-brainiest-parliament

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs

Tags: tech, browser, funny

This is a funny browser extension idea.

https://charliegerard.dev/blog/overgrown-extension/

Walker Playground

Tags: tech, web, funny

This is really cool. Makes me want to play Lemmings again.

https://markblah.github.io/lemmings/

Mastodon, The Only Good Choice

Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse

Of course it has some of the social media flaws bit the Fediverse is the only good option. At least it can't seems to enshittify due to corporate capture.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/07/05/Choose-Mastodon

This $48 e-paper display can be whatever you want it to be

Tags: tech, hardware, self-hosting

Interesting device. The self-hosting of the server part seems a bit involved still. It gives plenty of ideas of cool things to try though.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/11/this-48-e-paper-display-can-be-whatever-you-want-it-to-be/

Why big tech stopped building useful stuff

Tags: tech, innovation, business

The reasons invoked definitely make sense. It's kind of the age of mediocrity and it's really boring.

https://www.rubenerd.au/why-big-tech-stopped-building-useful-stuff/

Now Entering: The Era Of Bleh

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, innovation, business, organisation, craftsmanship

Interesting essay. It's not really a differentiating productivity which businesses will find but a clear homogenization. When everyone will come up with the same ideas, everything will be tasteless and mediocre. Will we properly notice? Will it be an era where craftsmanship will be back?

https://www.noemamag.com/now-entering-the-era-of-bleh/

Why Wikimedia Is Speaking Up in a Major AI Copyright Case

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, wikipedia, copyright, law

Important statement from Wikimedia. The brief is likely to have quite some impact in the ongoing copyright cases around the LLM industry.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/10/30/why-wikimedia-is-speaking-up-in-a-major-ai-copyright-case/

Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era

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

Interesting report showing the impact of LLM based contributions on communities. Note the obvious limit of this survey being declarative. It gives some food for thought though.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/oss-development-gen-ai-era-2026?hsLang=en

Webinar: Copyrightability of LLM-generated code

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, copyright, foss, law

Very interesting webinar. Lots of food for thought regarding LLM produced code being de facto public domain and the consequences. A bit frustrated it glances a bit over copyright infringement during the talk part but it's explored more during the Q&A. Clearly it shows that there are still quite a few blurry lines so the legal risks are real. It looks like we'll have to wait for court rulings and/or laws being clarified.

https://nlnet.nl/events/20261029/index.html

AI: EU Member States approve "digital expropriation" of Europeans for AI companies

Tags: tech, europe, law, privacy, ai, machine-learning, gpt

There's really a problem with the EU Commission and Council… How can they swing positions like this?

https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expropriation-europeans-ai-companies

Why I Resist Generative "AI"

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism, ethics, ecology, cognition, politics

A good summary of everything that is wrong with the current LLM industrial complex.

https://estherweidauer.com/articles/why-resist-generative-ai.html

US data centers could wipe out 15 years' worth of progress in greenhouse gas emissions

Tags: tech, infrastructure, ecology

Let's hope most of the new data centers just won't be built or get on line…

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/us-data-centers-could-wipe-out-15-years-worth-of-progress-in-greenhouse-gas-emissions-report-claims-buildouts-could-emit-as-much-carbon-dioxide-as-all-of-mexico

AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them.

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, reliability, learning, engineering

The question is explored from the SRE angle but it applies more widely. The deskilling in teams which automate as much as possible is real. What can you do them when you encounter something novel not covered by the automation? You're quickly stuck.

https://newsletter.signoz.io/p/ai-isnt-replacing-sres-its-deskilling

Security advisory: openssh-server password authentication bypass

Tags: tech, ssh, security

OK, this is a really bad one. Check your alpine based machines and containers.

https://www.alpinelinux.org/posts/2026-11-05-openssh-password-authentication-bypass/

Be Aware of What's in Your Logs

Tags: tech, debugging, logging, privacy

A bit lengthy but that point stands. When you send application logs it has privacy implications every time. Developers can and should try to limit the risks though.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/be-aware-of-whats-in-your-logs/

UUIDv7 doesn't have the properties you think it does

Tags: tech, uuid

Don't just blindly use it. Lots of properties will depend on the exact generator you use.

https://alexsci.com/blog/uuidv7-is-weird/

We can do better than line-buffered output

Tags: tech, terminal, system, performance

Indeed there are other approaches which can give better result.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2026/11/05/

It's the memory latency, stupid

Tags: tech, rust, memory, performance

Another illustration than the memory access patterns are the most important factor for performance.

https://pivotlake.io/blog/its-the-memory-latency-stupid/

Go concurrency distilled

Tags: tech, go, multithreading, asynchronous

Nice reference material on the Go concurrency primitives.

https://antonz.org/go-concurrency-distilled/

Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions

Tags: tech, programming, design, api

This is indeed a good guideline to follow when designing interfaces.

https://matklad.github.io/2026/10/29/pub-calls-pub.html

Thinking in Traits

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

The writing is maybe lacking structure a bit. Still that gives a worthwhile tour of all the nice features one can build with a trait system and carefully designed APIs.

https://corrode.dev/blog/thinking-in-traits/

C++26 DIS failed, how does C++ survive?

Tags: tech, c++, standard

This is of course a big deal. Will the deadlock be solved? Will the language be able to move forward again with the bases of the institution quite shaken? Only time will tell.

https://andreasfertig.com/blog/2026/11/cpp26-dis-failed-how-does-cpp-survive/

In C++, = default and {} are not the same constructor

Tags: tech, c++, performance

Different safety profile but also different performance depending on the compiler. To keep in mind if there's too much performance pressure.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/11/02/default-and-braces-are-not-the-same-constructor/

Modern C++ Is a Mindset, Not a Standard

Tags: tech, c++, safety

Indeed there's an educational problem. Too much C++ code is wrote "the old way".

https://www.modernescpp.com/index.php/cpp-and-memory-safety-part-2/

Pele · Mermaid diagrams as themeable SVG

Tags: tech, diagrams, tools

Looks like a very nice alternative to Mermaid.

https://pele.run/

Using maths to balance your heading styles

Tags: tech, typography, text, fonts, web, css

Interesting scale for headers in text content. The approach gives clearly good results.

https://www.craigabbott.co.uk/blog/2026/using-maths-to-balance-your-heading-styles/

The Polyglot's Dilemma: Conformance Testing a Dozen Specs in as Many Languages

Tags: tech, tests, databases

Interesting approach used for MongoDB drivers. I'm not sure I'd have banked on YAML but having conformance tests in a single language is clearly a good bet.

https://emptysqua.re/blog/polyglots-dilemma/

Simple ways to prepare before facilitating a meeting

Tags: meetings, facilitation

Definitely looks like good advice if you need to facilitate a meeting.

https://www.improvesomething.today/simple-ways-to-prepare-before-facilitating-a-meeting/

The Real Kevin Bacon

Tags: tech, data-visualization, movie

Very nice exploration of the Hollywood movies social graph. It was believed Kevin Bacon was the centre of it all. The story is way more nuanced.

https://pudding.cool/2026/10/kevin-bacon/

How I Survived Late-Stage Cancer (A Fun Story)

Tags: health, medecine, science

Wondering how chemotherapy works? Here is one example.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5_Fayfx2NUM

Bye for now!

06 Nov 2026 2:06pm GMT

Kirigami Addons 1.16.1 is out! Kirigami Addons is a growing collection of nice components you can use in your Kirigami and QML applications.

This release mainly includes small bugfixes and two visual chances.

AboutPage

The about page provided by Kirigami Addons now display the release information more prominently (if any is available).

Time Picker

The time picker was completely redesigned. If you belonged to the minority who liked the tumbler timer picker, well bad news, it's not that anymore.

The new design is directly inspired by the one from android.

Packager section

The actualy tarbal might take up to 24 hours to be published as it need to be processed by sysadmin, I just announced this before going in vacation.

You can find the package on download.kde.org (kirigami addons) as soon as it is available and it has been signed with my GPG key.

06 Nov 2026 1:00pm GMT

Renovate is a helpful tool that updates your dependencies automatically. This is cool, because it means you don't have to track updates to your dependencies manually, which let's be honest never really work. Renovate will just create a new merge request as soon as it detects an update.

This is particularly relevant now, with more and more vulnerabilities being detected in our software supply chain every day.

Setting things up

Renovate is super easy to set up by using its CLI in a GitLab pipeline.

The only particular point is that this needs to run in a repo that not everyone has access to, as it uses a GitLab access token to create MRs, so it is now in the sysadmin/renovate-bot in invent.

Rust

Renovate supports Cargo as a package manager by default, so the configuration is extremely short and the repos with Rust just need to be listed in kde-renovate.

If you maintain a Rust project, feel free to open a merge request to list your project there.

Craft

Craft is the most interesting project to benefit from this, as it is used to build our binaries for Android, Windows, macOS and more. It is also the most complex, as Renovate doesn't natively support Craft, nor does it have a way to retrieve updates from Anitya, only from GitLab, GitHub, pip and other sources.

Adding Anitya support was easy with a custom data source:

 "customDatasources": {
 "release-monitoring": {
 "defaultRegistryUrlTemplate": "https://release-monitoring.org/api/v2/versions/?project_id={{{packageName}}}",
 "format": "json",
 "transformTemplates": [
 "{\"releases\": [stable_versions.{\"version\": $}]}"
 ]
 }
 },

This uses the releaseManagerId from the blueprints to match each blueprint to a project on Anitya.

Updating the blueprints is trickier, as they are written in Python, so I had to write a small script using Python's ast module to modify them. It is a bit cursed, but it works as long as the blueprints follow the common structure with for ver in ["x.x.x", "y.y.y"]:.

The next step is to make sure all Craft blueprints contain a releaseManagerId, and this is where help would be much appreciated also checking that the PRs created by Renovate are correct and the new updated package build on every of our platforms.

Huge thanks to Ben and Hannah for setting this up and happy hacking!

06 Nov 2026 10:00am GMT

Has it really been just one week? The public announcement of Kwi last weekend has resulted in a flurry of activity both inside and outside the project!

First of all, thank you all very much! There's been a lot of positive and kind feedback, a lot of excitement, and very useful bug reports from so many of you.

Let's take stock together of what's been happening. The rough plan is to do this once week from now on, unless life/travel get in the way. Usually towards or on the weekends.

Getting Noticed

Kwi was the talk of KDE town for the week!

• Reactions and lively discussion on r/kde, r/linux, lobste.rs and Hacker News
• Articles and comments on Phoronix, 9to5 Linux, XDA Developers, Linux News (German) and many others
• A YouTube video by well-known YouTuber Brodie

Additionally, Kwi is seeing early interest by packagers active in the Fedora, Arch Linux, NixOS and other communities. Packaging uptake of course will require an actual, versioned release! More on our plans for that further below.

Progress

Kwi's users have been busy putting our brand-new app through its paces. A decent smattering of papercuts and teething issues has surfaced, along with a thankfully small number of more serious defects.

We've been able to keep up with the reports quite well so far. At the time of publication, Kwi has no open defect tickets.

Tickets: Implemented Feature Requests This Week

• Option to create a new tab after the current one
• Go back to a previous tab on tab closure
• Option to configure initial terminal size

Tickets: Closed Defects This Week

• Fallback glyphs are not rendered
• Dragging tabs to re-arrange them requires precision
• Retain selection on tab switch
• Option to not show URL at the bottom on mouse hover
• Major issue with character rendering
• Double-click drag select breaks on empty lines
• Right clicking while context menu is open closes both context menus
• Navigation on the nav/numpad layer on a Neo2 keyboard layout does not work
• Ctrl modifier is not forwarded to zellij
• 'Close All Terminals' dialogue isn't shown and focused
• alt+arrow-left and alt+arrow-right key-presses are not sent to a program
• Ctrl+click-to-open for file paths doesn't work with the default permissions specified in the Flatpak manifest
• About Kwi should attribute Ghostty as a library
• Allow Alt+n to pass through when there's only one tab
• Ctrl+Q is closing the terminal, even when not set the as the keybind in settings
• Search runs every time when switching tabs

This is not all! Alongside your reports, regular development of Kwi proceeds at pace, and many of the largest items in this week's changelog happened outside the ticket process.

Important Changes This Week:

• Terminal:
  • Hover decorations for links
  • Improvements to geometric and powerline symbols, both adding more of them and making them look more pleasing, and fixing a few bugs in double-line corners
  • Better support for placing complex underlines and other text decorations, including rendering underlines behind descenders
  • Improved appearance for text decorations
  • Not showing one blank terminal frame during window closing
• UI:
  • Revamping the search experience
    • A better location for the search bar
    • Colored feedback in the search field background for match/miss
    • A more stable, flicker-free search UI
  • Improved support for screen readers
  • Adding support for switching tabs by using the mouse wheel
  • Adding more keyboard shortcuts, aligning some shortcuts with familiar Konsole ones, and fixing other minor bugs in keyboard shortcut handling
  • Various other small UI refinements and consistency improvements, e.g. in the hamburger menu and other toolbar buttons
  • Coalescing terminal updates during window resize (this improves performance, but also happens to work around a newer bug on width/height-only resizes in newer bash versions)
  • Fixing a small visual glitch at the bottom of the tab bar when using fractional scaling
• Support for running each tab's processes in a systemd scope (unlike in Konsole, in a way that's free of races and works from within Flatpak)
• Making Kwi show up in GNOME's Notification Center
• Project bits:
  • Landing API documentation for Kwi's public QML API
  • Landing Kwi's test suite and enabling it on CI
  • Enabling additional quality checks on CI

Additionally, because Kwi is built on KDE's latest technologies, we sometimes get to find and fix bugs upstream of the project, or contribute new features needed by Kwi.

Upstream This Week - by Kwi, for everyone:

• We contributed support for theming the backgrounds of text fields to KDE's new work-in-progress Union theming system, used for visual feedback in our new search experience (Qt Quick MR, QWidget MR).
• We fixed icon placement at fractional scale in Kirigami apps (visible on our tab bar).

Road to Release

All of this progress, and yet Kwi remains officially unreleased! Hopefully not for much longer.

Kwi is presently undergoing KDE Review, a quality gate in the KDE community that graduates new projects from being experiments into official KDE projects. This is well underway; we have already completed the required checklist. Subsequently, KDE's awesome community of translators will start contributing translations to the project. The project will then also gain access to KDE's release infrastructure. An official, tagged and tarball'd Kwi v0.1 release is planned to follow soon after.

Together with the v0.1 release, will also send our Flatpak package out into the wider world via publication on Flathub.

In the weeks and months after, we plan to stay on top of your bug reports, as well as begin to address some feature requests.

Looking further out, our very important upstream the Ghostty project is gearing up to make independent releases of libghostty-vt, which serves as our terminal emulation backend. An ABI/API-stable v1.0 is planned within the next couple of months. This is also the timeline we roughly have in mind for a Kwi v1.0 release. There will be several interim releases to deliver improvements to you at a faster pace.

What's Next

Kwi development will continue to focus mainly on staying on top of early defect reports in the next few weeks. However, we do also have two bigger irons in the fire!

Making it easy to switch classic KDE apps to embed Kwi

Many users enjoy using a terminal not just via the traditional standalone apps like Kwi, but also via alternative UIs like Yakuake, or embedded into apps like Dolphin and Kate. All of these currently exclusively depend on Konsole, via a public plugin that is installed alongside it.

Indeed, How can I use this in Yakuake? was the most-often-heard feedback item we received this past week!

It arguably flew a bit under the radar in our announcement last week, but Kwi already provides a drop-in replacement for the Konsole plugin these apps could load instead. Which is the snag: They need a one-line code change to do so, or need the user to get crafty with a symlink, overriding Konsole's plugin manually.

That's not a great user experience at all. Landing an elegant mechanism in Plasma that lets users manage their preferred embedding terminal is therefore a high priority for Kwi. We have a plan there that we think can work, and will run it by the maintainers of the components involved soon.

Split Panes

The other high-in-demand missing feature in Kwi is that it currently does not yet have any support for split panes. We're happy to announce that we do plan to support them!

However, we want to take our time to get it right, and ultimately offer the pragmatic mix of familiar functionality, KDE HIG-adherence and state of the art in this space that we want Kwi to be generally known for. Rest assured, Kwi will gain this functionality before v1.0.

Thank you for reading, and see you in a week!

06 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

Over 180 individual applications 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:

• akonadi: Do not crash with a unknown tracer (Commit, fixes bug #528012)
• audiocd-kio: Don't indicate unsaved changes after reset/apply (Commit, fixes bug #502029)
• krfb: Fix VNC listener startup for desktop sharing (Commit, fixes bug #524610)

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
• 26.08.3 source info page
• 26.08.3 full changelog

05 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

Problem: KMail tags ≠ Thunderbird tags¶

Due to technical issues¹ at work, I had to temporarily switch to using Thunderbird - or rather, Betterbird - and since there is always way too many e-mail, I mark important and actionable messages as such to better find them afterwards.

A nasty surprise then happened, when I noticed that what I had marked as "Action item" in KMail, I could not find in Thunderbird. And on the flip-side, what I had marked as "To Do" or "Important" in Thunderbird/Betterbird, I could not find in KMail.

Needless to say, that … is … a … problem ! 😱

Quick analysis¶

So I went digging around² and luckily Akonadi Console does show both KMail's and Thunderbirds's tags.

But then it gets complicated …

To summarize, it seems:

• Thunderbird stores pre-set tags as IMAP flags in the $label% format, where % is a number from 1-5
• and Thunderbird stores user-added tags as IMAP flags the name you gave it, but you can change the name later on in its Advanced Settings editor
• KMail stores pre-set tags as IMAP Flags
• but KMail stores user-added tags as Akonadi tags instead

More messed up than what I hoped for, but we can at least work with something.

How to sync KMail's Important tags with Thunderbird¶

It already works out of the box.

KMail's Important message tag = IMAP \FLAGGED flag = Thunderbird's Starred / ⭐ message.

Yay!

How to sync KMail's Action Items with Thunderbird¶

There is a way to trick Thunderbird to interpret KMail's Action Item tag though.

All we need to do is trick it into using the same format in IMAP flag as KMail does for its Action Item tag.

1. In Thunderbird, add a new tag and call it $TODO.
2. Notice how mail that you previously tagged as Action Item in KMail now displays the $TODO tag in Thunderbird.
3. Go back to the Tags settings and rename the tag to Action Item (or whatever you want it to display)
4. (Optionally remove all the other Thunderbird tags, so they don't distract you or lead you astray. Especially Thunderbird's "Important" tag.)

Now whenever you mark an e-mail as Action Item in either mail client, it will show in both.

Custom tags …¶

… are currently probably cursed.

Do not rely on custom tags if you want to switch between different mail clients. Particularly the "Important" tag in Thunderbird is ugly trap to fall into - IMHO get rid of that one ASAP and just use the star instead.

• Thunderbird custom tags get stored as IMAP flags, so they sync and Akonadi does see them, but does not display them in KMail.
• KMail custom tags get stored as Akonadi tag UUID and (as far as I can tell) do not get pushed to the server.

It seems some changes to Akonadi/KMail side would need to be done to get that working.

I do not know what the logic is behind having a seemingly arbitrary⁴ selection of pre-set tags in KMail stored as IMAP flags, but every custom tag gets stored as an Akonadi tag.

Maybe the idea was to use the same generic tags in e-mail, calendar, contacts etc. … but then, for some reason, Akonadi tags are not shown by Baloo⁵ and vice-versa. 🤷

I would love to make use of custom tags more, especially in combination with filters. But at this point, I would really first like to understand why they work the way they do and will they be fixed/changed …

hook out → I hope this helps someone :)

04 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

Here comes Kaidan 0.17.0! This release allows to report spam and retract messages. In addition, it automatically reconnects based on your internet connection. As always, it includes several smaller improvements and fixes.

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

Spam Reports

Spam and abusive messages can be reported now. You can either report the sender or specific messages. The sender is automatically blocked in either case. The spam or abuse is reported to your XMPP provider. Your XMPP Provider is allowed to forward the report to the sender's XMPP provider or external services such as blocklist providers.

That way, a community-based spam protection can evolve. You flag spam for other people and their reports protect you from receiving spam.

To report a sender of spam or abusive messages, you can do that via the details dialog.

To report a specific message, there is a context menu entry for it.

Once you pressed the context menu entry, a dialog is opened to send the report.

Message Retraction

Since Kaidan 0.10 it is capable of removing messages locally (i.e., from your device). It is now also able to retract own messages resulting in removing them globally (i.e., from your device and all devices that received it).

You can even retract a message while not being connected. Kaidan retracts the message automatically once you are connected again. To keep it simple, removing a message globally is the default and performed via the context menu entry Remove. If that is not possible, e.g., because the message is too old, it can still be removed locally via the context menu entry Remove from Kaidan.

Note: If you retract a message, Kaidan instructs all of your and your contacts' devices to remove that message too. A device receiving such a request can deny or simply not support it. Thus, it is possible that a message you retracted is not removed from all devices that received the request.

Automatic Reconnecting

In Kaidan, you can enable or disable accounts. If an account is disabled, it stays offline. If it is enabled, it automatically tries to connect to your XMPP provider. In case of connection problems, Kaidan displays an error message. But it was not able to automatically try to reconnect after recovering from them.

The user had to manually disable and enable the account again. Kaidan is now able to detect the connection's status and reconnect on its own once the connection is reestablished. You do not need to take care of being connected anymore. Instead, you can focus on chatting! In combination with Kaidan's support for composing messages while being offline, messages are sent in the background as soon as you are connected again.

Changelog

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

Features:

• Go back to chat list to forward message and keep it open on narrow window (@melvo)
• Add efficient retrieval of latest chat list from server (@lnj)
• Add support for reporting spam/abusive senders/messages (XEP-0377: Blocking Command Reports) (@lnj, @melvo)
• Mark button for filtering chats while filtering is active (@melvo)
• Add support for retracting messages (XEP-0424: Message Retraction) (@lnj, @melvo)
• Automatically reconnect to server based on network changes (@lnj)
• Clear all ongoing actions of the message input field on pressing Escape button (@melvo)
• Ensure that current default input device is always used for recording (@melvo, @lnj)
• Hide button for recording voice messages if no input device is available (@melvo)
• Inform user about problems with voice message recording (@melvo)
• Delete recorded temporary file on error occurring while recording (@lnj)

Bugfixes:

• Fix opening chat with existing contact on attempt to add that contact (@melvo)
• Fix focusing message input field after opening chat or pressing on opened chat again (@melvo)
• Fix hiding password if corresponding setting is enabled (@melvo)
• Fix displaying duplicated blocked chat addresses (@lnj)
• Fix duplicated notifications for blocking/unblocking chat addresses (@lnj)
• Fix reactions to own messages (@lnj)
• Fix encrypting non-pending read markers (@melvo)
• Fix showing hints for invalid field input (@melvo)
• Fix wrapping long date sections in chat (@melvo)
• Fix only removing message reactions of removed chat instead of reactions of all chats of account (@lnj)
• Fix sending pending data on reconnection to servers without media sharing support (@lnj)
• Fix cut off details in media viewer (@melvo)
• Fix playing after positioning slider while media is paused in media viewer (@melvo)
• Fix resetting draft message on switching chats (@melvo)
• Fix width of voice messages (@melvo)
• Fix thumbnail generation with faulty plugin (@melvo)
• Fix size of media overview's tab bar items (@melvo)
• Fix thumbnails flickering in media overview while window is resized (@melvo)
• Fix encryption initialization for groups and disabled accounts (@melvo)
• Fix changing encryption of notes chats (@melvo)
• Fix displaying account name initials for notes chats (@melvo)
• Fix hanging account migration (@lnj)
• Fix replacing XMPP URI with its chat address for contact addition and group joining (@lnj, @melvo)

Notes:

• Kaidan requires QXmpp 1.17.1 now

Download

• Source code (.tar.xz) (sig signed with 04EFAD0F7A4D9724)
• Linux (Flatpak on Flathub)

Or install Kaidan for your distribution:

04 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

So... another few days working on Oxygen's symbolic icons. 607 commits between November 1 and 4: drawings, revisions, size variants and cleanup. Not 607 new icons... some of these little things need quite a few visits

And then there are the names.

Working through KDE's icon collection, I keep stopping to ask: what is this actually supposed to do? Capitals, underscores, hyphens, application names at either end... sometimes finding the meaning takes longer than drawing the icon.

My proposal is to make things a little more predictable: lowercase words separated by hyphens, descriptive shared names, and an application prefix when something really is application-specific.

• Info-amarok → amarok-info
• CVnamespace → code-namespace
• action-albumfolder-importdir2 → digikam-import-album-folder

I'm recording these suggestions in the icon inventory spreadsheet, alongside notes about meaning and usage. Applications still request the old names, so adopting replacements would need coordination and compatibility aliases.

Only a partial fix. But hopefully the next person gets a slightly smaller guessing game.

Anyway... back to drawing very small things

04 Nov 2026 8:18pm GMT

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.7.6.

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

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

View full changelog

03 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

Fedora 45 is now available ! 🎉 So let's see what this new release for the Fedora Atomic Desktops variants includes for Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic, Budgie Atomic and COSMIC Atomic.

Note: You can also read this post on the Fedora Magazine.

Changes for all Atomic Desktops

Completed the migration to the new Fedora forge

Everything related to the Atomic Desktops now resides in the atomic-desktops organization.

The only remaining repo on GitLab.com/fedora is the one used to build the unofficial bootable container images (gitlab.com/fedora/ostree/ci-test). The migration of this repo is planned as well.

Anaconda Web UI

The Atomic Desktops installer ISOs now use the new Anaconda WebUI. This follows the same change that occured for Fedora Workstation 42 and Fedora 43 Spins.

This also enables remote installation of a system using a Web browser on another machine over HTTPS.

See the Fedora Change pages for the switch to the WebUI and for Web based remote installations.

Installer images (ISO) and disk images built by Image Builder

The installer images (ISO) are now built by Image Builder. While there should not be any immediate visible changes, this will help us move to the bootable container images in the future.

This also enables us to offer pre-installed disk images for Silverblue and Kinoite. Those images are currently in preview and only those variants are covered for now. They are the only ones with a first boot experience from a disk image.

See the Fedora Change page for further information.

General Fedora changes worth noting

Those changes are part of the general set of changes that come with Fedora 45 and that are worth noting for Atomic Desktops users:

• Podman 6.0 & 6.1: The latest version of the container management tool. See the blog posts:
  • Introducing Podman v6.0.0
  • Podman 6 Configuration File Changes
  • Podman 6.1.0: Volume Renaming, Machine Restarts, and a Long List of Bug Fixes
  • Support for slirp4netns and the BoltDB backend have been removed.
• oo7 Secrets Service Provider: New secrets backend, enabled for all variants at the exception of Kinoite.
• DRM Panic Frontend: An easier way to report kernel crashes using a web interface. Hopefully you will never see it!

What's new in Silverblue

Fedora Silverblue comes with the latest GNOME 51 release.

For more details about the changes alongside GNOME 51, see What's new in Fedora Workstation 45 on the Fedora Magazine.

What's new in Kinoite

Fedora Kinoite ships with Plasma 6.7, Frameworks 6.31 and Gear 26.08.

Plasma 6.8 is expected to land right after the release.

See also What's new in Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop 45 on the Fedora Magazine.

What's new in Sway Atomic

Fedora Sway Atomic comes with the latest 1.12 Sway release.

What's new in Budgie Atomic

Fedora Budgie Atomic comes with the brand new version 10.10.3 of Budgie Desktop: New Favorites in Budgie Menu, re-introduced Keyboard applet with Wayland support, massive improvements to our desktop view, primary monitor selection, and more!

What's new in COSMIC Atomic

Fedora COSMIC Atomic comes with the 1.10.0 release of the COSMIC desktop.

Universal Blue, Bluefin, Bazzite, Aurora and secureblue

Our friends in the Universal Blue project (Bazzite, Bluefin, Aurora) have prepared the update to Fedora 45. Look for upcoming announcements in their Discourse.

As always, I heavily recommend checking them out, especially if you feel like some things are missing from the Fedora Atomic Desktops and you depend on them (NVIDIA drivers, extra media codec, out of tree kernel drivers, etc.).

If you are interested in more security focused variants, I recommend taking a look at the secureblue project.

What's next

Roadmap to Bootable Containers and bootc / CoreOS / Atomic unification

A lot of work is happening to make the transition to Bootable Containers as smooth as possible for our existing users. You can look at the roadmap for this transition at atomic-desktops#26.

Most of the progress in this release cycle was (again) focused on getting our bootable container images ready for general consumption in Fedora. A part of this work is being able to build them reliably in the Fedora Infra.

The people involved in the bootc, CoreOS and other Atomic variants are working on this effort as part of the new Atomic SIG. See atomic#137 and the project board.

Making it easier to derive images into Fedora Remix images

Work is in progress to make it easier to create derived container images from the Fedora Atomic Desktops images, notably in order to comply with the logo and branding policy.

Once this is ready, we may start publishing "Fedora Remix" branded container images of the Fedora Atomic Desktops. Those images would not include official Fedora branding and would thus be better suited for projects that want to layer their changes on top.

See atomic-desktops#125 and atomic-desktops#132.

Helping us with a few nasty bugs

If you are interested in contributing to Fedora Atomic Desktops, here are some bugs that we will have to fix in the short term. We would greatly appreciate help with:

• Fixing root mount options (atomic-desktops#72): This is a long standing and mostly invisible bug that impacts performance.

• Moving away from nss-altfiles (atomic-desktops#108): This is another long standing source of issues that new users regularly face.

Where to reach us

We are looking for contributors to help us make the Fedora Atomic Desktops the best experience for Fedora users.

• Atomic Desktops SIG: Organization on Fedora's Forge, #atomic-desktops:fedoraproject.org
• Silverblue: Workstation Working Group, #silverblue:fedoraproject.org
• Kinoite: KDE SIG, #kinoite:fedoraproject.org
• Sway Atomic: Sway SIG, #sway:fedoraproject.org
• Budgie Atomic: Budgie SIG, #budgie:fedoraproject.org
• COSMIC Atomic: COSMIC SIG, #cosmic:fedoraproject.org

02 Nov 2026 11:00pm GMT

After some cleanup and refactor, I've published the code of the KDE builder dashboard that I wrote about some days ago to invent.kde.org/ivan/kde-builder-dashboard.

I tweaked the look a bit. Failed projects are now on the top, and missing optional dependencies only take 33% of the screen.

This is what it looks like now with the breeze-dark theme (yes, for some reason, I made it themable):

To run it, just pipe the kde-builder output to it:

kde-builder --whatever-flags-you-want | kde-builder-dashboard.py

02 Nov 2026 9:59pm GMT

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

October was another infrastructure-heavy month for the project. A major initiative involved migrating the OS image storage and updating system to work with KDE's new S3-based file storage server. Another consisted of moving KDE Linux's OpenQA system to a dedicated server on KDE infrastructure, and off of Harald Sitter's personal server.

This very large amount of work was done by Bhushan Shah, Sky Poincet, Harald Sitter, and Ben Cooksley, so thanks to them!

It should all be pretty transparent, but if you find yourself unable to update with a "Protocol error" message, see the recovery instructions here.

Some other improvements made it in as well:

Navya Sai Sadi added a basic slideshow to the installer:

Jordan Brough fixed a bug that garbled the text of the keyboard layout indicator on the full disk encryption unlocking screen.

Harald Sitter made Info Center show the active edition (for example, "testing"):

Tabitha Moon enabled the ntsync kernel module by default, which improves performance in games played through Wine and Proton.

Hadi Chokr added a bunch of linting and validation checks, ensuring that future contributions are checked for common mistakes, errors, and typos.

Nate Graham added wayland-protocols to the base image, removing a barrier to compiling some KDE projects out of the box.

How you can help

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

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

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

01 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

I've started work on a new KDE application. It's called Kwi (pronounced kwee).

Kwi is designed to provide users of KDE Plasma and other free desktops with a modern and fast terminal, built on a robust tech stack and following the latest KDE HIG and UI conventions.

Here's a screenshot:

In some sense, the product vision for Kwi is to be kind of unexciting: Just what you want and expect out of a KDE Plasma terminal. Of course, given the powerful nature users generally expect from KDE software, this does not make the project lacking in ambition. :-)

To achieve things, Kwi builds on libghostty-vt from the excellent Ghostty project and familiar, mature KDE Frameworks such as KPty. It has a very speedy GPU-accelerated (Vulkan or OpenGL) renderer powered by the Qt Scene Graph. Its user interface is built with the latest and greatest by Kirigami, making it blend in very well among more recent KDE applications and the Plasma desktop.

In keeping with the theme, Kwi's icon/logo is a cute little terminal ghost. This is also how it came to bear its name: kwisin, or more typically gwisin, is a romanized form of 귀신 - Korean for ghost. It's pronounced a little bit like kwee-shin.

Things Kwi has to offer

Compared to the venerable and mature Konsole, Kwi is young and new. At the moment it offers a more streamlined feature set than Konsole, carefully realized using KDE's latest HIG patterns. The way forward will be to build on this slowly and carefully, using everything we've learned as a community about running mature design processes over the last decade or so (hello, VDG!). It's a chance to canvass the scene, take stock of how other terminals implement more recent innovations in this space, and compete with a KDE spin on things.

Konsole is very intertwined with the older of the two user interface tech stacks in Qt, QWidget. QWidget typically renders using the CPU, and so does Konsole. Newer KDE software (including Plasma itself) typically uses Qt Quick and benefits from GPU acceleration via Vulkan or OpenGL instead. This is what Kwi does as well. For certain terminal applications the performance gain (3x-35x faster than Konsole depending on what's being benchmarked) can make an actual big difference in the user experience, but generally it should also help reduce battery usage.

Kwi is built on libghostty-vt, a project that describes itself as an ecosystem play - provide a headless lib that takes care of all the gnarly terminal parsing and state, enable downstream projects and become sort of a rising tide that lifts all boats. It's starting to really deliver on this promise lately, outpacing other terminal implementations on support for modern TUI features and not hoarding all this good only for itself. While the library will only make an ABI/API stable v1.0 promise at some point in the next 4-6 months, it's already slowly being adopted by big and popular projects, including Neovim, Ghostel and many more. Here's a list.

Kwi marries the library to the KDE/Qt tech stack, which allows the project to focus mostly on desktop integration and rendering performance, two areas where KDE's software stack is generally second to none. The combination of the two offers some improvements over Konsole already, for example:

• General
  • UI lift-up to the latest KDE HIG
  • Automatic sync to the system color scheme
  • 3x-35x faster overall performance, depending on the benchmark
    • E.g. 870 fps in DOOM-fire-zig on a test system, vs. 23 fps in Konsole
• Rendering
  • GPU-accelerated rendering via Vulkan or OpenGL
  • Better support for using the KDE Plasma system color scheme, including live changes
  • Improved support for correct handling of Wayland fractional scaling
  • Improved terminal text rendering
    • Improved rendering of text decorations (e.g. z-sorting for complex underline styles)
    • Improved support for ligatures, especially when they interact with coloration and selection
    • Support for mode-2027 grapheme widths, Nerd Font icon scaling, etc.
    • Improved support for Powerline and geometry symbols
    • Support for Unicode placeholder images
• TUI app features, desktop integrations for terminal features, etc.
  • Improved accessibility in the terminal
    • Much improved text extraction for screen readers
    • Better mouse/hitscan/query support for screen readers
    • Better support for accessing actions from accessibility tools
  • Support for CSI 996/mode 2031 color scheme queries and updates
  • Improved, more complete support for modern TUI protocols
    • More complete, significantly faster support for the Kitty image protocol
      • Support for parent-relative image placement
    • Support for the Kitty animation protocol
    • Support for the Kitty mouse cursor shape protocol
    • Support for the Kitty/OSC 5522 and OSC 1337 clipboard protocols
    • More complete support for the OSC 9;4 progress protocol, including error and indeterminate states, etc.
    • Improved support for the Kitty keyboard protocol
• Architecture
  • Support for embedding into Qt Quick/Kirigami apps
  • More fine-grained threading architecture, also improving performance
  • Additional optimizations for running efficiently when containerized (e.g. as a Flatpak)

And many more, deeper down in the weeds.

Why make this, continued - a little bit about architecture

Why make this? First of all, to deliver the marked advantages detailed above! But there are also a few deeper motivations at play.

There's a gap we currently have in our developer offerings: Konsole, being strongly tied into the older QWidget tech stack, offers an embeddable component used in various QWidget-based KDE apps, for example Dolphin, Kate and Yakuake (the Kwi project offers a drop-in replacement solution for these apps). It doesn't offer anything similar to KDE apps written in Qt Quick/Kirigami, however, nor can it easily. This is a (minor) factor increasing the friction to move these KDE apps to the new tech stack. It also leaves new Qt Quick/Kirigami apps without a well-realized KDE terminal component to use.

Kwi installs a public Qt Quick/QML module that can be imported and used by other KDE apps, closing this gap.

An aside to this is an architectural improvement over Konsole: Anyone who's ever made an app using the Konsole KPart component (I made and maintained the KDE 4 version of Yakuake for many years) knows that the Konsole main application famously isn't a consumer of its own KPart. This leads to behavioral differences and some odd limitations between Konsole and alternative UIs like Yakuake. It's also a big reason why Konsole has very complex and sometimes confusing settings UI, with options placed seemingly at random in either a primary Settings dialog or within an Edit Current Profile dialog - it's because only the latter can be opened from within apps hosting the KPart. This is addressed in Kwi as well: The Kwi application is built around the same public QML module it offers for use by others. The settings accessible from the KPart are the same as from the application.

The improvements list in the earlier section also documents a pattern: In principle, Konsole is well-maintained and has also kept pace with modern terminal features. Often, however, the implementations of newer features are neither complete nor thorough, due to the high amount of effort involved in making changes to the old codebase and the highly terminal-specific expertise required. For example, Konsole does have support for Kitty images, but in practice it's just not fast or complete enough to be very useful, usually resulting in odd placement or low-res image display. The Kwi/libghostty split could be just the right one to pool and access the right resources where they are available, and increase velocity for the terminal ecosystem overall.

Future Outlook

There are a few more ideas further away that involve Kwi as a technology in some fashion.

Linux distributions are currently moving away from the in-kernel virtual terminal to better userspace solutions, generally Kmscon. This is overall a good thing, but from a KDE perspective, still leaves some potential for further seamless product integration on the table.

Kwi will allow us to experiment with building a Kmscon alternative built on the KDE tech stack, offering for the first time a VT with full accessibility and IME support and behavioral parity for the complete Linux user interface. Only time will tell if this works out, though, as it has been in no way attempted just yet!

Another challenge the project will have to work on is a more seamless transition path for Konsole users. Kwi already supports Konsole color scheme files. An open problem, though, is that QWidget-based apps embedding the Konsole KPart need a one-line code change to request the Kwi KPart instead. There an elegant solution needs to be found to express a user preference, ideally somewhere central.

Current Status & How To Try Kwi

Kwi is well underway and has seen limited testing by a small circle of friends, but it's also so very hot off the presses there's not even a tagged v0.1.0 yet. As such, please greatly temper your expectations and expect obvious and immediate bugs :-). It is in no way a match for the 29 years of continuous development work on Konsole, used by millions every day.

Please also don't mistake Kwi as some kind of announcement of the future KDE direction. For now, Kwi is an experiment and a proposal, only promising to develop an application you may choose to, and will hopefully like to, use. It's an option. The rest is a conversation to be had, and only time will tell.

That said, I greatly appreciate your help and feedback. If you find a bug, you can file it on KDE's Bugzilla, against the kwi application.

If you would like to take Kwi for a spin today, check out its code repository on KDE Invent.

Building Kwi can be difficult today, as it has very fresh dependencies that are likely still on their way into your distro/OS of choice at the moment. Thankfully, the KDE Invent CI/CD is also producing Flatpak builds and keeps a Flatpak repo of nightly builds you can install. Both are linked from the repo README. (Be aware, however, that also the Flatpak runtime can provide too-old versions of things for a while still, in particular affecting Union theming at the moment. Update: Nate has already ninja-fixed this, many thanks!)

On to lots of work ahead!

01 Nov 2026 12:00am GMT

This is a long one, because 1) there was a lot that we discussed at Akademy, and 2) since many people are not aware of Activities, I wanted to provide some more context, so people can understand better.

Overwhelming interest¶

That I think Activities are cool should come as no surprise.

What was surprising though was just how much interest in Activities turns out there is the community:

• at the Activity BoF, we were about 30 people and it was a very constructive meeting
• the video recording (PeerTube, YouTube) of my Activities BoF lightning talk has already had more than 1.200 views - which I find just utterly wild
• completely independent from each other, apart from mine there were two other talks at Akademy that touched upon Activities and how they can be a foundation for cool advanced stuff - in the BoF we have taken some inspiration from them

This is all to say: it is the right time for Activities to finally shine!

Call for help¶

As I mentioned at the Tuesday BoF Wrap-Up, we unearthed a lot of (previously hidden) interest in Activities, but - as is often the case - much fewer people have the skills and time to help develop them.

So if anything written below tickles your interest, you are very welcome to join in!

The first point of entry is the #kactivities:kde.org Matrix channel.

What are Activities (my desks analogy)¶

In the lightning talk I used a desk analogy to explain how I understand Activities. I will summarize that here, but will not go into technical details of how Activities work.¹

Essentially, I consider virtual desktops and Activites as complementary or even orthogonal to each other.²

I treat virtual desktops as real estate - analogous to extending the size of my physical desk. So I can fit more tools on it to get something done. So when I am moving a window from one virtual desktop to another, it is merely (re-)positioning my tools and resources around on the desk.³

To continue with this analogy, I understand Activities as separate, specialized desks.⁴ Like you would not chop onions at your office desk and would not do woodwork on your kitchen counter, it makes sense to separate the tools and activity on your computer by context too. When you go get your study book, notepad and writing utensils, you also do not go browse for them through your kitchen cupboards and fridge, game collection or garden toolshed, but instead go straight to your study room where what you need is on the desk or in its drawers. This context separation and switching is what Activities enable on the computer desktop.

Context is king¶

One of the first things did was to gather some information what people use Activities for and how.

Very quickly a common theme emerged: almost everyone saw Activities as providing context to the task at hand.

In some cases those contexts were for longer-standing activities (e.g. communication, organisation, work, study, presentations, gaming); in other cases those contexts were used for more project-based activities (e.g. writing a long document/book, work for client X, work for client Y, programming project A, programming project B, vacation planning, …).

To help those, who have not had much experience with Activites yet, better understand, these are all things that are unique to an Activity and are useful to provide context:

• the Activity name, icon, wallpaper and layout of icons/plasmoids can jog your visual memory
• having a toolkit specific for that task by setting custom plasmoids and by associating/pinning individual programs, files and folders to that Activity makes it easy to reach the right resources
• Plasma stores file and program use history per Activity⁵ and that serves two purposes here - 1) by looking at the history and most used sections in KickOff you can more easily remember what you were working on; and at the same time 2) having the history only be restricted to this Activity, you can stay focused better because when searching for something in e.g. your programming Activity, you will not be shown your gaming or comic book history

Presentation of Activities to new users¶

A good start is that we already mention and quickly explain Activities in the Welcome dialogue. (I apologize that in my lighting talk I forgot that fact.)

But it would be even better if we could show that power and flexibility by shipping Plasma with a handful of preset Activities - for example, to get the discussion going:

• Main/default - as it is now
• Presentation - an activity that is intended just for making and presenting slides and demos, with the "automatic suspend computer" and "automatically turn off screen" options off⁶
• Gaming - with gaming-related plasmoids and some games associated with that Activity, so they show up first on KickOff

The Presentation Activity is particularly one that several BoF participants thought was a great idea to avoid oversharing when presenting talks/slides or demos. Having a clean place, where the desktop, browser and their history is showing only presentation-relevant information would have saved many from awkward situations.

With the Gaming Activity we could demonstrate how you can be playful with plasmoids in one Activity, without affecting the other, more serious Activities, like Presentation.

Main/default Activity - avoid or embrace?¶

That brings us also to a problem many of us admitted to be guilty of - there always ends up this one Activity that you default to, when you are not working on any specific project.

It looks like many of us felt this as a failure (of either us or the system) as this main/default/chaos/dump Activity would typically be the gateway to procrastinating, as starting a new Activity would be just a little too much work. Also, if everything was associated with the main Activity, it lost its quality as context.

But perhaps a coming back to the default Activity should not be seen as a failure, but instead as a (ever new) starting point. To borrow the rooms analogy, instead of treating it as a hoarder's out-of-hand den, perhaps we should treat it as a hallway, where you choose where you go next.

This needs some serious thought and discussion on how to tackle that. But it seems clear there is room for improvement and that it is possible to fix it.

We are exploring this very idea right now - see the Workflow idea below. This could be a game changer!

Low-hanging fruit¶

Some things seem like they might be relatively easy to implement. Activities are already hiding a lot of untapped power, remember?

These things below might be an interesting single-person contribution, if anyone is looking for a small thing to dive into.⁷

Mentioning Activities in "find window" in KRunner/KickOff¶

Currently when you are searching for a window with KRunner, it will very helpfully tell you which virtual desktop the window is on.

Unfortunately, it will equally very unhelpfully omit to tell you on which Activity it is. Which is extra confusing if you have several windows of the same app in different Activities - like Kate sessions or browser profiles.

It would help a lot if instead of just saying "Activate window on Desktop 4" it would say "Activate window on Desktop 4 in Writing activity".

Recently and commonly used files and apps (per Activity)¶

As mentioned, Plasma already stores the history of which apps and files were opened separated by Activity.

You can already access this information through Dolphin, if you type/select recentlyused:/ in the location bar⁸. As you can see below, in the "Activities" Activity, that I recently made for this project, it is very useful already for quick access.

Even if we look at my very old "FLA" Activity, the history there remains very useful and jogged my memory about where I can find more information about not just the latest draft, but presentations and other documents I accessed while analyzing different options.

KickOff (and other launchers) show even more historic information. Confusingly though, the historic information lies under the "Places" tab in KickOff.

In addition to files and folders, here we can also see application history.

Not only does it show recently used files and apps, but often often used ones too! For some this has the potential to replace (or enhance) the favourite/pinned apps in the menu.

Kai Uwe Broulik was so cool that he already implemented an option for the users to at least set the "Places" tab as the default tab in KickOff while he was sitting in the BoF! (I do not have the link to said merge request at hand, if I get it I will post it here.)

Still, it would be great if we made this information easier to access by the user and make it more useful. If you have any ideas, there is a lot of potential here, it seems.

Plasmoid to show history¶

But, surely, we can do more than that!

For inspiration, we can look at the timeline demo by Scott Jenson.

Per-Activity information we can already gather:

• file/folder history - as seen in the above screenshots
• application launch history - I do not know the details, but assume Plasma records timestamps for it too
• browser history - not out of the box, but you can use the Activity-aware Firefox wrapper together with the Plasma Browser Integration (and you enable access to browser history in its option)

In addition to that, it could be very useful to also add see a ChangeLog/journal of what you did in that Activity. (See the Workflow idea below.)

Perhaps as a start, as a testing ground to see if this is useful to users, someone can make a simple plasmoid to show a timeline and put all of the above info in it … and then we start using it and gather feedback whether what could be improved (or if it is a terrible idea).

As Scott Jenson said, it is up to the FOSS desktops to innovate and it seems it is the right time to do just that and play around a bit (to paraphrase Nuno Pinheiro).

Context-aware clipboard / scrapbook (i.e. per Activity)¶

Another thing from Scott Jenson's talk that seems like a very powerful idea, and relatively easy to develop in Plasma is the clipboard/scrapbook demo - but with the slight change of doing it per-Activity instead of per-Document.

There are two reasons for this modification: 1) as we already have Activities it should be much easier to set it up that way instead of writing a new way to associate clipboard entries to files/windows/applications, and 2) it makes a lot more sense to store all the project's information per Activity - history, plasmoids, favourite/pinned files and applications and now the clipboard/scrapbook.

The obvious solution would be to modify Klipper to support Activities in some way.

And the obvious caveat would be what happens when you want to copy something in one Activity to bring it to another? So a 100% separation between Activities may not be the best option.

Maybe we should introduce an additional separate part of Klipper that is a per-Activity scrapbook and does not automatically get cleared. Then, the user could have the scrapbook-view of the Klipper plasmoid on the desktop (or in a panel⁹) for easy access.

This is just brainstorming, to get ideas going and test things out.

Again, Kai Uwe Broulik was already super-fast in creating a merge request in Qrca that goes a bit in this direction.

Time tracking¶

"Funnily" enough, at the BoF someone suggested that it would be very useful for them to track the time spent in an Activity. Their use case was that they have a separate Activity for each paid project they do for a client, and knowing how much time they spent on a project this way would make things much easier. I say "funnily", because that functionality got removed not too long ago under the assumption that no-body uses it 😅

At least we know it is not hard to do, as it was done before. And Ivan Čukić said it was trivial to implement - sounds like a great small first project 😉

Here are some use cases for where this could be useful:

• count time spent in the Activity - e.g. to track work, paid projects (and offer different time statistics - per day/week/month/total)
• limit maximum time - e.g. to limit time for playing games, work¹⁰, doing responsive tasks like processing e-mail and work chat
• enforce minimum use - e.g. too force you to stay in the studying or writing mode, before being able to switch to a different Activity (and ideally prevent you from accessing stuff that's just a distraction)

Do not disturb mode¶

It would be great if we could trigger the "Do Not Disturb" mode when starting a specific Activity.

This would be particularly useful for the Presentation Activity and any others where the user wants to concentrate on.

In the Activity settings, next to where the "do not suspend" and "do not turn off screen" options already lie, there is a great place to put it.

Another one that sounds like it would be a great first contribution to KDE.

The Workflow idea - the star of the show¶

While we were discussing all of the smaller and bigger things that we could do to make Activities better and compared how each of us understand and uses them, sharing papercuts and frustrations … an idea started crystallizing.

And I think we are on to something that could indeed be the next big step in how we use desktops.

Some friction that we all noticed with Activities is that they take time to set up - not much, but it adds up. What we need is a way to quickly start and quickly stop Activities.

So we started thinking what about if we flipped the Activity creation over and instead make it more like saving a file or a session. And that snowballed into the following use case:

1. you are working on something on your computer
2. you decide to do something else, but want to get back to that thing later on
3. you click "save Activity" and the dialog asks you to:
   • provide the name for what you were working on (and icon), so you can find it later on
   • optionally, provide the description of what this thing is you are working on (or motivational message), so you can remember better
   • optionally, write a note on what you did (changelog)
4. everything you were working on - the desktop setup (background, plasmoids, icons), files, application windows, scrapbook, etc. - gets shoved aside
5. with a quick prompt you select whether you want to continue an Activity you saved before, or start a new one (from a template or blank)
6. let us say, you decide to continue writing your thesis, that you have not touched since summer
7. you are greeted with your last description/note and the changelog to quickly remind you where you left of
8. a familiar desktop setup (backround, plasmoids, icons) gets you back in the mood, while scrolling through the history plasmoid's timeline and seeing your thesis scrapbook provide the necessary context to start working on it again; you immediately see the relevant files too, as they are top on the recent and commonly used list here (or you even "favourited them"); the right Kate session is already there too, and the notifications are automatically blocked … everything you need to continue your research, apart from a nice cup of tea
9. GOTO 1

As an analogy, one BoF participant called these "work snapshots".

To achieve this without (re-)introducing needless friction again, such a workflow needs to accommodate for:

• perpetual Activites - such as organizing, communication, general reading, time wasting, gaming, system tweaking, …
• project Activities that have a start and and end - writing your thesis or book, a research paper, a programming project, planning the next vacation, etc.
• single-use Activities - even shorter than projects, where you do not care about the history, you just want a clean slate to concentrate (perhaps from a template)
• fall-back Activity - the "hallway" from which you choose where to go next
• easy to create/modify Activity templates

What I described above is just the simple use case we collectively thought up during the BoF session. Shortly thereafter Andy Betts was amazing and started a more detailed design document in the KDE VDG. That is where you should go next, if this "Workflow idea" interests you.

There is still work to be done here and details to iron out, but this seems very achievable and it could turn out to be a killer feature of KDE Plasma.

More tricky ideas¶

As opposed to the above, I think⁷ that the below are some ideas that would need quite a bit more work added to get them working without breaking things elsewhere.

Activity-based app settings profiles¶

A common problem with Activities, and a reason for many to give up on them, is that unless a program has been specifically written to be Activity-aware, it can be a bit quirky and tricky to force it to work differently in several Activities.

To combat that, an idea was to use Activities as profiles/sandboxes for application settings. That would mean that if a program is not Activity-aware, its settings would get stored per Activity so it would essentially still act differently in different Activities. There is some ongoing work here already as part of a wider settings management system, but it is very early days.

If this works out, an interesting bonus would be that it might be possible to import/export settings or even sync whole Activities across different devices.

There are several complications to take into consideration though. Just to name a few that were mentioned at the BoF:

• How to handle single-instance apps (e.g. KMail, KOrganizer, most communication apps …) that do their damnest to make sure there is only one instance of this app running?
• Related to that, how to make sure that an application can be used with the same settings in different Activities, if the user wants that instead? And how to we present the two options to the user?
• How to detect if a program works nicely with Activities or if it needs settings sandboxing?

Luckily, there is already an example of how this can work (or at least similar enough) - Activity-aware Firefox]¹¹ creates a Firefox Profiles for each Plasma Activity to separate the tabs, history, settings between them. It works pretty well, but it has some caveats.

One participant presented a detailed use case on how they would like to use one Activity per client they consult. In each activity, they would like to have different Dolphin places/bookmarks, browser sessions/cookies (e.g. profile), recent files/history, projects/settings in the IDE, sticky notes/scratchpad, search settings in Baloo and separate MS Teams tenants.

Better context isolation (against AI)¶

Continuing with the sandboxing, the other talk that mentioned Activities (by Eva Brucherseifer and Jan Mühlig) was about a suggestion on how one could safely (and optionally) use AI on the desktop.

At the BoF we agreed that whatever we intend with Activities should work with no AI/LLM needed at all and that our scope is limited to Plasma and Activities.

I will still take this opportunity to point out a few things that I found interesting regarding that talk and even more so in the hallway discussions - and here I am not speaking for the BoF, but just sharing my personal thoughts¹²:

• I found it interesting and exciting that others at the same Akademy, completely separately, decided to talk about Activities as a foundation for work separation and project-focused workflows. This reassures me that the base idea of a better and more prominent Activities workflow is sound.
• LLM and AI agents are a thing. While no-one should be forced to use it, IMHO it is only time until we see wide-spread "AI agent as payload" malware - and with that not just voluntary, but also involuntary AI use.
• From what I heard in the hallway, the way things are right now, once you install an AI agent on any desktop - FOSS or closed-source - it basically gets complete access to do whatever the user can do on it. That is scary.
• Activities can be, and indeed seem like a good option, an integral part of setting guardrails around contexts, so an AI agent cannot access more than it is allowed to (within that Activity).

So, IMHO even if you do not subscribe to the workflow proposed by Eva and Jan, there is a lot of good points about hardening the desktop to make sure if an AI agent gains access to it, the damage to the privacy and security can be negated or at least contained.

Because this is a touchy subject, let me reiterate that this is out of scope of the Activities BoF and our current plans for making Activities easier to find and better to use.

… and now back to our regularly scheduled programme …

Better resource and session management with Activities¶

Resource management is also a topic, of course.

If this Activity-based Workflow takes off, we need to figure out how to manage resources on devices where a dozen - or even dozens! - of Activities are running at the same time.

Until a few versions ago, you were able to stop an Activity and later resume it. The idea was brilliant and I relied on it a lot in order to manage my cca. two dozen Activities. The problem was, that there were way so many edge case problems, you might as well look at a circle. So it got removed. (Some of us mourned, but it was the right decision.)

Still, if we run something like two dozen Activities and each of them has its own set of applications with different settings, as well as custom wallpapers and plasmoids - things add up.

An interesting idea that popped up during the BoF was that perhaps we could simply dedicate less resources to Activities that were not used in a while.

Luckily on Linux and other Unix-like systems we can tweak the "niceness" of processes. So we could make it that the longer an Activity has been inactive (i.e. not currently focused), the lower the nice and ionice values for the processes in it would get. And then at some point, we could even prompt the user if they want to close (and save the session of) an Activity that has been inactive for very long.

Especially the idea of closing of a session was something that we think is worth exploring even further. Even though the way Activities stopped/suspended before did not work really well, now that support for sessions in Wayland is progressing in Plasma, there is potential to do it right. From what I understand, the new xdg-session-management protocol would be key here (relevant news article).

Per-Activity sessions would greatly support the Activity-based Workflow.

Once you decide to do something else, when you end your current Activity, you could decide to either put it into background or stop it, so the resources it was using get released, (or delete it completely). If it runs in the background, it would become "nicer and nicer" in time. If it was stopped, the session would be saved to be later loaded up again.

Some further thoughts we gathered for future consideration on this topic:

• What should be the default when switching from an Activity? Some suggestions to consider:
  • Perpetual Activities, when unfocused, should not automatically ask to be stopped even after a long time. The user can manually stop them anyway.
  • Is there any reason to ask the user when an (e.g. project or single-use) Activity gets unfocused, what they want to do with that Activity? Or is is too much chatter/friction and we should simply leave it to the "niceness and propose close session"-algorithm and the user's direct control?
• On reboot/login how should Activities get loaded, by default? Some suggestions to consider:
  • Perpetual Activities should get automatically loaded.
  • There should be an option to set an Activity to only load if explicitly requested by the user (i.e. "do not ask on reboot/login" option).
  • For the rest of Activities the user should get presented as suggestions to load after reboot/logging in. Maybe this specific option is a bad idea and we should only auto-load Perpetual Activities and let the user load the rest as they decide what they want to do.

Varia¶

Unorganized notes¶

Some more notes from BoF participants that I do not have enough context (ha!) about to expand in more detail:

• private Activities (sandbox + Tor/proxy automatic setup)
• separate Activities in System Monitor / grouping resources
• premade templates
• power management in Activities - probably not going to happen, that was removed a few releases ago for a reason
• enable plugins in all subsequent sesisons for KDevelop/Kate
• more Activity support from apps / KDE Gear: Kate, Kaidan, KMail, …
• project overview in Activity
• Activities as profiles with data isolation
• switching between desktop layouts and themes
• similar to profile features on mobile phone / sub-users
• stopped using Activities because they did not stay on one project in an Activity, but got sidetracked all the time … and then forgot Activities exist
• better WM support when cycling through windows
• clarify difference with virtual desktops; often new users find about Activities, because they want to have a different wallpaper on each virtual desktop, and then they find a recommendation online that says to use Activities instead, so you can do that (but not what else are the differences)
• it should be easier to build your own plasmoid, or even your own Activity layout
• security and privacy options per Activity
• I do not use Activities, but rely on virtual desktops for context separation and on (X11) session management; switching between contexts needs to be "instant"; time tracking would be useful

The naming (non-)issue¶

Pretty early on in the discussion the naming issue arose. Because we were short on time and history has shown that this debate has no end, I decided to cut it short. To make up for that, let me explain myself here.

To get the obvious out of the way first: Yes, I agree "Activities" is not the best word to describe all that is possible with them, but I argue that that is fine.

When we think of a desktop environment, we think of windows, icons, menus and pointers - those are words we throw around every day, but have you ever thought how they bizarrely look nothing like their real-world physical counterparts¹³?

Imagine for a minute - and really try hard to imagine the following physical objects while you are looking at your actual physical desk¹⁴:

• you repurpose a printed paper, intended to put on a wall instead on your empty wooden desk to make it pretty
• then you put a bunch of religious art on said wall-decoration-covered desk
• when poking a piece of religious art with a rod, a window magically appears on the desk (without a wall to support it)
• oddly enough "opening" a window makes it appear - usually windows first have to exist, before you can open or close them
• again, oddly enough, "closing" the window, destroys the window
• through the window you see a bunch of text and a handful of buttons that are somehow stitched to whatever magic fabric is "in" the window (possibly the same invisible material as the wall holding the windows that you can freely move around and change the sizes of)
• poking the buttons with the rod (through the window) sometimes makes things that you see through the window change
• (all of this is still happening on your actual desk, keep that in mind)
• there are files and folders on the desk - that at least make sense
• you can put files into folders, but you cannot put folders into files (sic!)
• in order to open a file or folder you need to poke the piece of religious art, that represents it, with the rod, and then a new window appears ("opens") on your desk and you can see the inside of the folder through said window

Now tell me which drugs you were on if any of this made sense … and can I have some? 😅

And then even if we get the English naming just right, the question remains how that word can get translated into the 100+ languages of KDE.

Since Activities have existed since 2010 (and have their established translations), I think that it is fine to continue to use this name for them, as long as we explain and show in a better way what they actually are.

If an ideal name happens to drop into our collective laps, I agree we should take it into consideration, of course. But that is a much much lower priority than basically anything else in Activities.

What is Plasma anyway?¶

I recall a discussion with another participant that, just as me, has been a long-time heavy KDE user that I think is worth mentioning.

At an Akademy social event I claimed that KDE 3.5 with SuperKaramba was peak old/traditional desktop and that it would be a huge pity if we threw away all that massive innovation and work that went into the Plasma 4 rewrite, if we simply removed or hide all the weird cool stuff in order to make it look like a traditional desktop again. I argued that since no-one else is innovating, we would simply re-invent the KDE 3.5 with SuperKaramba again, just with better graphics.

And Jason, I think his name was¹⁵, reminded me why "Plasma" was called the way it is (I am paraphrasing):

Plasma is a neither a gas, nor a solid(, nor a liquid).

And similarly, KDE Plasma is a malleable thing full of potential. Panels, windows, widgets, etc. - they are all there for the user to define what they want them to be. A chat, for example, can be in a window or it can be in a widget. That widget can be on the desktop or in a panel and you can move it from one into the other.

Apparently that was super noticeable on netbooks, where Activities were a central part.

This is also part of the reason why quite a few things on Plasma are abstracted into Baloo, Akonadi, etc. - because the same thing can be used in several places at the same time, sharing a common (local) backend.

With all the pain that came with Plasma 4.0's instability, there was a great deal of innovation and flexibility - including Activities. And with ironing out the kinks and polishing, in time Plasma got more and more predictable, stable … and boring. And on one hand, that is great.

But, on the other hand, I think we should also continue KDE's mantra of "Simple by default, powerful when needed" and not shy away from its powerful components and building exciting, fun and useful stuff with it.

If you have not yet, I warmly recommend you watch the KDE Documentary and browse the KDE Timeline.

Wrapping up¶

That was a long read …

So to summarize the important parts:

• Activities are cool and we plan to improve them a lot
• what I wrote above are a bunch of ideas in different levels of maturity, but none are set in stone or with a dedicated developer
• we need help - if you are interested in any of the ideas above of Activities in general - join us on Matrix, Invent and the Activity Workflows issue

You can discuss this blog post and its ideas on its KDE Discuss forum topic.

hook out → I apologize that this report took way too long, but I had a lot on my plate … some of which I will blog about very soon

P.S. People at the BoF complained that I used Oxygen icons. I hope my switch to Buuf made them happier 🤣

31 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT