Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week the Plasma team focused almost entirely on bug fixing. And let's let the results speak for themselves: we fixed 18 high and very high priority Plasma bugs, or 28% of all open ones! Lots of polishing for Plasma 6.6 to make it a great release.

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.7.0

Added a dedicated setup UI for configuring shared printers on Windows networks. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #406211)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.6.0

Desktop switching and Present Windows shortcuts now use the Meta key by default for more consistent system-wide behavior. (Antti Savolainen, kwin MR #8597)

Plasma can now report printers' waste receptacle levels and notify users when they fill up. (Mike Noe, KDE Bugzilla #514525)

KRunner's buttons have been reorganized to be consistent with other Plasma widgets, making the interface feel more familiar and coherent. (Taras Oleksyn, plasma-workspace MR #6203)

Plasma 6.7.0

System Settings' Wi-Fi & Networking page now uses clearer Wi-Fi security labels, correctly showing WPA2 and WPA3 support for both Personal and Enterprise networks. (Lynne Megido, KDE Bugzilla #493238)

There are now keyboard shortcuts for switching virtual desktops and opening the Present Windows effect that use the Meta key, to be consistent with other globally-scoped keyboard shortcuts. (Antti Savolainen, KDE Bugzilla #508187)

Frameworks 6.23

Improved the visual fidelity of thumbnail images in open/save dialogs throughout Plasma and KDE apps. (Méven Car, KDE Bugzilla #489298)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.6

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make KWin crash after periods of idleness. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #513687)

Fixed an issue that would make Plasma crash when you disabled widgets in the System Tray and clicked the dialog window's "OK" button rather than the "Apply" button. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #478625)

Fixed an issue that could sometimes make KWin crash after repeatedly pressing the "Activate window demanding attention" shortcut (Meta+Ctrl+A by default) while multiple windows were demanding attention. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #500748)

Fixed a common case where Plasma could crash after certain games crashed first. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #506562)

Fixed a common case where Plasma could crash when configured with a weather station from the Environment Canada source in its Weather Report widget. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #514553)

Fixed a case where changing the visibility of the Media Player widget in the System Tray while music was playing could make Plasma crash. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514823)

Spectacle once again remembers the location where you last saved a screenshot the next time you save one. (Noah Davis, KDE Bugzilla #511649)

Fixed an issue causing 24" 16:9 aspect ratio monitors to get the wrong default resolution. (Anton Golubev, kwin MR #8681)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed a surprisingly common issue whereby KWin could sometimes crash when you frantically wiggled the pointer to try to stop a monitor from going to sleep. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #487660)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash when you deleted a virtual desktop that still had windows on it. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #8680)

Fixed another KWin crash, this one more random. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8677)

Fixed a long-standing issue whereby tooltips opened by buttons in Plasma widget popups could move onto the panel and get stuck there after you closed the widget popups. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #475646)

Fixed an issue that made popups of panel widgets undesirably change their size when you moved their panel to an adjacent screen edge. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #512273)

Fixed an issue making certain sub-menus of Plasma widgets not have transparent backgrounds, which was especially visible with menu blurring turned on. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #513307)

Fixed an issue in the HDR calibrator tool that made long pieces of text overflow from their boxes. (Nate Graham and David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #514687)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma forget the IPSec certificate passwords of L2TP VPNs. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #460)

Fixed an issue causing apps launched using D-Bus activation to be omitted from System Monitor's Applications table. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #510235)

Fixed an issue in System Monitor that could make the Applications table's "Details" panel un-scrollable under certain circumstances. (Arjen Hiemstra, KDE Bugzilla #506150)

Fixed an issue in Discover that could sometimes make Flatpak apps' languages packages fail to get grouped with the apps. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #513111)

Plasma 6.7.0

Fixed an issue that broke KRunner's Activities plugin from actually finding any activities. (Sam Morris, KDE Bugzilla #514000)

Fixed an issue that caused long boot menu entries to be cut off in the Breeze GRUB Menu styling. (Sébastien Bouchard, KDE Bugzilla #513107)

Frameworks 6.23

Fixed an issue that caused a large variety of crashes in Plasma and KDE apps related to devices appearing and disappearing. (Nicolas Fella, solid MR #232)

Fixed an issue making KWallet crash on OpenSUSE-based operating systems. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #490788)

Fixed an issue that broke the back button in Kirigami-based System Settings pages and apps when using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew and you went back and forward and then back again. (Youssef Al-Bor3y, KDE Bugzilla #511295)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Plasma's system monitoring infrastructure received further fixes to improve OpenBSD support. (Rafael Sadowski, libksysguard MR #454)

PackageKit 1.3.4

Implemented support for DNF5 in PackageKit, which fixes a huge number of issues relevant to people using Discover on Fedora-based operating systems. (Neal Gompa, packagekit PR #931)

How You Can Help

"This Week in Plasma" still needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

• Help put together the posts using the current mostly manual process
• Help automate the process

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

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 keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here

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

24 Jan 2026 12:03am GMT

Leaking memory is impolite. It's messy, it can suggest logic bugs, and thanks to AI grifters RAM is expensive.

Unfortunately C++ makes it rather easy to leak memory. Fortunately we have tools to find such leaks. One such tool is Leak Sanitizer (LSAN) from the Address Sanitizer (ASAN) family. It's using compiler-based instrumentation for the code to reports any leaks after the program terminates.

KDE's CI infrastructed has ASAN enabled for a while. However the leak sanitizer part was explicitly disabled, so no leaks were reported as part of the CI build and test run. This is because a number of projects have pre-exisiting memory leaks that would cause the C build to fail. Of course those should be fixed eventually, but in order to do that we need to know where they are. Also, for projects that currently don't have any leaks we want to enforce keeping it that way.

A few lines of Python later KDE's CI system now allows to enable LSAN on a per-project basis. The .kde-ci.yml file that governs CI builds in KDE gained a new option enable-lsan. It is off by default for now for compatibility, but we may consider enabling it by default eventually.

If enabled and any memory leak in a test is detected, that test and therefore the whole CI pipeline will fail.

Now once we found a leak, what can we do about it? There's several options:

• Use good old delete/free(). Works, but is often rather error-prone.
• Use QObject's parent mechanism. Works, but often frowned upon by C++ purists. Mostly makes sense for widget hierarchies.
• Smart pointers like std::unique_ptr/std::shared_ptr. These are great because they allow to express the ownership on an API level and make ownership transfers explicit. Often the best choice for business logic code.

LSAN is now enabled for some Frameworks CI builds, but ideally it would be enabled for all KDE projects. And of course any leaks found along the way should be fixed.

Happy leak-fixing!

23 Jan 2026 9:00pm GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-04.

FOSS for digital sovereignty in the EU

Tags: tech, europe, politics, foss

Need inspiration for your answer to the European Commission call for evidence on open source? This is a good one.

https://www.more-magic.net/posts/open-source-in-the-eu.html

Writing First, Tooling Second

Tags: tech, web, self-hosting, blog, writing

Get out and write indeed. You can fiddle with the tools later.

https://susam.net/writing-first-tooling-second.html

Attention Media ≠ Social Media

Tags: tech, social-media, attention-economy, fediverse

There was indeed another path for social media… Let's hope the Fediverse stay on its current course.

https://susam.net/attention-media-is-not-social-media.html

Why people believe misinformation even when they're told the facts

Tags: tech, social-media, fake-news, attention-economy

Or why the focus on fact checking is doomed to fail. You can't ignore our biases, the social context, and above all the toxic architecture of the big social medias.

https://theconversation.com/why-people-believe-misinformation-even-when-theyre-told-the-facts-271236

Deep reading can boost your critical thinking and help you resist misinformation - here's how to build the skill

Tags: tech, reading, social-media

Not all reading is born equal. The intent matters quite a lot. Build the skill, it'll last a life time.

https://theconversation.com/deep-reading-can-boost-your-critical-thinking-and-help-you-resist-misinformation-heres-how-to-build-the-skill-268082

Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots

Tags: tech, university, teaching, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ethics, foss

Interesting ideas on how to approach teaching at the university. It gives a few clue on how to deal with chatbots during exams, can be improved but definitely a good start.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html

Why We've Tried to Replace Developers Every Decade Since 1969

Tags: tech, programming, business, leadership, complexity, history

Good historical perspective about the attempts to get rid of developers. This never unfold as envisioned. This is mostly about the intellectual work to build artifacts handling the world complexity, and this doesn't go away.

https://www.caimito.net/en/blog/2025/12/07/the-recurring-dream-of-replacing-developers.html

Malware Peddlers Are Now Hijacking Snap Publisher Domains

Tags: tech, packaging, supply-chain, security

New packaging ecosystems bring their new attack vectors. This is definitely a teething problem which will need to be addressed soon.

https://blog.popey.com/2026/01/malware-purveyors-taking-over-published-snap-email-domains/

An adversarial coding test

Tags: tech, security, ide

Are you sure you want to trust that random project you got provided with? Really?

https://runjak.codes/posts/2026-01-21-adversarial-coding-test/

Pocket TTS: A high quality TTS that gives your CPU a voice

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, speech

Sounds like a very interesting model (pun intended). It's really nice to pack that much performance in a smaller neural network.

https://kyutai.org/blog/2026-01-13-pocket-tts

Personal infrastructure setup 2026

Tags: tech, self-hosting, infrastructure

Nice ideas for setting up your own infrastructure at home.

https://linderud.dev/blog/personal-infrastructure-setup-2026/

Unconventional PostgreSQL Optimizations

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, optimization, performance

When everything obvious fails… there are still optimisation tricks available for your databases.

https://hakibenita.com/postgresql-unconventional-optimizations

Why DuckDB is my first choice for data processing

Tags: tech, data-science, databases, pandas, duckdb

I definitely would like to have some time to fiddle with DuckDB more. It looks like a really neat alternative to something like pandas.

https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_duckdb/

Understanding C++ Ownership System

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

Nice introduction of the C++ ownership system. Nothing new under the sun obviously but since I still encounter developers struggling with this, such introductory material is nice to have handy for sharing.

https://blog.aiono.dev/posts/understanding-c++-ownership-system.html

Rust's Culture of Semantic Precision

Tags: tech, rust, culture

This is indeed an important cultural trait in the Rust community. This can bring challenge when integrating Rust code into a context with more ambiguity.

https://www.alilleybrinker.com/mini/rusts-culture-of-semantic-precision/

LikeC4

Tags: tech, architecture, c4, tools

Still young and pretty much a one man show. This could turn into a nice tool to use C4 more productively.

https://likec4.dev/#features

Pushing the smallest possible change to production

Tags: tech, team, organisation

This is good advice. Going for something extremely small first is a good way to on board in a new project.

https://ankursethi.com/blog/smallest-possible-change/

A year in the life of a Staff Engineer

Tags: tech, tech-lead, leadership, management, product-management, engineering

This is a good overview of what the Staff Engineer can be. There's of course a lot of variation depending on time, priorities and the culture of the organisation.

https://medium.com/@_davidanderson/a-year-in-the-life-of-a-staff-engineer-84ae9f6963c1

Work friends are the secret to great culture

Tags: tech, work, team, culture, leadership

Feels a bit odd to go to such length to put it in numbers. And yet, it's clear that friendships in the workplace are a must. They should be fostered rather than stifled.

https://www.makeworkbetter.info/p/work-friends-are-the-secret-to-great

The Most Powerful Pirate In History

Tags: history

Fascinating story. Some people shouldn't be forgotten.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2lkVlB96y4

Bye for now!

23 Jan 2026 10:38am GMT

Tellico 4.1.5 is available, with a couple of updates. This will be the last release that retains compatibility with Qt5.

Improvements

• Fixed Arxiv ID search to return correct results.
• Updated the Data Crow importer for its new XML format.
• Updated the IGDB source.
• Corrected XML usage for arch with unsigned char, like ARM.

I'll have the next release out soon, v4.2, with several more updates, and requiring Qt6.

22 Jan 2026 12:22am GMT

Plasma + Usability & Productivity Sprint in Valencia, Spain | 2019 It's been almost 7 years since I made a post titled "First steps in open-source" where I talked about joining KDE - a Linux community of kindred spirits working on free and open-source software. Brimming with optimism and still living the more or less...... Continue Reading →

21 Jan 2026 9:48pm GMT

Every year the KDE Community actively helps people to become active community members and contributors to Free Software through our Season of KDE mentorship programs.

We would like to warmly welcome this year's mentees Aviral Singh, Keshav Nanda, Vishesh Srivastava, Varun Sajith Dass, Aditya Sarna, Jaimukund Bhan, Navya Sai Sadu, Kumud Sagar, Arun Rawat, Tanish Kumar, Ajay Singh, Mohit Mishra, Rohith Vinod, Shivang K Raghuvanshi, Onat Ribar, Hrishikesh Gohain, Aryan Rai, Advaith SK, CJ Nguyen, Siddharth Chopra, Nitin Pandey, Pavan Kumar S G, Sayandeep Dutta, Sairam Bisoyi, and J Shiva Shankar. They will be working on 21 projects covering a wide range of apps, frameworks, utilities and software in general to improve KDE.

Sok 2026 Projects

Standardise translation reference paths across all KDE projects

Translators work on PO files that contain the translation data, including the file path to the file that the specific translation comes from. To understand the purpose of a particular string, sometimes the translators need to view the translatable strings in the code itself. To allow KDE to build tooling around the paths, the PO files must be standardised so that all contain file path references relative to the project root rather than from an arbitrary directory.

This work has been started already but will be finished during this SOK project. Aviral Singh and Keshav Nanda will work under the guidance of Finley Watson on edge cases, testing and cleaning up the merge requests ready for merging. They will also improve the test script.

Lokalize tasks

All Lokalize projects will be mentored by Finley Watson.

Introduce Appium testing

Vishesh Srivastava will be integrating Appium testing in Lokalize. Appium is already used by other KDE software, and could be very helpful for testing UI changes, including keyboard shortcuts. This task will include coordinating with other mentees as they modify parts of the UI, as well as writing other general tests.

Improving logic consistency and MacOS platform stability

Varun Sajith Dass will work on fixing reported bugs, and improving string processing in many parts of Lokalize. Varun's aim is to increase the robustness of Lokalize's existing features, improve the quality of the output, and make following the Human Interface Guidelines easier for translators. This work will require coordination with other mentees e.g. for writing tests. Varun also aims to make it possible to build Lokalize on MacOS by fixing bugs related to this.

Fix the glossary

The glossary tab in Lokalize is unintuitive and hard to use, and currently crashes Lokalize unless you manually add the file that saves the glossary data to disk. Aditya Sarna and Jaimukund Bhan will update the UI so that it is easier to use, improve the glossary's behaviour, fix bugs and better follow the Human Interface Guidelines. They will work with the translators and visual designers to ensure their work follow KDE best practices and creates meaningful improvements.

Jump to next translation unit when sort filters are applied

The editor tab contains a dock widget called "Translation Units" which has the ability to filter and sort entries in translation files with the search bar. Moving between entries while approving them by using the shortcut jumps about in the list, rather than working down the sorted list correctly, one after another. Navya Sai Sadu and Kumud Sagar will be working together to fix this so the keyboard shortcut behaves as expected.

Redesign translation memory tab

The translation memory tab allows you to pick a TM (saved translation pairs from previous translation jobs / files) to search through, and shows the results in the list below. Arun Rawat will be redesigning the UI to enable searching multiple memories at once, with these settings saved per-project. Additionally, the Translation memories manager will be merged into the tab instead of existing separately e.g. by moving TM-specific entries into the right-click menu, and adding more general buttons into the TM tab page, or the toolbar that is specific to the TM tab.

Standardise menubar

Lokalize uses a KDE framework, KXMLGUI, to manage its menubar and status bar. In Lokalize, KXMLGUI allows you to define the contents of the menubar for each tab. Right now the tabs have different ordering of menus with some menus missing in certain tabs.

Tanish Kumar will re-design the menubar so all tabs to offer the same menubar. Where a tab does not use a menu, the menu will be added, with menu options disabled.

All Lokalize projects will be mentored by Finley Watson.

Investigate alternatives to dblatex to convert docbook to pdf

KDE's documentation build pipeline currently relies on a legacy, copy-pasted fork of dblatex embedded inside the docs-kde-org repository. While functional, this setup obscures Git history, complicates upgrades, and makes KDE-specific customizations such as kdestyle difficult to understand and maintain.

Ajay Singh, under Johnny Jazeix guidance, will investigate the possibility of using other tools than dblatex (such as pandoc) to create the pdf from docbook. The aim is to see if it fixes the current issues we have with non-supported non-ascii languages. And if there is a working alternative, he will work on trying to have a similar style to what we currently have in the kdestyle.

Extract dblatex fork from docs-kde-org repo and improve non ascii languages support

we are currently reworking the documentation website. The first task was to generate the documentation of each repo in a specific job.

Mohit Mishra will work on extracting the dblatex from the code into its own repo (keeping the history) and finding out if we can directly clone the original repository instead of having a fork.

Mentored by Johnny Jazeix, the overall goal is to try to use the upstream dblatex (shipped in distributions) to generate the pdf, experiment with XeTeX PDF generation engine instead of pdfTeX to create PDF for non supported non-ascii languages (Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean...). If we can't improve it, extract dblatex fork on a specific repo to ease the maintenance`

Implement font subsetting when saving files in Okular

Okular supports PDF annotations and form-filling. When a user adds text to a document, Okular must ensure that the text remains readable on any system irrespective of whether the font is installed locally or not. Hence the font data is directly embedded into the document using the PDF rendering library Poppler.

The problem arises due to the lack of proper font subsetting (as Poppler does not support this). Modern OpenType and TrueType fonts contain thousands of glyphs for various languages and symbols.

Okular approaches this by embedding the entire font file into the document. This causes an undesirably large file size due to all the extra unused glyphs/symbols being embedded.

Rohith Vinod and Shivang K. Raghuvanshi, under Albert Astals' supervision, will work on solving this problem using the hb-subset-input-glyph-set API.

Plasma Setup: mobile support

Plasma Setup is KDE's first run setup wizard, providing a friendly way to create the first user account and configure basic system settings. Unfortunately it only works on desktop form factors

Under Kristen McWilliam's guidance,Onat Ribar will work on supporting Plasma Setup for Plasma Mobile as well.

KEcoLab

Recent updates in the lab mean that X11-based emulation tools like xdotool are obsolete. Guided by Joseph P. De Veaugh-Geiss, Karanjot Singh, and Aakarsh MJ, Hrishikesh Gohain will be tasked with porting existing scripts to a Wayland-based tool. Once Wayland support is ready, Hrishikesh will prepare test scripts to measure the KDE Plasma Desktop Environment itself.

Turning mentorship.kde.org into a proper onboarding platform

mentorship.kde.org currently looks like a website, but does not behave like an onboarding system. Aryan Rai and Advaith SK will be required to convert the site into a guided entry point for KDE mentorship.

Anish Tak and Paul Brown will be guiding Aryan and Advaith throughout the project.

Automate Promo data collection

Promo collects data from different sources that measure how our followship grows, how many outlets are talking about us, what is our level engagement, etc. This information is currently collected by hand and is a massive time drain. CJ Nguyen, mentored by Paul Brown, will create systems to automate the collection, storage and analysis of this data.

Markdown and plain text editors for Marknote

Siddharth Chopra will be adding two editors to MarkNote, an app that lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks. The first editor is a raw markdown editor for .md files and a plain text editor for .txt files.

Siddharth also plans to work on making some improvements to the current markdown editor.

Carl Schwan will be Siddharth's mentor in this project.

Making Cantor's existing tests visible, reproducible, and actionable in CI

In this project, Avyakt Jain aims to activate Cantor's existing testing infrastructure in a low-risk, incremental, maintainer-friendly way by (1) producing a clear, factual overview of current test coverage and gaps, (2) enabling a minimal, MR-scoped CI test job that provides visible JUnit-based feedback, and (3) improving reproducibility and documentation for running tests locally. The expected outcome is faster, more reliable feedback for maintainers and contributors, without enforcing new quality gates or changing Cantor's runtime behavior.

Alexander Semke and Stefan Gerlach will be supervising Avyakt's work.

Call log synchronization and backup in KDE Connect

Nitin Pandey will be working on improving telephony integration in KDE Connect by implementing call log synchronization and backup from Android devices to the desktop. Instead of creating a separate desktop client for call history, the project will integrate call logs directly into the existing KDE Connect SMS client on the desktop, providing a unified communication view.

Albert Vaca will be mentoring this project.

Enhancement of KDE Mancala: Engine Parallelization and Digital Asset Creation

Pavan Kumar S G will speed up MankalaEngine by enabling it to use threads, Pavan Kumar SG will also create artwork to be used in the Mankala NextGen GUI.

This project will receive guidance from Benson Muite and Srisharan VS.

Improve Mankala GUI and add translations for Game variants

Sayandeep Dutta will improve the visual appeal of Mankala NextGen GUI and contribute towards it going through KDE Review. In addition, Tamil translations will be created for MankalaEngine and Mankala NextGen.

Srisharan VS and Benson Muite will support this project.

XMPP Support in Falkon through WebXDC

Sairam Bisoyi will create a Falkon extension to allow it to be used for chat using the XMPP protocol and its WebXDC extension..

The project advisors are Schimon Jehudah, Juraj Oravec and Benson Muite.

Adding Vamana Guntalu to Mankala Engine and a WebXDC bookmarking system in Falkon

J Shiva Shankar will add the Vamana Guntalu mancala game to MankalaEngine. J Shiva Shankar will also create a Falkon extension to allow synchronization of website bookmarks across different devices using the XMPP protocol in a WebXDC application.

The project advisors are Schimon Jehudah, Juraj Oravec and Benson Muite.

Stay in the loop!

You will be able to follow the progress of all mentees through their blog posts on KDE's planet, and by joining the relevant project communication channels.

21 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2026, Agustin relocates to La Palma while evolving his independent consulting practice. He aims to specialize services, explore freelancer collaborations, and adapt to AI, while remaining active in the thriving global open-source community.

20 Jan 2026 11:17am GMT

The Skrooge Team announces the release 26.1.20 version of its popular Personal Finances Manager based on KDE Frameworks.

Changelog

• Correction bug 512770: some accounts doubled in "amount" vs "today amount"
• Correction bug 513589: QIF import errors
• Correction bug 513016: skrooge-boursorama.py don't work
• Correction bug 514649: Performance issue
• Correction bug 514649: "Open transaction with..." and some other are empty

20 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

New features in NeoChat, new releases of Kaidan and Calligra Plan

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.

With January well under way, the news regarding KDE apps is coming thick and fast. Let's dig in!

PIM Applications

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

Tobias Fella added an option for remembering the signing/encryption configuration from the last operation (26.04.0 - pim/kleopatra MR #427).

Merkuro Mail Read and write emails

Florian Richer fixed some issues with the identity configuration dialog (26.04.0 - pim/kidentitymanagement MR #40).

Office Applications

Plan Project Management

Mickael Sergent released Calligra Plan 4.0.0 - the first version of Calligra Plan built with Qt 6! Also thanks to all packagers who fixed and modernized some of the CMake code after the release.

Marknote Write down your thoughts

Siddharth Chopra fixed the the font selection dialog (1.4.0 - office/marknote MR #82).

Creative Applications

Drawy Your handy, infinite brainstorming tool

Laurent Montel added support for drawing filled rectangles (graphics/drawy MR #216) and arrows (graphics/drawy MR #199), as well as changing the opacity of elements (graphics/drawy MR #205).

Kdenlive Video editor

Abdias J Moya Perez implemented a fixed centered playhead mode for the timeline. When enabled, the playhead remains locked at the center of the timeline view while the timeline content scrolls smoothly beneath it during playback, scrubbing, and seeking (multimedia/kdenlive MR #785).

Multimedia Applications

Photos Image Gallery

Noah Davis added a floating zoom bar (26.04.0 - graphics/koko MR #253).

Elisa Play local music and listen to online radio

Nate Graham removed two unnecessary buttons that appeared when hovering over songs in the playlist (26.04.0 - multimedia/elisa MR #737).

Utilities Applications

Kate Advanced text editor

Sahil Verma added support for importing user templates from local folders, which can then be used to generate files from specific templates (26.04.0 - utilities/kate MR #1969).

Network Applications

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Joshua Goins split up the Permissions settings for rooms, because the members list (with lots of moderators) tended to dominate the page. He also moved the search bar for members to the top, and re-organized various permissions into more suitable groups.

Joshua also added a "Seen By" dialog to allow you to view the read markers in something that isn't extremely small!

Another new and useful feature introduced by Joshua is private notes. Someone has a confusing username and you can't remember who they are? Need to jot down their birthday or keep track of the bad jokes they keep telling you? 😛 Since this isn't standardized between clients, it's only available in NeoChat. But on the flipside, it will sync between NeoChat on different computers.

And regarding safety-related changes, there were a few small additions too. Joshua added a new helpful dialog where you can view your server's support information in-app if available. It also wasn't clear where reports are sent to, which has caused confusion.

Finally, Joshua also fixed a lot of small bugs all over the place. You can read his Mastodon thread to learn more!

Darshan Phaldesai made some nice visual changes to the reaction buttons: now they use rounded rectangles instead of circles, and their text is more legible.

Kaidan Modern chat app for every device

The Kaidan team released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release introduces advanced media sharing, filtering of XMPP providers when creating an account, support for XMPP URIs, and more.

You can see more details at the announcement post.

Additionally, Melvin Keskin added support for audio/video calls (network/kaidan MR #1472).

KDE Connect Seamless connection of your devices

Stephan Seitz made sure that the sample commands provided by KDE Connect for the "Run Commands" plugin are OS-specific (26.04.0 - network/kdeconnect-kde MR #897).

Educational Applications

RKWard KDE frontend to the R statistics language

Thomas Friedrichsmeier made some progress in adding support for Quarto files (education/rkward MR #73).

Minuet Music Education Software

Sandro Andrade ported Minuet to Kirigami (26.04.0 - education/minuet MR #54).

System Applications

Dolphin Manage your files

Thanks to Akseli Lahtinen, binary files and scripts are now executable from the context menu (KDE Frameworks 6.23 - frameworks/kio MR #2113).

xi ota has added the option to always show the tab bar (24.04.0 - system/dolphin MR #1152).

External Applications

Kraft Quotes and invoices for small business

Klaas Freitag presented version 2.0 of Kraft this week. Kraft is a business tool that helps you keep track of payments as well as creating quotes, invoices, and other business-related documents.

Version 2.0 is easier to install, implements a legal document life cycle from draft to finalized, comes with better PDF output, makes it easier to migrate from your earlier versions, and continues to protect your privacy as it integrates well with your own Nextcloud or OpenCloud instances.

Games

Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano added a bye editor to Chessament (games/chessament MR #39). What's a "bye editor"? Learn about Bye on this Wikipedia page.

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you're hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE - you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don't have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

19 Jan 2026 2:21pm GMT

Extended Security Maintenance Is Now Available

19 Jan 2026 1:13pm GMT

In the Qt Company's R&D organization we have made it a tradition to start the year with a Hackathon where anyone can work on anything they find interesting. It's a great opportunity to work on or with something else than usual, to try out new technologies, or to generally scratch whatever might have been itching. We started with a pitching session the week before so that people that are looking for inspiration or projects to join know what's on the buffet. And then on Wednesday morning we kicked off the hacking, giving everyone two full days to work on their project before the presentations on Friday noon.

19 Jan 2026 12:36pm GMT

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.3.2, the second bugfix release for Amarok 3.3 "Far Above the Clouds"!

3.3.2 features a number of small improvements, including various small behaviour changes and bugfixes in e.g. user interface, audio backend and saving of playlist files. Additionally, 'added to collection' date, which previously was available in collection search only, is now displayed in track's details in tag dialog. KDE Framework depedency is now set at version 6.5, which was released in mid-2024. All in all, Amarok 3.3.2 should bring improved usability and stability, ensuring you can keep enjoying your music in 2026.

Changes since 3.3.1

FEATURES:

• Show 'added to collection' time in tag dialog when available (BR 508899)

CHANGES:

• Make single click open items and double click add to playlist in collection browser.
• Amarok now depends on KDE Frameworks 6.5.

BUGFIXES:

• Fixes to Magnatune collection update and playback (BR 508052)
• Fix some issues in playlist layout editor UI
• Fix disabling of notifications when using system notifications
• Fix getting stuck in a loop if mute state was altered repeatedly
• Fix podcast sort order for some channels (BR 511036)
• Fix saving stream URLs in playlist (BR 509204)

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.3.2 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.

Packager section

You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.

18 Jan 2026 9:20am GMT

For the past few years, generation of user documentation at docs.kde.org was not working. After a few months on working on the related issue, we finally managed to make it functional again and it once again displays the documentation for almost 150 applications!

Previous issues

There were major issues with the previous workflow:

• The documentation generation and publication were done on a dedicated machine.
• It was a monolithic process: the generation of the documentation for all KDE projects was followed with the generation of the website and its publication.
• Since the arrival of Qt 6, it was not possible to easily update the process to take it into account, so no new documentation was generated.

For ease of maintenance, it would be better if:

• Each application took care of generating its own documentation
• The website generation only cared about retrieving the existing documentation and building the website
• We could have an easy way to reproduce it locally

Current solution

Update suse-qt610 image

We use the suse-qt610 docker image to generate the documentation. The different packages needed to build the html/PDF files and generate the website have been installed.

Generation of the documentation

We have created a new pipeline documentation.yml that was added for each application which has documentation. This pipeline takes care of generating the documentation and publishing it to a specific registry. To ensure the documentation is well-generated, developers need to ensure that their project has:

• 'frameworks/kdoctools': '@latest-kf6' listed in its .kde-ci.yml
• - /gitlab-templates/documentation.yml in its .gitlab-ci.yml
• kdoctools_install(po) in its CMakeLists.txt

Local generation

To generate locally, you can use the following commands. First retrieve and run the latest image:

podman pull invent-registry.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-images/suse-qt610:latest
podman run --user=root -it suse-qt610:latest

Inside it, clone your repository (the example will use GCompris-teachers handbook):

cd builds
git clone https://invent.kde.org/documentation/gcompris-teachers-handbook
cd gcompris-teachers-handbook

Clone the needed repositories and export the environment variables:

git clone https://invent.kde.org/websites/docs-kde-org.git docs-kde-org --depth=1
git clone https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-utilities.git --depth=1
git clone https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/repo-metadata.git ci-utilities/repo-metadata/ --depth=1

export KDECI_GITLAB_SERVER=https://invent.kde.org/
export KDECI_PACKAGE_PROJECT=teams/ci-artifacts/suse-qt6.10
export KDECI_CACHE_PATH=/home/user/caches/
export DBLATEX_BASE_DIR=$PWD/docs-kde-org
export SGML_CATALOG_FILES=$PWD/_install/share/kf6/kdoctools/customization/catalog.xml

Note: we only need the docs-kde-org repository because of PDF generation. There is some work in progress to reduce this dependency.

Retrieve the dependencies and build the documentation:

python3 -u ci-utilities/run-ci-build.py --project gcompris-teachers-handbook --branch master --platform Linux/Qt6/Shared --only-setup-environment
python3 ci-utilities/generate-documentation.py --project gcompris-teachers-handbook --output-folder webdoc --format html pdf --branch master

The output will be in the webdoc folder. You can copy this to your machine using podman cp CONTAINERID:/builds/gcompris-teachers-handbook/webdoc/ . (use podman ps to get the CONTAINERID).

Website generation

Now that each project generates its own documentation, we have reworked the existing website scripts to use these files instead of generating all of them again.

The script will browse all the projects in KDE which have i18n branches in their metadata and fetch the corresponding documentation (if it exists).

The last step is to generate the indexes for the website's search feature, using Xapian.

Local website generation

To generate locally, you can use the following commands. First retrieve and run the latest image:

podman pull invent-registry.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-images/suse-qt610:latest
podman run --user=root -it suse-qt610:latest

Inside it, clone the needed repositories and create the needed logs folder:

cd builds
git clone https://invent.kde.org/documentation/gcompris-teachers-handbook
cd gcompris-teachers-handbook
git clone https://invent.kde.org/websites/docs-kde-org.git docs-kde-org --depth=1
git clone https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/ci-utilities.git --depth=1
git clone https://invent.kde.org/sysadmin/repo-metadata.git ci-utilities/repo-metadata/ --depth=1

You will also need to generate a gitlab token from your invent account. Make sure the read_api scope is selected!

export KDECI_GITLAB_SERVER=https://invent.kde.org/
export KDECI_GITLAB_TOKEN=generated_token
export KDECI_PACKAGE_PROJECT=teams/ci-artifacts/suse-qt6.10
export KDECI_CACHE_PATH=/home/user/caches/

Generate the website, copy static files and run the xapian indexing:

./kdedocgen.py -r -s -l doclogconfig.ini -c docgen_conf.ini
./create_generated_used.php work >website/generated_used.inc.php 2>logs/genused.log
python3 -u ci-utilities/run-ci-build.py --project docs-kde-org --branch master --platform Linux/Qt6/Shared --only-setup-environment
cp -R _install/share/doc/HTML/en/kdoctools6-common website/trunk_kf6/en/
cp -R search/ website/
./website/search/do_xapian_index.sh

The output will be in the website folder.

Website deployment

The website repository has its own scheduled pipeline (once a week) to generate the website and publish it.

The deployment is done using the ci-notary service.

Future plans

There are still multiple issues to tackle:

• Most non-ASCII languages (CJK, Arabic...) are not supported for PDF generation. We have two contributors in Season of KDE who will dig into finding a solution to improve this!
• We have several hardcoded paths/links to Qt 6/KF 6. We need to drop those for when Qt 7/KF 7 comes.
• Updating deprecated documentation where it makes sense.

18 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Last weekend I attended a rather spontaneous Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, again hosted at Wikimedia's WikiBär.

Topics

Elevator data

Data about current and planned future elevator outages is becoming available in a standardized format (SIRI SX and SIRI FM), in Germany and Switzerland at least. That's crucial information especially for wheelchair routing, and MOTIS, the routing engine used by Transitous, can take this into consideration. However, it doesn't support the SIRI format yet.

The main challenge here is identifying the affected elevator:

• The German SIRI FM data uses DIID identifiers for elevators. While those also appear in the OpenStation dataset, we currently have neither geographic coordinates for them nor are DIIDs referenced in OpenStreetMap. This leaves us with no practical way to map the elevator status information to an elevator in the OSM data for routing, at this point.
• The Swiss SIRI SX data uses OSM node/way ids for elevators. While there are concerns about the stability of those as identifiers, this should nevertheless work sufficiently in the majority of cases.

NeTEx

So far all static schedule data used by Transitous is using the GTFS format. That's a relatively simple set of CSV files in a ZIP. There's a another format for this though, NeTEx. It's a vastly more complex and rather verbose XML, but it can also model a number of things that cannot be represented in GTFS so far, such as vehicle attributes.

MOTIS v2.8 added initial support for NeTEx, but due to the complexity of the format and its tendency to offer multiple different ways to model the same thing it remains a case-by-case investigation whether a specific NeTEx feed is working sufficiently well.

We looked at three feeds that seem particularly promising at this point. While using NeTEx there would give us clear benefits, all of them would also introduce regressions over the status quo that need to be addressed first.

DELFI NeTEx feed for Germany:

• Contains correct train names for non-IC/non-ICE long distance trains (EC, ECE, RJ, RJX, etc).
• Contains vehicle attributes (on a similar level as provided by DB's website).
• Less details regarding bus stops compared to GTFS, e.g. missing many platform names.

SNCF NeTEx feed for France:

• Would finally give us proper route types and train names for TGV, IC and TER trains.
• Misses some trips included in the corresponding GTFS feed.
• Realtime data doesn't match against the NeTEx feed.
• We tested a workaround by importing both the NeTEx and GTFS feeds in the right order and have MOTIS merge the common trips correctly. This works as such, but identified two pre-existing merging issues that need to be fixed in MOTIS first.

Swiss national NeTEx feed:

• Would give us train numbers for international trains and at least some vehicle attributes.
• Matching rates against realtime data are lower than with GTFS. Workarounds like currently in use in Germany might help, augmenting the schedule data with stop registry data.

While it will still take a bit of time before any of those feeds will enter production on Transitous, we have started to prepare Transitous' import pipeline and documentation to not exclusively assume GTFS as the input format anymore.

And more…

There were plenty more topics discussed beyond those two:

• Making the Grafana dashboard more useful for feed/region maintainers.
• Using Wikidata as the canonical source for data augmentation, and how we could reliably match GTFS agencies or routes to Wikidata items.
• Requirements for a routing profile for blind users, such as routing along tactile and acoustic markers and minimizing steps and crossings.
• Implementation details for adding "on-trip" queries, ie. routing requests that don't start from a location but on board of a vehicle.
• Resolving duplicates between multiple GBFS v3 aggregated feeds.

For more details, also see the meeting notes.

And to end this with a screenshot, we also fixed the font rendering on the Transitous map which was missing labels in e.g. Egypt, Georgia and Thailand.

Upcoming events

There's several more opportunities in the upcoming weeks to meet members of the Transitous community:

• FOSDEM in Brussels on January 31 - February 1.
• The OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe on February 21-22.
• FOSSGIS-Konferenz in Göttingen, March 25-28.

There's of course also the Transitous Matrix channel to get involved.

17 Jan 2026 10:15am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we closed the door on features for Plasma 6.6, which opened another one for those features to land in 6.7. As a result, several features were merged for Plasma 6.7, including some particularly juicy ones!

As for Plasma 6.6, this starts the one-month period where the core Plasma team focuses almost entirely on fixing bugs. As you'll see below, we already fixed quite a few this week! So there's a huge amount of stuff to go over, and let's get right to it:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

System Monitor now lets you set the priority of processes graphically, just like the older KSysGuard app did. (Matthieu Carteron, plasma-systemmonitor MR #381 and libksysguard MR #455)

(The lack of a darkened underlay is unintentional; we'll get that fixed up soon.)

Plasma 6.7.0

Added a switch to the Brightness and Color widget that lets you instantly go from light mode to dark mode (or vice versa)! (Kai Uwe Broulik, powerdevil MR #576)

(At some point we'll add a nice cross-fade transition here, too.)

Added a global push-to-talk feature: if you set a push-to-talk key, all microphones will be muted until the specified key is held down. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and Shubham Arora, plasma-pa MR #394, kglobalaccel MR #41, and plasma-workspace MR #6126)

Notable UI Improvements

Plasma 6.5.6

The HDR calibration wizard now temporarily disables Night Light while calibrating, to ensure that you get an accurate result. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #448)

Plasma 6.6.0

Mounting a removable disk no longer performs a file system scan by default; now this is a manual action you initiate from the expanded actions list. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #505852)

The screen chooser dialog now includes a search/filter field so you can easily find a screen by name even when there are a zillion windows open. (Harald Sitter, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #506)

Kicker's search results no longer flicker or resize while typing, keeping columns stable during searches for a smoother and snappier experience. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3439)

HDR Calibrator now offers a summary page with a setting to better support Windows HDR applications and games. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #443)

Replaced some technical gobbledygook in the titles of Bluetooth status and error notifications with more relevant and user-friendly text. (Nate Graham, bluedevil MR #238)

(The body text isn't great either, but that's also being worked on!)

If you happen to have a keyboard or other input device with "Seek Forwards" and "Seek Backwards" buttons, pressing them now works as expected out of the box. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #514680)

Plasma 6.7.0

System Settings' Game Controller, Mouse, and Touchpad pages now only appear when the devices they configure are present. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-desktop MR #3436)

Discover now shows sub-categories in its "Games" group for game launchers and game tools. (Jakob Dev, discover MR #1224)

Improved how the global edit mode works with a touchscreen. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6161 and plasma-desktop MR #3442)

On System Settings' Accessibility page, the Mouse Navigation tooltip now explains how to switch mouse click modes with the numeric keypad. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE Bug #505687)

Searching for "memory" now turns up the System Monitor app in search results. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6194)

Frameworks 6.23

Improved the touch-friendliness of open/save dialogs. (Méven Car, KDE Bug #513606)

Improved the icon selection algorithm for missing icons so that it no longer returns downscaled versions of much larger icons, which may have a completely different style. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #466678)

By default, sidebars and left edge drawers in Kirigami-using apps now have exactly the width needed to avoid being too wide or too narrow. Some apps still override the default width, and that will need to be un-done now, so expect the weirdly-sized sidebars to get fixed over time, rather than all at once when you upgrade to Frameworks 6.23. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #505693)

KDE Gear 26.04.0

System Settings' pages related to audio CDs (if you have them installed) now only appear when the computer has any optical drives. (Nate Graham, KDE Bug #513661 and KDE Bug #513664)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.5.5

Fixed a case where KWin could crash on launch when the GPU did something weird when trying to render screencasts or window thumbnails. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513710)

Fixed an issue that made the fingerprint enrollment dialog's "Add" button go missing if you canceled enrollment and then immediately re-opened the dialog. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #514088)

Fixed an issue that sometimes made Weather Report widget's tooltip use the wrong unit and display numbers with excessive decimal places. (Ismael Asensio, KDE Bug #514419)

Fixed an issue that made System Settings' search field sometimes not show the proper language-specific placeholder text. (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Bug #512187)

Plasma 6.5.6

Fixed one of the top Plasma crashes that could happen when turning off certain screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #511757)

Fixed a crash in System Settings' Game Controller page when using certain devices and versions of the SDL library. (David Edmundson, KDE Bug #511859)

If you have multiple Plasma panels, clicking on different ones over and over again while in edit mode no longer makes multiple panel edit dialogs appear. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #513135)

Plasma 6.6.0

Fixed a KWin crash that could happen when waking up a laptop connected to an external screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514229)

Fixed an issue relating to focus on the lock screen with multi-monitor setups. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bug #512028)

Discover's window no longer becomes un-maximized when any popup dialogs appear. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #503801)

Having an exotic network setup or a lot of Docker containers no longer breaks the layout of System Settings' Remote Desktop page while the feature is turned on. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #513504)

Plasma 6.7.0

If you've turned on the login sound, it now plays at the right time. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bug #510923)

Frameworks 6.22.1

Fixed a regression that made KDE Connect crash due to clipboard shenanigans. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #514512)

Frameworks 6.23

Fixed two issues with tooltips that could sometimes cause them to be offset or rapidly appear and disappear in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #510860 and KDE Bug #511875)

Fixed some bugs and visual glitches with certain sidebars and list items in Kirigami-based apps when using an RTL language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Marco Martin and Christoph Wolk, kirigami MR #2027 and kirigami MR #2026)

Fixed a strange issue that could cause notifications from the Quod Libet music player specifically to stop appearing. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #489910)

Symbolic icons for KDE Connect now re-color themselves properly when using a non-default color scheme. (Ángel Navarro, breeze-icons MR #522)

Qt 6.10.3

Fixed two of the most common Plasma crashes that were caused by Qt's QML Compiler doing something weird under the hood. (Ulf Hermann, KDE Bug #513527 and KDE Bug #513012)

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.6.0

Implemented version 2 of the Wayland color management protocol. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8033)

Reduced some visual glitches in Firefox when turning on its off-by-default HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514599)

Plasma 6.7.0

Implemented support for network activity monitoring on FreeBSD in the System Monitor app and widgets. (Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen, ksystemstats MR #41)

How You Can Help

Since the Plasma 6.6 beta period has commenced, this is a great time to submit bug reports for all the niggling issues you've been suffering with but haven't formally reported yet. We're focusing more than usual on bug triage too, so your reports will be seen.

There's a new Troubleshooting help page that can help narrow down issues, too. Check it out! And helping to triage other people's reported issues is a big help, too.

In addition, "This Week in Plasma" needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:

• Help put together the posts using the current mostly manual process
• Help automate the process

Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.

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 keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here

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

17 Jan 2026 12:03am GMT

The Plasma Login Manager support has been merged into Ni! OS.

If you want to use it, there are two prerequisites:

1. you are using Wayland, not X11; and
2. you are on unstable NixOS.

It is in the "works for me" state. I don't use auto-login, virtual keyboard, etc.

Going unstable

If you are on the stable channel, which would surprise me as you're reading this post, it is easy to switch to unstable just by running these commands as root user (sudo, or su, or…).

nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable nixos
nix-channel --update
nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade 

This will switch you to the unstable version of NixOS.

Mind that, as NixOS is an immutable distribution, you can easily boot back into the stable version - the previous version of your system is still accessible in the bootloader menu.

Switching from SDDM to the Plasma Login Manager

There's a new option in Ni! OS called experimental.use_plasma_login_manager. The only thing you need to do in order to switch from SDDM to the Plasma Login Manager is to set it to true, and just switch your setup to the new configuration with:

nixos-rebuild switch

Switching back is also trivial - just change the value back to false and do the switch again.

There and back again

One new thing in Ni! OS is a custom label for the versions of the system (derivations in NixOS terminology).

If you enable an experimental feature such as the Plasma Login Manager, the label will clearly denote that. It makes it easy to get back to a version without the experimental features enabled.

As you can see in the following screenshot, the default label is kde-ni-os and all enabled experimental features are appended to it - when enabling the Plasma Login Manager, the label becomes kde-ni-os:plasma-login-manager. These labels can be seen in the following screenshot:

[edit] Upstream

Was notified by NixOS KDE maintainer K900, that PLM will officially become a part of nixpkgs as Plasma 6.5.5 gets updated to 6.6.

You can follow the progress of the patch here.

Once Plasma 6.6 is released, and it becomes available in nixpkgs, Ni! OS will start using the official package instead of my local hack.

16 Jan 2026 9:45pm GMT