Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

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

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

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

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.7

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

Plasma 6.8

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

New

Old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

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

Plasma 6.7.6

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

Plasma 6.8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frameworks 6.31

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

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

Qt 6.11.1

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

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.8

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

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

Gear 26.12

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

How you can help

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

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

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

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

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

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

12 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

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

Making Social Media Social

Tags: tech, fediverse, social-media, community

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

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

Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg Put on 'Leave of Absence'

Tags: tech, blog, wordpress, business

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

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

Doomscrolling ourselves to death

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

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

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

Tristan Buckmaster's statement on the Navier-Stokes resolution

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

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

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

The function of LLM-based math "proofs"

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

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

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

Soft-deprecating re.match()

Tags: tech, api, python

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

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

A quick overview of atomics in C

Tags: tech, c, multithreading, atomics

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

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

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

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

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

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

My HTML Boilerplate

Tags: tech, web, html

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

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

There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get

Tags: tech, software, engineering, quality

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

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

On Quality: What It Is and Why Products Get Worse

Tags: production, quality, craftsmanship

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

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

Degeneracy is a Symptom

Tags: history, economics, politics

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

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

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

Tags: history, politics

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

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

When Death Was a Relief

Tags: history

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

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

Bye for now!

11 Sep 2026 3:47pm GMT

So... Koko needed a new icon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It isn't.

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

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

And now we have AI.

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

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

Make something NEW!!!

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

Just please make us feel something.

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

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

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

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

11 Sep 2026 2:57pm GMT

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

Join us at Akademy

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

Kdenlive needs your support

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

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

11 Sep 2026 1:45pm GMT

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

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

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

See you there!

10 Sep 2026 8:28pm GMT

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

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

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

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

PNG images are great!

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

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

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

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

JPEG-XL vs PNG in AppStream

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting JXL encoding findings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JXL in AppStream

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

Upsides of JXL in AppStream right now

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

Downsides of switching to JXL too quickly

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

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

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

Media pipeline improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to see / try this!

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

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

What's next?

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

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

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

10 Sep 2026 5:48pm GMT

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

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

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

Effect Stack Before

Effect Stack After Refactoring

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

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

New features

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

Move keyframes with keyboard

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

Zoom and Keyframe scaling

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

And all the rest

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

Performance

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

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

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

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

Meet us at Akademy

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

Kdenlive needs your support

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10 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

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

• kup: Backup scheduler for the Plasma desktop

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

Help stress-test the Union theming system

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

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

To test Union:

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

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

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

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

Everything else

View full changelog

10 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

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

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

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

Distro and app store packagers should update their application packages.

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

10 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

Wednesday, 9 September 2026

KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.30.0.

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

New in this version

09 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

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

Overview​

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

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

ci-healthcheck​

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

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

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

I consider this a massive success! 🎉🎉🎉

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

plasma-morekeys​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Akademy​

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

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

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

See you soon! 👋👋👋

08 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

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

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

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

View full changelog

08 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

I tagged v0.0.11 last night. Or this morning. I've stopped keeping track of which side of midnight things happen on.

Most of what's in this tag I already went on about on Monday, in the weekly update: the harp swapping, the Guitar Pro files, the pitch detectors that turn out not to hear chords. Go read that one if you want the long version, and it is a long version, I checked. This is only about the four things that landed after I wrote it.

Four things. Well. Three things, because one of them was me deleting a line out of a TODO file, and I'm not going to make you read a paragraph about that.

The harmonica I made up

So there was this line in my TODO list, and it said my chromatic harmonica was modelled as reaching less of its range than a diatonic, which is backwards. Chromatics are the ones that get all the notes. That's the deal with a chromatic. You press the little button on the side and you get the notes in between, that is the entire pitch of the instrument, that's why it costs four times as much as the other one.

So I went in to fix it, expecting to add a missing technique somewhere, and what I found instead was that the layout in my code was not a chromatic harmonica. It was not a harmonica at all. It was a C major scale going up one note per hole. C D E F G A B C D E F G, straight up, like somebody had typed a scale into an array and gone to lunch, which, in fairness, is exactly what happened, and the somebody was me.

A real 12-hole chromatic is solo tuned. It goes C E G C, then D F A B, and that four hole group repeats up the instrument for three octaves. That repeating is the whole point of it. That's what makes one fingering work in every octave, that's the thing you're buying. Mine repeated nothing. Mine also stopped at A5 instead of C7, so fourteen of the thirty seven semitones between C4 and C7 weren't reachable at all, on an instrument whose one job is reaching all of them.

Fourteen out of thirty seven. On the chromatic. The one that gets all the notes.

Nobody noticed, and here's the bad part

Now you'd think somebody would have noticed, and here is why nobody did, and it's the part that actually bothers me.

Both of the chromatic charts I ship had the made up layout copied into them. Both of them. So they agreed with the code perfectly, and the code agreed with them, and everybody in there was consistent and confident and describing an instrument nobody owns.

One of those two charts, and I want you to appreciate this with me, one of those two charts is the lesson that teaches you the chromatic slide.

So if you had gone out and bought a real chromatic harmonica, an actual physical one, made of metal, by a company, and you'd sat down to learn the slide from my game, the hole numbers would have been wrong. Every one of them. And nothing anywhere would have told you why, and you would have assumed the problem was you, because when you're learning an instrument you always assume the problem is you, and about nine times in ten you're right, and this was the tenth time.

Both charts are re-fingered onto the real instrument now. The music didn't change, and it couldn't, because every event already recorded the pitch it sounds and those pitches were fine. It was only ever the hole numbers that were imaginary. So I re-resolved each event from its note instead of its hole: thirty three of them in Für Elise, sixteen in the lesson. Not one note moved.

The slide lesson does now teach ten slides instead of fourteen, because on a real solo tuned harmonica more of those notes just sit on a plain reed and don't need the button. Which is fine. Ten slides is plenty of slides.

And the test that would have caught this doesn't compare the charts to themselves, because as established they were extremely happy with themselves. It compares them against a tuning this codebase can actually build.

The staff was lying too, only quietly

Two smaller ones, both in the notation strip along the top.

Accidentals were drawn per note instead of per bar. So if a tune leans on one altered note, and blues tunes do, a second position blues leans on its F# all day long, you got the same sharp redrawn in front of every single note. Which looks silly, but it's worse than silly, because each one is about eleven pixels wide and an eighth note only has seventeen pixels to give in the first place.

They hold for the rest of the bar now, like they do on paper. And every note that cancels one gets a real natural sign, because just skipping the repeats would have left a later plain F in that bar reading as an F#, and I'd have gone from drawing something redundant to drawing something false, which is a worse trade than it sounds.

The staff itself was a fixed thirty four pixels per beat, and a notehead plus the accidental in front of it wants about twenty one, and a sixteenth note was getting eight and a half. They overlapped. Of course they overlapped. It works out the spacing from each song's own density now, with a cap on it, because otherwise one busy bar shrinks how far ahead you can see down to about a bar and a half, and then you can't read the thing at all.

That's v0.0.11. Still 0.0.x, still early, still on GitHub, still, as of this week, no longer shipping an instrument that does not exist.

08 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT

I'm getting old (though, not as old as the image below), and I miss the good old days when using Linux was more difficult, but when every system in a Linux desktop session was simple.

This was before polkit, systemd, … Even before DBus and PulseAudio. All of these systems are cool and all, but I sometimes miss the simplicity of "everything can be a shell script".

I've been playing around with something that made me investigate how the Plasma session is started, and if I can replicate it without significant issues with a simple shell script or something else.

It turns out it is not that difficult of a process, just a bit convoluted.

Your chosen display manager starts startplasma. A DBus session is created and startplasmacompositor (and kwin_wayland) is started. Then plasma_session starts. And it starts kded6 and ksmserver. There are a few other things that are started as well (like kactivitymanagerd), but they are started automagically by DBus when another component tries to use their DBus API.

Moving to a shell script

In the old days, there was just a simple shell script called startkde which set the environment variables and started all the needed processes for a working KDE (and later Plasma) session. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't efficient, but it did what it needed to.

Se I decided to try to reimplement a rudimentary version of that script for the new Plasma.

These are the basic environment variables you'd want set before running a Plasma session (or other UI applications):

# XDG
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=KDE
export XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=KDE

# Qt
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
export QT_WAYLAND_SHELL_INTEGRATION=xdg-shell
export QT_WAYLAND_DISABLE_WINDOWDECORATION=1
export QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=0
export QT_WAYLAND_RECONNECT=1
export QSG_RHI_BACKEND=vulkan

# KDE
export DESKTOP_SESSION=plasma
export KDE_FULL_SESSION=true
export KDE_SESSION_VERSION=6

I placed this into a seaprate script called env.sh as it is useful for testing to be able to initialize the same environment in a shell outside of startkde.

Apart from these, if you have some custom installation paths for Qt or KDE things, you should also set PATH, XDG_DATA_DIRS, XDG_CONFIG_DIRS, QT_PLUGIN_PATH, QML2_IMPORT_PATH and QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_STYLE_PATH.

If you have any custom environment variables defined in ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env, you should add them here as well (or source all the files from that directory).

For the main script, just source env.sh, run dbus-update-activation-environment --all and start all the session components mentioned above:

source env.sh
dbus-update-activation-environment --all
kwin_wayland --drm &
KWIN_PID=$!
sleep 1

export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=wayland-0
kactivitymanagerd &
ksmserver &
kded6 &
plasmashell &
krunner &
# other things you want started along with Plasma

wait $KWIN_PID

The sleep 1 is evil and there are better ways to check if wayland-0 became available, but this is a quick and dirty script after all. And the original startkde script also had some sleeps in it.

The only thing remaining is to create a session file that your display manager can use, and you're good to go (/usr/share/wayland-session/shellscript-based-startplasma.desktop)):

...
Exec=dbus-run-session -- /path/to/the/script.sh
...

This seems to work without important issues, it just skips the splash screen which I can live without (wow, ksplashqml is 15 years old…).

I didn't test it for too long, as I quickly replaced this shell script with a dinit-based setup, but more on that in the next post.

07 Sep 2026 8:10am GMT

Gwenview has been KDE's flagship image viewer for over 25 years. It works, it's feature-packed, and it's been modernized repeatedly. Gwenview has served generations of KDE users faithfully and well.

So… why build a replacement?

Well, over the years Gwenview has fallen behind in some areas that can't easily be retrofitted without rewriting half of it anyway - like better performance with large image libraries, GPU acceleration, mobile-friendliness, and the kind of enjoyably hackable QtQuick UI that would make it easier to modernize and engage a new generation of contributors.

Either by way of illustration or as a result of the above, community contributions of features, bug fixes, and UI improvements to Gwenview have dried up in recent years. It would appear that Gwenview's technical architecture has reached the limit of what people are willing to do with it.

Something new

Meet Photos (originally named "Koko"):

Actually I lied: Photos is not a new app. Its first release was five years ago, after extended development dating at least back to 2017. But it was always somewhat niche, because it began as a mobile app and couldn't match Gwenview in raw functionality and desktop-friendliness.

So over the past year, Techpaladin Software (full disclosure: I'm the CEO) has sponsored a bunch of development with the explicit goal of bringing Photos to parity with Gwenview as a first-class desktop app. Oliver's recent blog post contains lots of interesting details about the process.

Techpaladin folks will continue to contribute maintenance for a while, but our hope is that we've managed to bootstrap the app to the point where the KDE community can generally take over for further feature and UI development on the desktop side. Therefore…

Give it a try!

I'd like to invite users to try using Photos, and invite distros to consider replacing Gwenview with it - either soon, or in the future.

I'm sure it won't be perfect. Gwenview has had an extra 15 or so years in the metaphorical oven. But at this point Photos has pretty much all of the relevant features, plus some added goodies:

• Much better performance, especially with large photo libraries and high DPI screens
• Mobile-friendly UI that's also capable of being used as a very small window
• Shares Spectacle's amazing annotation system
• You can mark images as favorites
• Timeline, location, and "just show me all my images" views

So give it a try! The current 26.08 release is pretty good, and the upcoming 26.12 release will add a few more improvements.

If you find any bugs, sources of UI awkwardness, or missing features compared to Gwenview that you actually need and care about, feel free to report them on the Bugzilla page. And changes can be contributed via merge request on Photos' invent.kde.org page.

Let us know what you think! And if you like it, consider helping out with development or bug triaging. It takes a village to raise a child maintain an app.

07 Sep 2026 4:53am GMT

This is a weekly update, which means I did a week of things and now I'm going to tell you about them, and I should say up front that most of the week went on two problems that sound small when you write them down. You had to own the exact harmonica a chart was written for. And the chart had to be in my file format, the one I invented, the one nobody else has ever written anything in.

The one harmonica you own

Here's the thing about harmonicas. A diatonic is built in one key. Not tuned to one key, built in it, the reeds are physically cut for it, and if the chart says C and the harp in your pocket says G then you can't play that chart. Not badly, not with effort. You sit there and nothing you do produces the note.

And people learning have one harmonica. One. Whichever one turned up. So the situation where you open my game, pick a song, and discover it wasn't written for the only instrument you own isn't an edge case, it's Tuesday.

There are two honest answers to this and they go in opposite directions. You keep the tab and let the music move: same holes, same breath, different key. Or you keep the music and let the tab move: same tune, different holes. Both are defensible, I couldn't pick, so I built both and put them on a little screen that turns up after you choose a song.

That screen also tells you the damage. Something like "5 need a bend · 2 need an overblow · 9 can't be played". The nine is the number I built the screen for. If swapping your harp in quietly eats a fifth of the melody, I'd rather say it out loud and let you decide than hand you a chart with holes in it and let you assume you're the problem.

The test that went looking for one thing

The remapping code has a property test on it. It walks twelve source keys against twelve target keys, both harmonica families, every hole, both breath directions, in both of those modes I just described, and for every single combination it checks that anything the code calls playable is a pitch that harmonica can physically produce.

That check is the entire reason the test exists. If it fails, my game is sitting there listening for a note you cannot make, and then marking you down for not making it, and you'd have no way of knowing which of you was broken.

It told me I was wrong three times, and each time the code was right, which is why I wrote a test instead of trusting myself. A G harp is pitched below C, not above, so G4 sits on hole 4 and not hole 1. A#4 isn't on an F harp at all, and I had to go find a Bb before I could test the case I actually wanted. And transposing a chart onto its own harmonica isn't the no-op I'd assumed, because hole 3 blow and hole 2 draw are both G4 on a C harp, so resolving by pitch alone was quietly rewriting one into the other and telling me it had done nothing.

But that's not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that the same test, which I wrote to check transposition, sat down and told me about a bug that has nothing to do with transposition at all. The set of notes my scorer will accept from your microphone was built out of blow reeds, draw reeds and bends. Not overblows. Not overdraws. On a C harp, seven of the eight over-pitches simply were not in that set, which means any chart asking for an overblow could never be scored. Ever. Not once. And nothing on screen would have told you why.

Nobody hit it because none of the charts I ship use one. It was going to sit there until somebody wrote something advanced, and then it was going to look like a microphone problem, and they'd have spent an evening buying a better microphone.

Later in the week I found the same kind of thing pointing the other way. My table of how far each hole bends had every hole capped at a semitone and a half, which is just wrong. A bend pulls a reed toward the other reed in the same hole, so how far you can go is however much room is between them. Three full semitones on hole 3, which is the note you buy a harmonica in order to play. Nothing at all on holes 5 and 7. The table says that now, and there's a test comparing it against the physical layout, because two descriptions of one physical fact will come apart eventually and I'd rather find out from CI.

Somebody else's files

Harmonicon reads Guitar Pro now, gp3 through gp7, and MuseScore, and MusicXML, and MIDI. Drop one in a song folder and it gets found and converted and played.

Parsing them was the easy half. The hard half is that a tab file is a whole band. Bass, comp, melody, usually drums, and I have to work out which of those you meant. So every track gets converted on its own and fitted to its own harmonica, because the right harp for a melody is almost never the right harp for a bass line, and then you get a list telling you what you'd actually be able to play. "Track 1: 6 notes, 0% playable. Track 2: 100%."

If a track is called Harmonica it wins automatically, and I learned two exceptions to that by breaking things. A bass line called Harmonica handed me a chart with no playable notes in it at all, so being named right no longer beats being playable. And drum tracks now report zero notes on purpose, because their frets are drum kit indices, and if you read those as pitches you get a part that looks entirely reasonable, wins the picker, and then plays nothing whatsoever resembling the song.

The word "harp" on its own is deliberately not in my list of names to look for. It matches an orchestral harp. A harp part converted to harmonica is precisely the unplayable soup the list exists to prevent, and the arithmetic isn't close: missing a track called Harp costs you one click, matching a real one costs you a chart nobody alive can play.

All seven of them sit behind one trait in a new crate, so the next format is a module and a match arm. It cost more than I wanted. That crate went from 5 dependencies to 94, almost all of it zip and everything zip drags along behind it. I wrote the tradeoff down and slept on it before deciding, which I mention because I nearly didn't, and the thing that decided it was that zip is what MuseScore and the newer Guitar Pro containers genuinely need, so it buys three formats rather than propping up one.

Which of my detectors can hear a chord

Chord scoring has been in there for ages. It wants every pitch of the chord present at the same time, which is a reasonable thing to want. What I had never once checked is whether the pitch detectors can actually deliver it.

So I measured, on a real chord out of a real chart. FFT, which is the default, hears both notes. NMF hears both notes. YIN, pYIN and MPM hear neither.

And the three that fail don't fail quietly. pYIN and MPM both report an F4, confidently, a note which is not in the signal, which simply happens to sit between the two notes that are. So it isn't a chord going unscored. It's a wrong note strolling into the scorer with its hands in its pockets.

None of which was visible from inside the game. Choosing pYIN in the options made every chord in every chart unhittable and told you nothing. The picker says "pYIN, single notes only" now, and if the song you loaded has chords your detector can't hear, a banner says so.

While I was in there: unplugging your microphone in the middle of a song used to leave the game convinced it was still connected. Your notes just stopped scoring, forever, silently. Which is the exact failure I'd built a warning overlay for the week before, reachable by the more likely route the entire time, and I'd like it on the record that I found this myself before anybody else did.

Three hundred gigabytes

Now this next part isn't about the game at all and you can skip it, except that it ate two days, so.

My build directory had reached 300 gigabytes.

Two separate reasons, both boring, both mine. A debug binary was 2.41 GB, of which about ninety percent was debug information for dependencies I have never once stepped into. And cargo doesn't delete the old ones. So there were ninety-nine files of over a gigabyte each, sitting there, going back to August, every one of them a complete binary from some build I'd long since stopped caring about.

A few profile settings and a sweep later a debug binary is 287 MB, and a clean build plus the entire test suite leaves the whole tree at 7.1 GB.

While I was in the mood I also found the version number written in four different places that disagreed with each other, which meant the version the game showed you in Help / About was one that no release has ever actually carried. One script bumps all four now, and CI fails in about three seconds if the tag and the manifest disagree, rather than after four platform builds have finished uploading.

So: you can play a chart on the harmonica you own, or on the one it was written for, and either way it'll tell you what that's going to cost you before you start. And you can hand it a Guitar Pro file, and it'll work out which part of the band you meant.

1306 tests passing. Still 0.0.x, still early, still on GitHub.

07 Sep 2026 12:00am GMT