fidzu : KDE

Quite a few things have happened around the Android platform support for KDE applications in recent months, so high time for another update on that.

Qt 6.11

As already mentioned previously, we have updated the Qt version to 6.11. That has the unfortunate consequence of losing support for Android 8 and older. Due to that we also removed the ARM32 builds, as devices running Android 9 or higher are very likely capable of using ARM64 builds anyway, cutting down the CI cost by a third.

The previously often annoying interactions between input focus and the virtual keyboard seems to have improved somewhat with Qt 6.11. Changes in how the back key/gesture is handled however also caused a few regressions, like a double page pop in more deeply nested applications (Kirigami MR 2100).

SafeArea support

While the previous focus of dealing with "safe" screen areas (ie. parts of the application window not being covered by screen cutouts or system controls like the Android status and navigation bars) had been on not breaking horribly due to Android's changed default behavior we have meanwhile been working on polishing this to actually look decent.

• Fixed misplaced drawer handles (Kirigami MR 2102).
• Fixed NeoChat's chat bar being placed behind the bottom navigation bar (NeoChat MR 2893).
• Fixed a double bottom margin in NeoChat (Kirigami MR 2107).
• Fixed floating buttons in Itinerary getting misplaced (Kirigami MR 2105).
• Fixed Alligator global drawer expanding into the status bar (Alligator MR 172).
• Fixed runtime warnings in Tokodon when computing safe margins (Kirigami MR 2110).

If you spot places where this still doesn't work correctly, let us know in the #kde-android Matrix channel!

Notifications

There's also a number of improvements and extensions for notification handling:

• Fixed interactions with notification actions or the notification itself having no effect (MR 200).
• Implemented confirming inline replies (MR 202). This fixes the notification showing a spinner animation indefinitely after submitting an inline reply.
• Improved icon handling. We can now properly distinguish between what Android calls the "small" and "big" notification icons, a symbolic application icon and an image of e.g. a chat avatar. This will require small changes to applications to get the best result, in most cases providing a symbolic application icon should be enough already (MR 201).
• A new API for cross-platform notification configuration is in review (MR 203). This will also benefit Flatpak applications.

Safe JNI usage

Interaction between our C++ code and Android's Java platform APIs happens via the so-called Java Native Interface (JNI). That's a rather low-level C interface with little to no type safety and the need for error-prone handwritten arcane signature strings. Already back in the Qt 5 era I had therefore written a few helpers for a more type-safe use of this in KAndroidExtras.

Much of this functionality is meanwhile available in Qt 6 in a very similar fashion, with the JNI array support being the latest addition in Qt 6.9. Compared to raw JNI use this is already a massive improvement, see e.g. MR 204 making use of this in KNotifications. It avoids practically all hand-written JNI signatures as well as much of the manual type conversion.

One part is still missing though, type-safe wrappers so that function arguments and property types are checked at compile-time. That has been extracted and rebased on top of Qt's JNI code in KJniExtras now. It's only 10% of the code, with most of the complex template magic gone.

As a small downside we are unfortunately losing the ability to test JNI code on Linux with this, as the old approach provided a mock implementation when not building for Android.

Calendar access

With the type-safe JNI wrappers small enough now to be copied as a single header file, this finally unblocked the move of the Android platform calendar backend from Itinerary upstream to KCalendarCore (MR 242).

Together with the calendar runtime permission API already in Qt, this should make e.g. an "add to calendar" feature for Kongress or KTrip easy to add now.

File dialogs and remote files

An often reported issue against several of our applications is that they seemingly don't do anything when opening a file via the platform file dialog. This happens for files on a cloud share, which the Qt Quick file dialog silently discards due to not being local files, making this look like as if the user has canceled the dialog to the application. Therefore just nothing happens and no error message is shown either.

Interestingly enough, that problem also happens on KDE Plasma, where the native file dialog also can select remote files, it's just much less common there. But since we can tell the Plasma file dialog to only allow selecting local files, this one is easy to fix (CR 742273, available in Qt 6.12).

On Android we don't have that option, nor would that be really satisfying anyway, opening files from a cloud share is a very valid usecase. Therefore there's now also a proposed change to the Qt Quick file dialog to optionally allow selecting arbitrary URLs, similar to what its Qt Widgets counter-part already offers (CR 743681). This wont automatically fix the problem, but it would at least give applications a chance to do something about this.

Locale-aware sorting

Something fairly basic that Qt on Android so far didn't do properly (at least when not bundling it with multi-10MB worth of ICU libraries) was locale-aware sorting. When using English you might not notice that, but in many other languages this results in weird and confusing lists. In German for example the letter "Ä" gets basically treated like "A" for sorting, while so far it ended up after "Z" on Android.

There's now a proposed Qt patch (CR 741548) implementing a QCollator backend for Android using platform infrastructure. This uses Android's native ICU flavor when available and otherwise falls back to the less efficient and less featureful Java API.

Crash reporting

While we have automatic crash reporting on Linux since some time (see e.g. Harald's LAS talk for more details), crashes on Android were not handled at all by our applications so far.

Based on discussions at the Graz Sprint in April this has now changed, KCrash can now detect a previous crash when starting an application, and offers to submit an automatic crash report to KDE's Sentry instance.

Those reports have been very helpful on Linux already, providing very important information about issues and allowing to prioritize those with the most impact, but it's nevertheless crucial we don't submit anything without user consent.

The bulk of the implementation is in KCrash MR 101, a few changes are necessary for integrating this into applications as well though.

In your build.gradle, add sentry-android-core as a dependency:

dependencies {
...
implementation 'io.sentry:sentry-android-core:8.43.0'
}

In your AndroidManifest.xml, add a meta-data entry configuring the Sentry DSN for your application:

<application ...>
<meta-data android:name="io.sentry.dsn" android:value="https://<token>@crash-reports.kde.org/<app-id>"/>
</application>

And finally, remove the build system and preprocessor conditions excluding KCrash use on Android. Note that verifying this part is crucial, without KCrash you'll get the aggressive default behavior of Sentry, uploading without user consent.

Inhibition

Earlier this year KGuiAddons got a new API for inhibiting system actions such as locking the screen. The obvious usecase for this is a video player, but e.g. Itinerary uses this as well for ensuring your screen stays on while showing a barcode to be scanned at a ticket check.

Android platform support for this has also been added (MR 203), allowing the removal of corresponding code in applications.

Outlook

While all of that is good progress, things are likely about to change. Later this year Google is planning to roll out measures making it significantly harder to provide and install applications on Android.

For more information check out Keep Android Open, a campaign supported by the KDE e.V. among many other organizations.

Regardless of how this will eventually materialize, the direction is clear, Android isn't going to be a viable long-term platform for FOSS software, not even in its Google-free form. I have mostly considered it a stop-gap solution until Linux on the phone is ready anyway, so this is another reason to increase the effort into that direction.

13 Jun 2026 6:45am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the Plasma team put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.7 with another big push on bug fixing. It's looking really good for release next Tuesday!

As a result, some feature work and UI polishing started to trickle in for Plasma 6.8.

Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Plasma Browser Integration now supports the Flatpak version of Microsoft Edge. (Conley Dawson, KDE Bugzilla #521109)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.6

Window actions that involve the mouse wheel no longer respect your "natural scrolling" preference; we reasoned that in this situation, up should always mean up and down should always mean down. (Vlad Zahorodnii and David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #442789)

Plasma 6.7

If you authorize an app to be able to remote-control the system without asking for permission first (for example, a remote desktop app), when it does so, now Plasma shows a notification that it's happening. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #571)

When navigating by using the number pad keys to move the pointer, pressing multiple keys now moves the pointer in a direction halfway between them. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #486520)

KRunner-powered searches now suppress results from the "Global Shortcuts" provider when there are better results from other ones, which makes the search results more relevant for common searches. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #3710)

Changed the automatic day/night theme switcher to switch halfway between the start and end of dawn or dusk, rather than at the end. (Vlad Zahorodnii, Bugzilla #511973)

Added kde-shader-wallpaper to the list of allowed wallpaper plugins in Plasma Login Manager. (y4m y4m, plasma-login-manager MR #141)

Plasma 6.8

Improved Plasma's ability to detect dark GTK 2 themes and apply a matching icon theme, which should substantially reduce cases of illegible icons in old GTK 2 apps when using a dark color theme. (Luan Oliveira, kde-gtk-config MR #144)

The top edges of non-maximized Breeze-themed windows now have as much extra draggable area as the bottom and side edges already do. (Sergey Katunin, KDE Bugzilla #504225)

Made the portal-based permission dialogs more consistent in their presentation and wording. (Nate Graham, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #575)

Frameworks 6.28

You can now use the Meta key on its own to trigger KWin's Overview screen. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #518302)

Improved the alignment of thumbnail previews in open/save dialogs. (John Doe, frameworks-kio MR #2249)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed an issue that made KWin accidentally leak the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to child processes it launched, which would break the Bubblewrap sandboxing system when applied to those processes. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #521013)

Fixed a bug that could make Plasma crash when changing the monitor layout during the login process. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #510477)

Fixed an issue that could make the "Today" button on the Digital Clock widget's calendar popup highlight the wrong day when in a time zone later than UTC and the local time was before midnight in UTC time. (Fushan Wen, KDE Bugzilla #521114)

The feature that lets apps screencast without asking permission no longer requires the screen setup to be identical to what it was when the permission was granted. (David Redondo, KDE Bugzilla #519122)

SVG-based wallpapers are now able to fully participate in the dark/light wallpaper switching feature. (David W., KDE Bugzilla #519168)

Fixed a bug that prevented explanatory text showing up as expected in the generic "[app] wants to do [thing]" portal dialog. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #584)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a very odd issue that would break the Icons-Only Task Manager widget if you created a file named metadata.desktop right inside your home folder. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521247)

If you somehow manage to delete a multi-activity setup's active activity, Plasma now switches you to the next one instead of crashing and leaving you with a broken desktop. (Angel Parra, KDE Bugzilla #521124)

Fixed a case where Discover could crash while processing changes to distro packages. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1335)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when waking from sleep after monitors were added or removed during sleep. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521078)

Fixed a case where System Monitor would crash when quit while the column configuration dialog was open. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #491000)

Worked around an issue in GTK 4 that could make selected text in some GTK 4 apps become irritatingly de-selected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #517573)

Fixed a weird regression that could make the pointer inappropriately display the "app is launching" animation when minimizing windows using the Plastik window decoration style. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #516264)

Fixed a regression that made non-random wallpaper slideshows start over from the first one at every login, instead of remembering the last-seen wallpaper. (Fushan Wen, KDE Bugzilla #512559)

Fixed a regression that made System Monitor's Process Table view display unformatted data. (Arjen Hiemstra, libksysguard MR #476)

Fixed a very weird issue that could make KWin get confused and stop running animations and animated effects properly after opening an app that creates an invisible window. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #519789)

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make the Weather Report widget endlessly reload after waking the system from sleep. (Ce Sun, KDE Bugzilla #517280)

Made System Monitor graphs' axis labels show fractional values when needed. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #521041)

Made it possible to un-favorite apps that are marked as favorites in Kickoff/Kicker/etc. even if they contain some weird character combinations. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #520894)

Fixed an issue that could make the notification icon in the System Tray get stuck in a half-rotated state if the animation got interrupted for any reason. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #458156)

Fixed an issue that made a translated label turn into an English label after changing and saving settings on System Settings' Screen Locking page. (Sergey Katunin, KDE Bugzilla #521293)

Made the Color Picker widget not visually overflow when placed inside a Grouping widget. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517052)

Frameworks 6.28

Fixed a weird issue that could make Plasma freeze if you created a .desktop file, set its icon to be a local AVIF image, and put it on the desktop. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #521200)

Qt 6.11.2

Fixed an apparently fairly common way that Plasma could crash when fetching album art for remote media (for example, on YouTube) shown in Media Player widgets. (Mårten Nordheim, KDE Bugzilla #505490)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE - you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don't have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

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

13 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-24.

Total Reciprocity Public License

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, copyright

More an experiment than something I'd recommend for real. Still it shows there's a gap we need to close in the licenses available. Let's hope the OSI and the FSF will do strong moves toward closing this gap.

https://trplfoundation.org/

Forms of Open Source Government

Tags: tech, foss, governance, satire

In part useful, in part satire I think. Still it gives a good idea of various governance models in FOSS communities.

https://nesbitt.io/2026/06/09/forms-of-open-source-government.html

Retro-Tech Parenting

Tags: tech, culture, learning, parenting

There's a path to get people (children included) to get into technology with enough of the veneer of convenience to make sure it is a learning experience… While keeping it pleasurable.

https://havenweb.org/2026/05/28/retro-tech.html

Pokémon Go Scans Quietly Trained The Navigation Tech Now Headed Into Military Drones

Tags: tech, game, surveillance, attention-economy, defense

How do you like our particular brand of dystopia? That's what you get for using proprietary data farming game I guess.

https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vantor-military-drone-navigation/

The Blight Reaches Microsoft: 73 Repos Disabled in 105 Seconds

Tags: tech, microsoft, github, security, supply-chain, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot

There's really something nasty at play. Those coding agents are clearly not insulated from the system enough and too easy to manipulate in order to exfiltrate sensitive information.

https://opensourcemalware.com/blog/miasma-reaches-azure

our workplace LLM mass delusion

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, management, trust

This piece asks a very profound question in fact. If you're in a workplace where senior management allows and pushes everyone to get deluded about the real capabilities of those tools, how do you later move forward and rebuild trust?

https://blog.avas.space/llm-circus/

To my students

Tags: tech, learning, culture, ethics, politics, quality

Very nice piece, timely and needed. Indeed, let's hope people stick to those principles.

http://ozark.hendrix.edu/~yorgey/forest/00FD/index.xml

How LLMs Actually Work

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, architecture, neural-networks

A good primer on the main architecture traits of transformer models.

https://www.0xkato.xyz/how-llms-actually-work/

Local-First Software Is Easier to Scale

Tags: tech, performance, architecture

It's definitely easier not having to scale at all. Which is what you get when you design for local first / client side.

https://elijahpotter.dev/articles/local-first-software-is-easier-to-scale

Linux latency measurements and compositor tuning

Tags: tech, graphics, linux, desktop, performance, debugging

Interesting read, this is really tricky to measure such latency. It looks like we might have room for improvements on latency still. Curious to see if the proposed fixes will make it in kwin.

https://farnoy.dev/posts/linux-latency

Test-case Reducers Are Underappreciated Debugging Tools

Tags: tech, tests, debugging

Interesting family of testing and debugging tools indeed. I should definitely reach out to those more.

https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2026/test_case_reducers_are_underappreciated_debugging_tools.html

Why Queues Don't Fix Overload (And What To Do Instead)

Tags: tech, queuing, architecture, distributed

Queues are not magic. If they're unbounded you're in for a world of pain as load increases.

https://pmbanugo.me/blog/why-queues-dont-fix-overload-and-what-to-do-instead

The User Doesn't Care - But you should

Tags: tech, programming, quality

Indeed, when people say "users don't care about quality" (tests or otherwise), this is mostly folklore. As soon as something goes wrong they'll care.

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/260607.html

The un-hateable engineering managers

Tags: tech, engineering, management

Sometimes, you got to deliver the bad news… It's healthy if you feel uneasy about it though.

https://newsletter.manager.dev/p/the-un-hateable-engineering-managers

Bye for now!

12 Jun 2026 12:30pm GMT

Structure of code and logic for tournaments in the Mankala Engine.

So, we want the tournaments to be able to:

• Create custom game rooms (with different variants, number of players, and time limit)
• Join the rooms with room codes.
• Create elimination brackets for players.
• Have empty slots filled with computerized opponents.
• A scoreboard after the game for final rankings.

The tournament is going to be part of the Multiplayer variant. For that, when a person clicks on Multiplayer game mode, they will be asked to select from the given two options of a casual 1 to 1 game or another a tournament. Then they will be asked to either create a room or join the room with the code.

Key elements to implement:

• Room codes will be created by mapping XMPP MUC JIDs (e.g., A3F7K2 → tournament-a3f7k2@conference.server.com).
• Fill computerized opponents: When it is detected that there is an absence of required players, the game will be filled with computer opponents in all the empty spots, just like we have for the vs AI game mode.

Here is an example of how the tournaments.cpp can be implemented:

class TournamentManager : public QObject {
Q_OBJECT
Q_PROPERTY(QVariantList tournaments READ getTournaments NOTIFY tournamentsChanged)
Q_PROPERTY(QVariantMap activeTournament READ getActiveTournament NOTIFY activeTournamentChanged)
public:
// --- Tournament duration ---
Q_INVOKABLE QString createTournament(
const QString& variant, // "Bohnenspiel", "Oware", "Pallanguli"
int maxPlayers, // eg. 4, 8, 16
int durationDays, // tournament duration
const QString& organizerJid // creator's XMPP JID
);
Q_INVOKABLE void joinTournament(const QString& roomCode, const QString& playerJid);
Q_INVOKABLE void startTournament(const QString& tournamentId);
// --- Match management ---
Q_INVOKABLE void reportMatchResult(const QString& matchId,
const QString& winnerJid);
Q_INVOKABLE void advanceBracket(const QString& tournamentId);
// --- Computer Opponents ---
Q_INVOKABLE void fillEmptySlots(const QString& tournamentId);
// --- Room codes ---
Q_INVOKABLE QString generateRoomCode();
Q_INVOKABLE QString resolveRoomCode(const QString& code);
signals:
void tournamentsChanged();
void activeTournamentChanged();
void matchReady(const QString& matchId, const QString& player1, const QString& player2);
void tournamentComplete(const QString& tournamentId, const QVariantList& rankings);
void playerJoined(const QString& playerJid);
};

For filling empty spaces we can use the logic as:

struct Match {
QString matchId;
QString player1Jid; // empty string = unfilled slot
QString player2Jid;
QString winnerJid;
int round; // 0 = first round, 1 = quarter-finals, etc.
int position; // position within the round
bool isAIMatch; // true if one/both players are computer
};
class TournamentBracket {
public:
void initialize(int playerCount); // builds bracket tree
void seedPlayers(const QStringList& playerJids);
void fillWithAI(); // fills empty slots
Match getNextMatch() const;
void recordResult(const QString& matchId, const QString& winnerJid);
bool isComplete() const;
QVariantList getRankings() const;
private:
std::vector<std::vector<Match>> m_rounds; // rounds[0] = first round, etc.
int m_totalRounds;
};

At the end of the elimination cycle and the tournament bracket, we can get the results and show them on our created leaderboard page with the XMPP icons, usernames, and the number of games the players won.

What more can be added?

I plan to research more on whether we can store and display these games in the player profiles and create a communication channel for the players and spectators during the ongoing game, which could be both text and voice chat using XMPP and other relevant communication protocols.

Thanks for reading. 👀

11 Jun 2026 5:02pm GMT

Recreating a design system manually in QML is a laborious task for a Qt developer. A typical Figma design system can include hundreds of design tokens for colors, typography, spacing, radii, shadows, and motion durations - plus dozens of UI components, each with multiple variants and states. Every value has to be transcribed precisely, and even small mismatches can quietly desynchronize the implementation from the Figma source.

Two new AI skills close the design-system-to-code gap between Figma and Qt. The Qt Figma Token Extraction skill converts your Figma design tokens directly into QML singletons. The Qt Figma Component Generation skill then turns your Figma component library into idiomatic QML controls that consume those singletons. Together they automate the full design-system handoff. The skills delegate this entire workflow to an AI agent, which connects to Figma, reads the design system, and produces clean, idiomatic QML ready to drop into a Qt project.

11 Jun 2026 4:59am GMT

Thursday, 11 June 2026

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.27.0.

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

New in this version

11 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

This is a weekly update from my Google Summer of Code 2026 project with KDE, improving effect widgets in Kdenlive.

Week 2 was about getting feedback and doing it right.

After opening the draft MR for the Curves Widget, my mentor Jean-Baptiste reviewed the approach and suggested a cleaner architecture. The original implementation packed all 4 channel parameters into a single compound parameter. JB's feedback: each channel should be its own separate av_curve parameter in the effect XML, and AssetParameterView should share one CurveParamWidget across all of them; similar to how m_mainKeyframeWidget works for keyframe parameters.

This was a significant refactor but the result is much cleaner:

• avfilter_curves.xml now has 4 separate parameters; av.master, av.r, av.g, av.b, each with its own name and description
• AssetParameterView creates the CurveParamWidget on the first av_curve param, then calls addAvCurveTab() for each subsequent one
• Each tab is tied to its own model index; valueChanged fires per-parameter independently
• serializeAllChannels() is gone entirely;each channel just emits its own value

All four tabs (All, R, G, B) are working correctly. Per-channel state is preserved when switching tabs. Project save and restore works. The MR is now updated with the refactored approach and waiting for JB's review.

The All tab applies a curve to all channels simultaneously:

Switching to the R tab adjusts only the red channel independently:

Week 3 is already underway; the MR is pushed and waiting for JB's review. More updates next Sunday.

10 Jun 2026 7:55pm GMT

E.P. Unny is a notable Indian political cartoonist, who worked/works with famed Shankar's Weekly and new papers such as The Hindu and Indian Express.

Since 2020, all his cartoons (also 2025, 2026 so far) are published - every week - open-access by Sayahna Foundation.

Unny was using a font based on his handwriting style for the cartoons, designed by K.H. Hussain of Rachana. Recently, a new font designed by Varshini KVSS & 'Kandam Collective' is developed by Rachana Institute of Typography to use in the cartoons, and it is released as open source - see the specimen and download links.

The character set of the font is Latin only. There are plenty of alternate glyphs (for upper case and lower cases of i, j, l, g, etc. - for instance check the double 'l' in 'Intelligence' on the specimen above). Such characters are rendered alternately to give a feel of the randomness that handwriting evokes.

The source (and issue tracking) are available at RIT fonts repository.

08 Jun 2026 11:14am GMT

Dear digiKam fans and users,

After three months of active development, bug triage, and feature integration, the digiKam team is proud to announce the stable release of digiKam 9.1.0. This version builds on the foundation of 9.0.0, introducing new features, performance improvements, and a significant number of bug fixes to enhance stability, usability, and workflow efficiency. This release focuses on database migration, preview enhancements, advanced search, and usability improvements across the board.

07 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

So… more Oxygen icons

This weekend I been filling some of the more obvious holes in the icon set and recently these 2 landed.

The first one is for KeepSecret, the application that is replacing the old KWallet.

Security icons are funny. There are only so many ways to draw "keep your stuff safe" before you end up with another lock icon. Or a key. Or a lock pretending not to be a lock.

I ended up going with a small vault door. Which is basically also a lock pretending not to be a lock but at least it looks kinda cool, and more important I think it looks as smart as our users are...

The other one is for generic package managers.

And apparently software still arrives in wooden crates.

I dont know who started this visual convention but after all these years I kinda stopped questioning it. Software packages are boxes. Everybody understands boxes. Lets move on, and debate the real important things such as the relevance of the save icon as a flopy device

One thing that I love about icon design is how different the process becomes depending on size.

At large sizes you can spend hours messing around with materials, reflections, shadows and tiny details.

At small sizes all that disappears and suddenly you are fighting for every pixel. trying to keep the meanigfull details and creating a source svg monster in Oxygen repo

I think icon design is really just the art of deciding what can be removed before the whole thing falls apart.

Talking about things that may or may not fall apart…

I've also been spending some time exploring styling in QML and thinking about possible future directions for O².

Nothing concrete yet.

Mostly experiments.

Some ideas are sensible.

Some ideas are absolutely not sensible. On propose

The main goal is realy to show range of things I would ike to see available on Union.

Those are usually the interesting ones.

Right now I'm more interested in exploring the range of possibilities than deciding what a final result should look like. There are some surprisingly fun things hidden in there.

If all goes well we will soonish publish a video with KDAB showing some of these experiments and crazy ideas.

Or at least the ones that dont completely explode before then

So stay tuned.

And as always, thanks for using Oxygen.

This old project still finding new excuses to keep going.

06 Jun 2026 9:40pm GMT

The second maintenance release of the 26.04 series is out with the usual batch of bug fixes and improvements for workflow and stability. This update comes with fixes to rendering, timeline editing, project file handling, and Windows, MacOS, AppImage and Flatpak packaging.

One noteworthy bug closed in this version is a fix on Windows to finally allow exporting your videos to a network drive, closing a 4-year-old bug.

Head to our download section to get the latest binaries, or check the updates from your package manager. Please note that for Linux only AppImage and Flatpak are supported by the Kdenlive team.

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

06 Jun 2026 12:45pm GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the team continued polishing Plasma 6.7 for its release later in the month. As such, this week saw mostly bug fixing.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Hovering over a partially-visible item in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget no longer unexpectedly automatically scrolls the view to show the entire item. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #426015)

Spectacle's feature to automatically copy the screenshot to the clipboard is now temporarily turned off while extracting text via OCR, so that the extracted text makes it onto the clipboard instead. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #520758)

When launching an app from a terminal window, the animated launch feedback effect now ends after the app launches, as expected. (Nicolas Fella, Vlad Zahorodnii, and Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #459986)

Plasma 6.8

Notifications about connected devices having low battery power are now shown in full-screen apps so you won't miss them, just like notifications for the internal battery being low. (Jan Bidler, plasma-workspace MR #6623)

The Peek at Desktop and Window Aperture effects now respect the system-wide animation speed setting. (Sudip Datta, KDE Bugzilla #490531)

Frameworks 6.27

KRunner now assumes you mean US pints rather than Imperial pints when you convert to or from them, since pints are still official in the USA. (Nate Graham, kunitconversion MR #86)

After

Before

Disk sizes displayed in various places now fully respect your preference regarding storage units. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518493)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash while refreshing the list of nearby wireless networks. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519739)

Fixed an issue that reset custom tiling layouts on portrait-rotated monitors after restarting the system. (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #514355)

Searching for an app in the Kicker Application Menu widget and launching one that isn't the first item in the search results list no longer launches it twice. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #521001)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed a regression in VNC-based screen sharing that prevented the Ctrl and Alt modifier from being sent to the machine being controlled. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #519690)

Fixed an issue that could make Plasma freeze if you quickly switch months in the Digital Clock widget by dragging on the calendar view multiple times in quick succession. (Sander Wolswijk, KDE Bugzilla #511028)

Made the Task Manager Widget's "Move to Desktop" feature work on grouped tasks. (Hynek Schlindenbuch, KDE Bugzilla #520777)

Fixed two issues with the Grouping widget: not re-appearing instantly after undoing deleting it, and a phantom header remaining visible after removing the last app from it. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517044 and KDE Bugzilla #517043)

Fixed a variety of issues with icons or list items not properly reversing themselves when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Tobias Fella and Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #518932, KDE Bugzilla #518909, KDE Bugzilla #518935, KDE Bugzilla #518835, and KDE Bugzilla #518837)

Made System Settings raise and focus its window as expected when launched using a higher-than-default level of focus stealing prevention. (Kai Uwe Broulik, systemsettings MR #408)

Frameworks 6.27

Switching between light and dark Global Themes no longer sometimes results in various UI elements in Plasma only changing their colors halfway. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #503671)

Fixed an issue saving and retrieving config data in cases where a setting has been given a system-wide default value by the OS vendor that differs from KDE's own default value. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #509416)

Fixed various related issues with network shares auto-mounted using systemd, including the trash not working properly, and appearing strangely in GUI apps. (Oliver Schramm, KDE Bugzilla #518012)

Fixed an issue that made it impossible to rename files on the desktop via the "Suggest new name" feature in the overwrite dialog. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #509461)

How you can help

KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.

Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!

Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE - you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don't have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.

You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keeps KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bug fix mentioned here

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

06 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-23.

"But it happened."

Tags: tech, google, attention-economy, business

Good point, the booing on Eric Schimidt's commencement speech is likely not just about him talking about AI at some point. You see, the man has very heavy baggage… He's one of the architects of the current dystopia but won't acknowledge it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlQ7EoJDTQY

AI didn't break the web. The dotcons did - AI just turned up the volume

Tags: tech, copyright, commons, web, ai, machine-learning, gpt, enclosure

Indeed the trend wasn't new. It's "just" the icing on the cake from the enclosure point of view.

https://hamishcampbell.com/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume/

Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ethics, law

When Amnesty International feels like it has to publish a 44 pages briefing pointing out what's wrong with your approach and business… it'd be nice to pay attention.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

About rsync slopocalypse

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

Indeed, if the rsync maintainer can't handle a coding assistant properly… who can?

https://teh.entar.net/@spacehobo/116659545246426837

When Other Games Chased Polygons, Blade Runner Chased Atmosphere

Tags: tech, game, graphics, 2d, 3d

There was an era of hybrid techniques in video games before it mostly went full real-time 3D. It gave interesting results, here is an example.

https://gardinerbryant.com/when-other-games-chased-polygons/

Avoid using "<![CDATA[ ... ]]>" in RSS

Tags: tech, blog, rss

Good point indeed, need to review my own feed next time I get the chance.

https://waspdev.com/articles/2026-05-11/avoid-using-cdata-in-rss

You Don't Love systemd Timers Enough

Tags: tech, linux, systemd, time

Good primer on systemd timers. Indeed it's really one of the nice systemd features.

https://blog.tjll.net/you-dont-love-systemd-timers-enough/

5 PostgreSQL locking behaviors that trip people up

Tags: tech, postgresql, databases, distributed

Mind those traps when dealing with such a database. There are locks you don't necessarily expect.

https://dev.to/shinyakato_/5-postgresql-locking-behaviors-that-trip-people-up-4k7n

You probably don't need Yocto, and that's fine

Tags: tech, linux, embedded, yocto, debian

Indeed, teams reach out to Yocto by default a bit too much. It's good to have an idea on when you really needed and when you can go for simpler options.

https://sigma-star.at/blog/2026/05/you-probably-dont-need-yocto-and-thats-fine/

Nine Ways to Do Inheritance in Rust, a Language Without Inheritance

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems, object-oriented

Some of the examples lean on macro trickery. Still this gives a good example of the flexibility you get with the trait system.

https://medium.com/@carlmkadie/nine-ways-to-do-inheritance-in-rust-a-language-without-inheritance-14825bf1e215

The C++ Standard Library Has Been Walking Itself Back for Fifteen Years, and the Receipts Are Public

Tags: tech, c++, standard, culture

Cold and harsh look at how the C++ standard library evolves. There's indeed a problem in the fact that nothing gets removed ever.

https://hftuniversity.com/post/the-c-standard-library-has-been-walking-itself-back-for-fifteen-years-and-the-receipts-are-public

You Must Fix Your Asserts

Tags: tech, reliability, failure, debugging

Good point, disabling asserts in production is not the best default position to have.

https://kristoff.it/blog/fix-your-asserts/

What (almost) Everyone Gets Wrong About TDD & BDD

Tags: tech, tdd, atdd, history

Good summary of how the terms evolved. They are more tied to each other than most people think.

https://antonymarcano.substack.com/p/what-almost-everyone-gets-wrong-about-c05

normalize patience

Tags: tech, culture, patience, time, productivity, attention-economy

Things which matter take time. The calls to productivity and technology pushing us toward faster response on everything is killing what makes our humanity.

https://rnotte.art/normalize-patience/

Bye for now!

05 Jun 2026 4:39pm GMT

This week, I completed the port of KeepSecret's actions to the new org.kde.kirigami.actioncollection API from kirigami-app-components, a recently introduced library developed by Marco Martin (notmart).

Before working on this task, actions were defined separately throughout the UI. With ActionCollection, I could define each action once in a central place and then reuse it wherever it was needed. This makes the code easier to maintain and also integrates KeepSecret with KDE's standard shortcut system, allowing users to configure shortcuts through the usual KDE interface.

The main change was creating a dedicated Actions.qml file with AC.ActionCollectionManager as the root element. Inside it, actions are now centrally defined across three collections - one for the wallet list, one for wallet contents, and one for item details. These include actions such as New Wallet, New Entry, Search, Lock, Unlock, Copy Password, Save, Revert, and Delete.

During review, additional actions were added, dependencies were simplified, and Flatpak build issues were addressed. Since kirigami-app-components is still very new, some CI and packaging adjustments were needed before everything built correctly.

The merge request !29 has now been reviewed, approved, and merged into KeepSecret.

Next up is the Import/Export feature - I'll be studying KeepSecret's wallet data structures and designing the file format this week.

04 Jun 2026 7:54pm GMT

Hello Reader!

In case you don't know me (quite likely 😆), I am Ojas Maheshwari (@the_epicman:matrix.org) and I am currently working in the Google Summer of Code program for the KDE community on a project about Font Subsetting in Poppler under my mentor Albert Astals Cid.

Community Bonding

If I am being honest, I had already bonded with the Poppler community before GSoC started 😅

I had a lot of conversations with Albert, Sune, lbaudin and ats, and they already helped me a lot with my technical problems with my contributions prior to GSoC :D

However, I also managed to bond with other fellow GSoC contributors this summer so it's a win in my book :D

Week 1

I learnt a lot about how PDF files work this week.

Technical terms like Indirect Objects, Default Appearance, Appearance Streams which used to sound confusing to me before finally clicked.

I got more comfortable with traversing and using PDF data structures such as Objects, Arrays, Dicts, Streams etc.

The Happy News is that I got the Font Subsetting to work for FreeText Annotations.

I have raised a Draft MR which should be ready-to-review by end of this week and my plan is to get it fully correct and merged first and then move on to doing the same thing for forms.

Code screenshot to make the blog look cooler

How it works

If you are interested to know what my current approach is:

• The whole subsetting runs only when the user saves the document.

• We go over all resources (for now, just FreeText annotations) that were modified, and call a subsetFonts method on them.

• This is a method implemented by every class that needs subsetting, and inside this method we pass the data on what "font" renders what part of the "text" to our FontSubsetter::getSubsetFonts.

std::map<Ref, Ref> FontSubsetter::getSubsetFonts(const std::map<std::shared_ptr<const GfxFont>, std::string> &fontMappings) const

• The function generates the subset font objects and adds them to the PDF and returns mappings of old font refs and newer font refs. The subsetting happens using a library called "Harfbuzz".

• Then the subsetFonts function simply replaces the older refs with the newer ones inside the font subdictionary of the appearance stream of the annotation.

Thanks for reading

Although this blog might look small, it took me more than 1.5 hours to write this because I kept writing and deleting things. I am hoping I get better at writing blogs in the future.

But anyways, thanks for reading!
And have a great day !
Byee 😃!

04 Jun 2026 5:39pm GMT

Luis Cañas Díaz and I shared lessons from our BI journey at the Eclipse Foundation SDV webinar - from open source to automotive. Methodology, real use cases, and hard-won lessons on data, metrics, and insights.

04 Jun 2026 5:15pm GMT