fidzu : KDE

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

Some of the last Plasma 6.8 features landed this week, and there's a whole bunch of great stuff! Let's jump right in:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

Plasma now features a built-in "dwell clicker" feature! This is an accessibility tool that automatically clicks whenever the pointer is moved somewhere and then left alone for a moment - and what constitutes a "moment" is configurable, of course. It works really well. You can learn a bit more about it on Sebastian's blog. (Sebastian Sauer, KDE Bugzilla #521391)

Speaking of pointers and clicking… the feature to scroll by holding down the middle mouse button and moving the pointer now has a new optional triggering mode: you can press the middle mouse button to enter and exit this scrolling mode, without having to hold it down. This makes it bit closer to the "Autoscroll" feature on Windows. (Uriel Fontan, KDE Bugzilla #495617)

Plasma's ever-growing list of alternate calendar layouts now includes the Bikram Sambat calendar used in Nepal and parts of India. (Satya Prakash Dahal, KDE Bugzilla #500298)

There's now a new remote desktop mode that locks the remote computer's physical screens upon connection, and shows a newly-created virtual screen to the user who is connecting. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #230)

Screen readers can now ask KWin what window is under the pointer. (Nicolas Fella, kwin MR #9825)

Union styles now appear on System Settings' Application Styles page! This will make it easier to use and test them, and you can also import them from files, too. (Arjen Hiemstra, plasma-workspace MR #6970)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8

You can now disable a screen or other output only when this is actually supported. (David Edmundson, kscreen MR #512)

The mouse keys acceleration spinbox no longer claims it's showing milliseconds, because it isn't! (Nicolas Fella, plasma-desktop MR #2854)

When you resize the Display Configuration widget, the buttons within it resize smoothly, not jerkily. (Michal Malinowski, kscreen MR #513)

The off-by-default feature to show tooltip thumbnails when clicking on a grouped Task Manager Task (kind of like how Windows does it) now works in a more natural-feeling way. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #484206)

KDE Gear 26.12.0

The expander arrow for notifications in KDE Connect's widget now points in the correct direction in all states, including when using a right-to-left language. (Ely Golden and Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #524889)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed an issue that could make the Maliit on-screen keyboard crash at seemingly-random times. (Sebastian Müller, kwin MR #9818)

If a Plasma Vault with the "Go offline while this vault is open" feature is left open when the system shuts down, networking is now restored on the next login as expected. (Just Karol, KDE Bugzilla #457680)

Clicking on a link in a notification no longer also invokes the notification's default action. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7003)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed a somewhat common way that KDE's background daemon could crash when connecting to a Wi-Fi network or creating a hotspot. (Mickaël Thomas, KDE Bugzilla #522489)

Fixed a somewhat common way that Plasma could crash while shutting down or restarting when there was a Weather Report widget in the panel. (Bohdan Onofriichuk, KDE Bugzilla #524929)

Discover no longer fails to check for updates on operating systems that integrate the fwupd firmware updater system into Discover, but where its background process quits early while Discover is still running. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #521682)

Task Manager tasks' progress bars now work as expected when using a right-to-left language. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #524112)

Fixed a recent regression in Discover that made it show a banner about updates requiring a restart for too many types of updates. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, discover MR #1404)

Fixed a bug that made scrolling through Alt+Tab items with a mouse wheel only work in one direction. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #522229)

Apps that resize their windows immediately after launching are now still positioned correctly according to the "Centered" window placement mode. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #525036)

Fixed some visual glitches in the Eye On Screen effect. (Sudip Datta, KDE Bugzilla #481100)

Fixed the Apply and Help buttons in the Clipboard settings window not working always, or at all, respectively. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #485460 and plasma-workspace MR #6992)

Plasma 6.8

Apps or the user can no longer crash KWin by sending malformed shortcut assignment requests over D-Bus. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #524700)

On System Settings' Power Management page, the spinboxes used to configure charge limits now work properly when you type numbers into them. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #505071)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7.5

Changing your system languages now sends the same data correctly to Flatpak apps, so they can more reliably display the languages you asked for. (Harald Sitter, plasma-workspace MR #6883)

Plasma 6.8

Screen recordings made by Spectacle and any other app using the KPipeWire library are now higher in quality. (Sergey Katunin, kpipwire MR #278)

Reduced the amount of VRAM that Plasma's Breeze theme requires by optimizing some of its SVG assets. (Méven Car, libplasma MR #1567)

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.

04 Sep 2026 6:17pm GMT

Back from vacations and I did some catch up late at night… So expect a larger selection than usual. Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-36.

WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone

Tags: tech, web, internet, culture, history

A very uplifting essay in my opinion. Starts with a historical perspective on the webmaster role to then evolve into a manifesto about creation on the web.

https://brennan.day/webmaster-a-manifesto-for-everyone/

There's no such thing as Just a Tool

Tags: tech, tools, philosophy, framework, design

Indeed, it's high time our industry leaves the "it's just a tool" rhetoric behind. This claim is a way for us to not take our responsibilities in the design of the tools we make.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH

Tags: tech, foss, politics

There's no "apolitical" projects. Claiming the contrary is just trying to hide your agenda. While our engineer culture keeps falling for it, really bad actors are benefiting from it…

https://brennan.day/normalized-fascism-in-open-source-12-million-given-to-dhh/

Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users

Tags: tech, facebook, social-media, law, surveillance

This is not indeed the win you'd expect. More surveillance coming pushed by the settlement…

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/09/metas-17-billion-settlement-bad-deal-teens-and-all-social-media-users

The actual epistemic crisis

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, fake, fake-news, knowledge, politics

Very important opinion piece from Cory Doctorow again. The trend was clear of an epistemic crisis brewing and generative AI basically put it on steroids. This is a real blow to our civilisation.

https://pluralistic.net/2026/08/20/epistemic-void/#expert-agencies

The people vs the AI overlords

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

Clearly there's a political project behind the design of those tools. Clearly our industry is lacking enough class consciousness to push back against the "AI overlords" agenda.

https://anarc.at/blog/2026-08-18-people-vs-ai-overlords/

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ethics, book, knowledge

This truly makes me sad… The level of cynicism required to destroy rare books is just beyond me. All this to squeeze the last human made tokens available with no real gain in sight.

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

AI Software Development - What Does The Data Say?

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

The executive summary is good. This is also a nice source of reference papers and studies on the topic. It shows quite well why the work is moving to the harnesses rather than the models. Indeed models probably won't improve much in terms of reliability. It all points once again towards a needed shift of people attention from the shiny toys and towards team practice instead.

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/

There Is Still No Silver Bullet

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, productivity, engineering, craftsmanship

Very good opinion piece going back to Naur's and Brook's important papers about software production. It's a sobering take on how LLM can't bring the promised productivity gains. This is not saying it can't bring productivity gains of course but it'll never be as dramatic as what the current hype cycle pushes people to believe.

https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bullet/

Copyrightability of LLM-generated code: Can we license "vibe code" into Free Software?

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

Clearly the situation of copyright around LLM uses is complex. It's easy to fall into code which can't be copyrighted if there's not enough human input to produce the work (and keep in mind that "prompting" is likely not enough input). This also raises questions about potential copyright violations. Looks like following the guidelines of the SFC for contributing to Free Software projects is getting especially important.

https://fsfe.org/news/2026/news-20260825-01.html

And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

Tags: tech, security, privacy, politics

Or a reminder that no system can be made to be completely safe and secure. When the political pressure or violence gets in the equation it's hard to not simply falter and satisfy the demands.

https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/08/and-then-the-men-with-guns-tell-you-to-do-it-anyway/

hk - Git Hook Manager

Tags: tech, git, tools, linting

Might turn into a nice way to manage your git hooks.

https://hk.jdx.dev/

Easy Sandboxing on Linux with Bubblewrap

Tags: tech, linux containers, flatpak, security, sandbox

A nice and simple approach to sandbox a command. Of course with the system integration it's a bit porous bit it might be a good base for quite a few uses.

https://bxt.rs/blog/easy-sandboxing-on-linux-with-bubblewrap/

Hister: Your Own Search Engine

Tags: tech, search, self-hosting

Looks like an interesting personal indexing system for your own files and slice of the web.

https://hister.org/

Monitoring SystemD services with Healthchecks.io

Tags: tech, systemd, monitoring

Neat trick to monitor systemd services.

https://passbe.com/2022/healthchecks-io-systemd-checks/

Python sets and dictionaries can have quadratic-time performance

Tags: tech, python, performance, algorithm, cpu, memory, complexity

Too often people mistake the algorithmic complexity theory for the real performances you would get. This can't be further from the truth. The memory layout trumps all. As usual you need to measure.

https://lemire.me/blog/2026/09/03/python-sets-and-dictionaries-can-have-quadratic-time-performance/

Rewriting in Rust: Performance, Failures, 2026 Reality Check

Tags: tech, rust, porting, rewrite, safety

Unsurprisingly it's not all unicorns and rainbows. This piece tries to highlight the right questions to ask yourself before aiming for a rewrite.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/rust/2026/08/10/rewriting-in-rust/

Rust concurrency vs Go concurrency: stackless vs stackfull coroutines

Tags: tech, go, rust, asynchronous, coroutine

Comparison of two concurrency models. This is a light read which shows quite well the differences.

https://kerkour.com/rust-vs-go-concurrency

Concurrency vs. Throughput: why more parallelism can make databases slower

Tags: tech, multithreading, databases, performance

When more concurrency might not help. Illustration with the case of database queries.

https://planetscale.com/blog/concurrency-vs-throughput-vitess-mysql

SQLite for Everything

Tags: tech, databases, sqlite, architecture, funny

Another love letter to SQLite. It's meant to be funny but comes with plenty of good arguments and ideas as well.

https://joecode.com/2026-08-19-sqlite3/

The Browser's Main Thread Is Expensive

Tags: tech, web, frontend, browser, performance

A reminder that web frontend work isn't as easy as it sounds. It brings quite some caveats and his difficult to do well. Otherwise you wonder why things stutter or render badly.

https://kciter.so/posts/the-expensive-main-thread/en/

Ambient CSS - a physics-based lighting system for CSS

Tags: tech, css, graphics, physics

Really nice tricks you can pull with CSS nowadays. The result is fairly nice visually.

https://ambientcss.vercel.app/

HTML Can Do That

Tags: tech, html, javascript

More proofs that HTML is more and more capable by itself.

https://chrisburnell.com/html-can-do-that/#example-until-found

Solving copyright & licensing information in client-side JavaScript, CSS and similar

Tags: tech, web, frontend, javascript, licensing, foss, law

Finally a sensible approach to communicate license compliance for client side content delivered via a browser. It's not too much of a bother so let's hope it gets picked up.

https://matija.suklje.name/solving-copyright-licensing-information-in-client-side-javascript-css-and-similar-agreeing-on-a-useful-solution

Software That Must Not Be Wrong: Property Tests for a Pediatric Dosing Calculator

Tags: tech, property-based-testing, tests, rust, type-systems

Interesting case where you want to property test but without a specific property base test tool. Indeed, if you need to be exhaustive and the input space is small enough this is the better decision. This article also comes with interesting point on Rust type system but that's less central to the main point.

https://rust-blog.github.io/post/favi-child-property-tests/

Let's not call it "tech debt," it's just "mess"

Tags: tech, technical-debt, complexity, maintenance, craftsmanship

A good piece showing some of the problems with how the term technical debt is widely misused. There's a problem with the metaphor itself, you rarely have the information level needed to call it debt.

https://www.simplermachines.com/lets-not-call-it-tech-debt-its-just-mess/

Guilt-Driven Development

Tags: tech, quality, engineering, craftsmanship

I like this article somehow. Indeed I'd like to see more guilt in the people shipping bugs in production (myself included probably). Also I'm very much aligned with the proposed approach to tame issues: thinking, types, tests, and telemetry.

https://markuseliasson.se/article/guilt-driven-development

Reviewing code is a skill

Tags: tech, engineering, codereview, learning, knowledge

Excellent piece about code reviews. But it goes further than that and shows how our skills could improve. By tackling this question it does a good job showing we don't know where the ceiling is in terms of skills in our craft.

https://typesanitizer.com/blog/code-review.html

Coachability++

Tags: tech, coaching, management, mentoring

Interesting slide deck about coaching in tech circles. Clearly provides good inspiration both for coaches or if you're the one requesting to be coached.

https://cate.blog/2021/02/22/coachability/

The Expertise Trap

Tags: expertise, problem-solving, cognition, bias

This is an easy trap to fall into unfortunately. Be mindful of your own biases. They might increase as you gain more expertise in a field unfortunately.

https://www.congruentchange.com/the-expertise-trap/

Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?

Tags: history, politics, mathematics

Don't be fooled by the click-bait title. It's a good piece looking at history and game theory. It gives some lessons about how civilizations collapse… or not.

https://thegrimhistorian.substack.com/p/has-america-crossed-the-asshole-threshold?ref=DenseDiscovery-404

Meet the 2026 Ig Nobel Prize winners

Tags: science, funny

Another good crop of Ig Nobel this year! I'm not sure which one is my favorite.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/meet-the-2026-ig-nobel-prize-winners/

Bye for now!

04 Sep 2026 11:46am GMT

For many years now, I and others have been working on getting plasmashell's open bug reports as accurate and actionable as possible.

We've made tremendous progress, driving down the number of unconfirmed bug reports to its lowest levels in over a decade, and mostly keeping it there:

Right now we're at a point where we're down to about 160 unconfirmed reports, and we need your help to get that down as close to 0 as possible.

Why do we need your help?

Because most of the remaining unconfirmed bugs are really hard to reproduce and confirm. They can only be understood or reproduced by someone with specialized hardware, uncommon software, specialized configurations, specific VPN setups, domain-specific knowledge, and so on. Others were reported in a state where the author doesn't know how to reproduce the issue and none of us has been able to, either.

The addition of your valuable eyeballs and brains can help figure out what the heck is going on in these reports!

How to help

Go to https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&list_id=3586535&order=changeddate%20DESC%2Cdupecount%20DESC%2Cshort_desc%2Cproduct%2Clongdescs.count%20DESC%2Cbug_id%20DESC&product=plasmashell&query_format=advanced, and…

• Figure out the pattern for issues that are reported to happen "randomly" or "sometimes".
• If you have the hardware, configuration, or specialized software necessary to try to reproduce an issue described as specific to it, try.
• If you're familiar with upstream software like the Qt, PipeWire, Bluez, graphics drivers or the Linux kernel, help identify bug reports whose issue is upstream of KDE.

What it takes

1. Use the latest released version of Plasma. that's 6.7.4 as of the time of writing. A distro that uses git master versions of things is even better.
2. Use a distro that ships KDE software as "vanilla" as possible, with a minimum of distro-specific customizations. Either as your daily driver, or in a VM. Arch Linux and KDE Linux are good options here, and Fedora KDE is okay too. Highly opinionated distros can still work, but are not as ideal for bug triage.
3. Read through and understand https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging.
4. Be nice. You'll be a part of KDE's public face!

And that's it! Bug triaging help is really appreciated here.

I would absolutely love it if we could get the number of UNCONFIRMED plasmashell bugs down to 0, and then keep them that way by pouncing on every single new one as it comes in.

You can help make that possible! Thanks, everyone.

04 Sep 2026 12:30am GMT

Hello everyone!

My Google Summer of Code project Font Subsetting in Poppler has technically been completed with this MR getting merged.

Poppler now supports Font Subsetting and a new release is going to be out soon. Although the work has been rigorously tested for regressions on a lot of PDF files, I am still quite nervous :D

Here's a demo video I made for font subsetting:

Experience

Overall, GSoC was a very enriching experience. I learnt many things I didn't know before such as PDF internals, some C++ and CMake features and sharpened my debugging skills using GDB.
But it was also a very tough experience, there were a lot of times when I thought I was going to fail.

I'll also be attending Akademy in Graz so I hope to meet and learn from a lot of contributors from there!

Gratitude

I am grateful to god for providing me with such an opportunity.

I would like to thank my mentor Albert Astals Cid for mentoring me throughout GSoC.
Huge thanks to the people from the Poppler community, Sune Vuorela, Lucas Baudin and everyone for helping me with my technical doubts in the Matrix IRC.
Thanks to the KDE mentorship team and the board members for managing the GSoC program!

03 Sep 2026 8:15pm GMT

This summer the SPDX Cryptography Group agreed on how to describe algorithm parameters, tightened its contribution and release processes, and opened the discussion on post-quantum cryptography. Where this report comes from This is an update of the work we do at the SPDX Cryptography Group. SPDX stands for Software Package Data Exchange. Our group is … Continue reading SPDX Cryptographic Algorithm List: summer 2026 update

03 Sep 2026 11:34am GMT

One known significant issue when going from X11 to Wayland was our KMouseTool being X11 only.

KMouseTool implements a Dwell Clicker that is an assistive technology designed for individuals who find traditional mouse clicking difficult, painful, or impossible due to conditions like paralysis, mobility issues, or repetitive strain injury (RSI). It allows users to perform left-clicks, right-clicks, double-clicks, and dragging entirely without pressing physical buttons by simply pausing the cursor on the screen for a specified duration.

In KDE Plasma 6.8 we will ship the just merged brand new Dwell Clicker implementation that works also on Wayland.

Here is how it looks in action:

Have feedback or questions? Head over to the KDE Discuss forum to share your thoughts with the team.

02 Sep 2026 3:31pm GMT

The Way Developers Use AI Has Changed

When Qt AI Assistant was introduced, the state of the art in AI-powered software development was the single-turn prompt: select a block of code, ask for a test case, an explanation, or some boilerplate QML, and review the result.

01 Sep 2026 6:55am GMT

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

Here's how KDE Linux evolved in August:

Data safety

A major data safety project reached a state of usability!

First, Hadi Chokr transformed users' home folders into Btrfs sub-volumes and turned on automatic Btrfs snapshots for all user files.

Then, Bharadwaj Raju integrated the new kio-snapshot system he's been working on and added support in Dolphin.

Now you can easily view and roll back to older versions of your files, even without an off-device backup:

This doesn't replace a backup, of course! But it does amount to a sort of homedir-level undo feature that can keep your data safe from accidental deletions, or other destructive changes that are less catastrophic than a disk failure or having the device lost or stolen. And these snapshots will be useful to use as backup sources, so you're not trying to back up a moving target.

Another few layers in the data safety onion, shall we say!

CJKV input support by default

Nate Graham finished the project to make Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese text input work out of the box. Now everything needed to type in these languages is pre-installed, and all you have to do is turn it on.

QA & testing

Thomas Duckworth and Bhushan Shah continued to develop, refine, and maintain KDE Linux's automatic QA system, which continued to pay dividends this month. The system caught multiple complex integration issues introduced accidentally in commits made to KDE software - all of which are now fixed, so users of other operating systems will never have to experience them.

Security

Yago Raña Gayoso removed an unnecessary override that gave everyone in the wheel group default access to the Docker daemon's socket.

Nate Graham fixed an oversight that let blacklisted kernel modules into the unified kernel images.

Bugs fixed

Harald Sitter fixed an issue that could make updates fail right after the update was published, or when run on machines with weak CPUs or slow network connections.

Hadi Chokr fixed an issue with user-visible version numbers of KDE Linux builds not including the intended level of precision.

Documentation

Nate Graham added quick links to KDE Linux's official documentation right there in the launcher menu's "Help" section.

Nate Graham also documented how to free up disk space, added a dedicated "Help & Support" page to the website, and added a link to the project's news feed.

Philip Grant refined and documented a way to integrate KeePassXC with the Flatpak packaging of Firefox and Chromium (and their derivative browsers).

Julius Künzel fixed the styling of the standard Hugo alert bubbles, and Nate Graham ported the docs to use them.

Grab bag

Paul Brown added a neat feature to the set-up-systemd-extension tool that lets you create new extensions at different locations and with different names.

Hadi made the installer report its progress in a more granular way, so there's less waiting around and wondering if the installation process got stuck.

Bhushan Shah removed the "UEFI shell" entry from the bootloader menu, since it was useless for practically everyone, and now the menu is less cluttered.

How you can help

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

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

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

31 Aug 2026 9:15pm GMT

We are happy to announce the summer release of Kdenlive 26.08. Continuing the efforts from the last version, the core team has been focusing mostly on stability - fixing bugs and crashes while also doing lot's under the hood improvements.

This release comes with 11 crash fixes as well as improvements to the undo/redo stack for compositions and sequence creation. Work has also been done to modernize the codebase in the Qml loader for Clips and Compositions.

The majority of the new, nifty and shiny additions and enhancements in this release were made by new contributors! This seems to have become a tradition in 2026, and we couldn't be happier about it.

Highlights

Timeline

Automatic Track Creation

Added functionality to automatically create audio tracks when adding a clip to the timeline in case there are not enough. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Reorder Tracks

Added a long awaited ability to reorder tracks. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Markers At Gaps

Added option to add markers at gaps between timeline clips. Implemented by Yash Bavadiya.

Playhead Snapping When Dragging

ALT + drag the time cursor (playhead) in the timeline ruler, it now snaps to nearby snap points like clip edges, guides, markers, and zone in/out. Implemented by Yash Bavadiya.

Copy Selection To New Sequence

It works similarly to "Create sequence from selection" except that it does not remove the clips from the original sequence and replace them with the new sequence clip. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Clip Color Configuration

Added an option to configure colors for video, audio, title, image, and slideshow clip types.

Playhead/Mouse Zoom

Added a button in the Status Bar to toggle between zooming to the mouse cursor position or the playhead position. Implemented by the mrfantastic.

Multi-Clip Speed Changes

Added the ability to change the playback speed of multiple clips at once either by directly Ctrl + dragging in the timeline or by using the Clip Speed tool. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Title Editor

Snapping

Added snapping in the Title Editor. Implemented by chocolateimage.

Rounded Corners

Rectangles now can have rounded corners. Also notice the draggable spinbox ability to change the radius. Implemented by chocolateimage.

Copy/Paste

Added the ability to copy and paste elements in the Titler. Implemented by chocolateimage.

Automatic Clip Replacement

Added option to automatically replace a title clip in the timeline with the new title clip being edited. Implemented by Eduardo Guedes.

Miscellaneous

Additive Soloing

Added the ability to do additive soloing in the audio mixer by shift clicking. Implemented by Patrick Williamson.

Adjustable Rotation Anchor

Added the ability to set the rotation anchor in the Transform effect. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.

Other Noteworthy Changes

• Updated effects with text (GPS Text, Dynamic Text, Timer) to allow for more font properties. Implemented by Bernd Jordan.
• Rectangular alpha mask is now animatable. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.
• Added ability to use math expressions in effects values. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.
• Drawbox and Delogo effects use the newly implemented feature to draw a rectangle directly on monitor. Implemented by Jean Baptiste Mardelle.
• Added the frei0r Color Enhance effect. Implemented by Bernd Jordan.
• Added option to add rendered video to project bin in the Render Widget. Implemented by Jaimukund Bhan.
• Multi-cam Editing: Added functionality to insert clips to timeline using the clip's timecode from their metadata (if they contain it). Implemented by Jaimukund Bhan.
• Ability to open video, audio, image files from file managers or CLI environments with Kdenlive. Implemented by Yash Bavadiya.
• Added webp support for image sequences. Implemented by Farid Abdelnour.

Give back to Kdenlive

Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community. Donate now!

Need help ?

As usual, you will find very useful tips in our documentation website. You can also get help and exchange your ideas in our Kdenlive users Matrix chat room.

Get involved

Kdenlive relies on its community, your help is always welcome. You can contribute by :

• Helping to identify and triage bugs
• Contribute to translating Kdenlive in your language
• Promote Kdenlive in your local community

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

31 Aug 2026 6:05pm GMT

We're excited to announce the release of version 1.16.0 of the Qt Extension for Visual Studio Code! This release brings:

• QML Profiler and Trace Viewer to profile your QML applications directly from VS Code
• A new Welcome page with browsers for Qt examples and Qt Academy courses
• Better PySide support with QML Live Preview and uv virtual environments

31 Aug 2026 2:24pm GMT

For once, something on this blog that isn't C++.

Harmonicon is a rhythm game for blues harmonica. Notes scroll toward a hit line and you play on an actual harmonica, into your microphone, and the game listens.

The idea

The harmonica is cheap, fits in a pocket, and it hides everything: the reeds are inside, your tongue and throat do most of the work, and nothing about the instrument tells you whether the note that just came out is the note you meant. You can practise a bend wrong for a month quite happily.

Let the instrument be the input. Harmonicon captures the microphone, runs pitch detection on it in real time, and scores what you actually played against the chart. Every note you score is a note you genuinely hit.

Playing a song

The default view is one lane per hole: ten for a diatonic, twelve for a chromatic, taken from whatever the chart was written for. Blue notes are blows, orange are draws, and the number on each is the hole you need. Above the lanes there's the phrase in standard notation and as harmonica tab, because those are the two ways harmonica players actually read music, and the panel on the right tells you which harp to pick up and which position you're playing in.

There's also a 3D view, which is the same game rendered around a harmonica model that moves with the beat.

Getting away from charts

Charts are good for learning a song and bad for learning to play. The Jam Session mode drops the scoring entirely and gives you a rolling 12-bar blues to improvise over.

The useful part is the hole map on the right. As the backing moves through the bars, each hole recolours: gold if it's a chord tone of the bar sounding right now, green if it's elsewhere in the blues scale, dim if it's going to sound wrong. You follow the colour instead of trying to recall theory at tempo, and the theory arrives later, on its own.

Lessons

There's a curriculum underneath all of this, grouped into units and gated by prerequisites - from getting one clean single note out of the thing, through bends and articulation, up to improvising over a blues. Some lessons are scored drills. A few aren't scoreable at all: tongue blocking sounds identical to puckering from the microphone's point of view, so that one is instruction you mark as done and the game trusts you.

Under the hood

Rust, with Bevy for the engine and cpal for audio capture. The interesting problem is the pitch detection, which is why there are five algorithms to chose from: FFT, YIN, pYIN, MPM and NMF.

Status

There's a lot in it - a bending trainer, an in-game song editor with MIDI import, adaptive difficulty, A-B looping, latency calibration, a spectrogram - but "early/experimental" is an honest label rather than modesty.

It's MIT licensed and the code is at github.com/tcanabrava/harmonicon. If you own a harmonica and a microphone, that's the entire hardware requirement.

31 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

And I think it's pretty nice

30 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw the first stirrings of support for QtWidgets-based apps in KDE's new Union theming system, which is a very exciting milestone.

But that's not all! This week is also packed with UI improvements, performance improvements, bug fixes, and a few more features, too.

Plasma 6.8 is rapidly shaping up, and all this work reflects it. Check it out:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.8

The new Union theming system has gained initial support for styling QtWidgets apps! (Akseli Lahtinen, union MR #270)

Plasma's built-in RDP server now supports adjusting its quality level to the network's available bandwidth to keep the frame rate as consistent as possible. (Nick Haghiri, krdp MR #238)

Plasma's Strongswan VPN support now allows the use of EAP-TTLS authentication. (Wyllian Bezerra da Silva, plasma-nm MR #636)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7.5

Discover now only offers to open and install .deb packages on operating systems natively supporting that package format. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, plasma-desktop MR #3957)

Plasma 6.8

When you copy a password or other piece of text that the app says is a secret, the clipboard history UI now makes this clear rather than hiding it and letting you wonder why nothing appeared there. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #508326)

The indicator that a screen recording is in progress now only appears if it actually is in progress, which handles the case of apps that open screen recording sessions early, but start the recording later. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #597)

KWin's Overview effect is now a little bit easier to open with a four-finger swipe touchpad gesture. (Remy Farley, kwin MR #9486)

All of the text for calendar events in the Digital Clock widget is now selectable. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #433668)

System Settings' Drawing Tablet page now has a less awkward design for the dialog window to choose what the buttons on your tablet's pen do. (Joshua Goins, KDE Bugzilla #524720)

New

Old

The Bluetooth widget now shows its "Configure" button in the same place that all other widgets do, for better functional consistency. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #516134)

Connecting to an enterprise Wi-Fi network for the first time now takes you immediately to the place where you can enter your credentials, instead of making you navigate there manually. (Ramil Nurmanov, plasma-nm MR #635)

Clicking a System Tray icon that opens a widget can no longer make that icon immediately disappear; now, it will always stay visible until the widget's popup closes, giving you the opportunity to click on it a second time to close the popup. (समीर सिंह Sameer Singh, KDE Bugzilla #521115)

Using the clipboard's "Keep the selection and clipboard the same" setting no longer unnecessarily disables other settings. (Tomáš Hnyk, KDE Bugzilla #492840)

If your system is in such a poor state that there are many crashes, your System Tray no longer fills up with dozens of little sad face icons; now only one appears, and clicking on it will show the full list in its own window. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #420443)

Frameworks 6.30

In-window dialogs in Kirigami-based apps are now better highlighted against the rest of the window content when using a dark theme. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #447965)

System Monitor graphs now request "tabular numerals" for the legends when using a font that supports them, improving alignment. (Christoph Wolk, kquickcharts MR #109)

New

Old

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a security issue that made the screen locker fail to lock if you manually configured it to turn off the screen after the "don't require password to unlock" period. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #523504)

Plasma 6.7.5

Fixed a pretty bad bug that made Discover get stuck while checking for updates when its Snap backend was present, but there were no upgradeable Snap apps. (Dustin Trumps, KDE Bugzilla #524077)

Fixed a case where non-KDE apps running in Plasma could sometimes crash when you closed a dialog. (Balló György, KDE Bugzilla #523039)

Fixed a recent regression that impaired pointer movement in VMs using non-accelerated graphics drivers. (Base Devel, KDE Bugzilla #524280)

Using a right-to-left language like Arabic or Hebrew no longer prevents force-quitting processes or apps in System Monitor. (Jakob Petsovits, KDE Bugzilla #522233)

Fixed a weird little bug that made the panel's tooltip in edit mode become malformed after right-clicking on the panel. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #488578)

If your system is in a super-duper messed-up state, it can at least no longer cause the DrKonqi crash handler to crash in a loop, feeding itself with crashes that exhaust the system's memory. (Harald Sitter and Alexander Berg, KDE Bugzilla #524048)

Plasma 6.8

Fixed the second-most-common crash in Plasma, which could happen while logging out. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6973)

On System Settings' Plasma Search page, the "Defaults" button and non-default settings highlighting now work as expected. (Tobias Ozór, plasma-desktop MR #3973)

With multiple Application Launcher (Kickoff) Widgets, all of them are now capable of returning search results for not-yet-installed apps, not just the first one. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #511220)

A logout sound no longer delays the logout process more than it needs to. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #491745)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7.5

Improved the way HDR content looks when using an ICC profile. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #524038)

Plasma 6.8

Improved the performance and power efficiency of many kinds of full-screen content when using an Intel or NVIDIA GPU with HDR, ICC profiles, and/or the Night Light effect. (Naveen Kumar, kwin MR #9640)

KWin now supports HDR content using the HLG transfer function. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #508817)

Reduced screen-casting latency throughout Plasma and KWin (including for the built-in RDP server!) by one frame. (David Edmundson, kpipewire MR #274)

Reduced the resource usage required to show thumbnails in notifications and the Activities sidebar. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6966 and plasma-desktop MR #3967)

Reduced the resource usage required for the Trash widget. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-desktop MR #3965)

Screenshots made with Spectacle that don't have any transparency no longer include an alpha channel, slightly reducing file sizes. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #9798)

Disabling a System Tray widget now frees up its memory immediately, rather than only after Plasma or the system is restarted. (Tomáš Hnyk, plasma-workspace MR #6983)

The showConfigurationInterface() function now works in Plasma scripting. (Remilia S., plasma-workspace MR #6977)

If you've broken, misconfigured, or removed all of Plasma's wallpaper plugins, Plasma will now launch without them and just show a plain background, instead of failing to launch at all. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #524875)

Frameworks 6.30

KWallet no longer spams your log with errors in certain non-default configurations. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #524500)

KDE Gear 26.12.0

System Settings' Proxy page has been rewritten in QML, which lets it work on Plasma Mobile. The design is nearly identical, so you shouldn't notice any obvious changes to it. (Tobias Fella, kio-extras MR #536)

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.

28 Aug 2026 9:14pm GMT

It has begun.

After couple months of work, I have now finally managed to cobble together the QtWidgets side of Union.

This means that your QtWidgets apps, such as Dolphin, KMail, Kate etc. can now use the Union CSS files as the source of their styling.

However, temper your expectations, as this is the first initial release!

Do note that there are visual bugs and oddities! I'm still working on things!

So yes, as you can see, some things look off. Not Breeze at all! Some things are just different, some other things have wrong colors.

These are all fixable and I will do my best to get as many things as possible fixed for the Plasma 6.8 release.

But some other oddities are kind of expected: This is the first time ever Breeze QtWidgets and QtQuick style have same shared source-of-truth as an easily editable file! (Excluding colorschemes.) So some of these designs are made with QtQuick in mind, so they can look a bit off in QtWidgets.

I'll go through here what I did and what still needs to be done, but this was a huge undertaking, so I'm having a small celebration for the very first release of this. :)

Hold on, can I try it!?

Yes! It should be released in Plasma 6.8, unless someone tells me no. As of writing this, nobody has said no.

You can make your own CSS files and see them affect QtWidgets apps too. Just expect some breakage and report all the bugs!

Go crazy with the themes. Try everything. Bring back whimsy to computers. Tell us about the theming experience in general.

Have fun. Your computer should be just as cool as you are.

The rest of this blogpost is more a technical rant and ramble as I am venting all the exhaustion over this thing, lol.

QStyle is difficult

QStyle themes, which are the styles that modify the look of QtWidgets applications, are not easy to work on. Most themes I've seen take an existing one, such as Fusion or Breeze and make their changes on top of those.

But for Union, we had to start from scratch. I took the very basic base of QStyle, which is called QCommonStyle (kind of a fallback theme), and began building on top of that.

Then, there was multiple parts:

• Figure out a way for the QStyle to paint things using CSS
• Build a hierarchy of the style by reading the CSS data and applying it to QStyle world
• Create a completely new set of element files we use
  • The QStyle themes are very unwieldy and hard to work on otherwise
• Go through every single element and ensure they read all data from the CSS correctly
  • And ensure the style stays backwards compatible!
  • This is still ongoing process, most bugs lurk here. :P
• Figure out how to use Union layouting system within QStyle elements
  • This is also buggy, as QStyle is more "rigid" with layouting
  • Applications expect very specific layouting from QStyles over the years it has existed
  • So any application that deviates from those expectations will look broken
• Caching so that the style is performant
  • Here Arjen helped me a lot, thank you!
• And a lot of other stuff I have already forgotten..

Thankfully redstrate had already made the painting part for the very simplified proxystyle (which took Breeze and modified it a bit), so I did not have to modify that too much. I mostly had to poke at it to make it work with my hierarchy system. So thanks! <3

It's hard to put it into words how much work there was involving the actual QStyle itself and creating a sort of "framework within a framework" so that the Union rules would translate better for the QStyle rules.

For example, when a widget, such as a PushButton, wants to be styled, it informs the QStyle about it with something called QStyleOptionButton. This class holds bunch of information about the button, and the style can use that information to decorate it better. But of course, the styleoption does not necessarily need to exist. If there is no styleoption, the style can use the QWidget itself for style information. But even that can be empty! And at that point, you do not know how to style something, since you do not even know what it is.

What made matters even worse was that the documentation just Does Not Exist.

Sure, there is the QStyle documentation, but it is more about "what" and not "why" or "how." I could have used somekind of tutorial for how to make a QStyle from scratch, but I could not really find anything, except super old information from Qt4 times. So very very often I resorted to just reading the raw source code itself, which is also not very easy to read. There is a lot of variables that are just named pw or w. So even the codebase is very undocumented..!

Most of the work had to be done with trial and error! "What happens if I change this value?" "What if I use debugger to follow this variable, where will it lead?" I also used Breeze as my information bank a lot, as it had gone through it all before. That was very helpful.

But the lack of documentation and old codebase nobody seems to really touch anymore, much less document, was the thing that made this all take so long time.

Not to forget the completely misleading names in the API. "PM_MenuPanelWidth" is not the width of the panel, but actually "Border width (applied on all sides) for a QMenu."

The total work was 9000 lines of code. Yes. And all of it is required. Lot's of boilerplate, as QStyle seems to love boilerplate. Pretty much all of it is artisanal, handwritten slop by yours truly.

I had to painstakingly go through all the elements we're drawing and sizes we're calculating, then turning it into an Element that we can easily modify without modifying the whole style.

If you have managed to make a working QStyle theme completely from scratch, going through every little detail, I salute you. This is some of the toughest stuff I've ever worked on.

So in summary: I had to backwards engineer a lot of stuff to figure out what order we even draw some things, or what size affects what in the actual application. Then make it work with Union core and CSS.

DOCUMENT YOUR API PLEASE I BEG YOU

Next steps

Next up is testing and bugfixing.

There's already a lot of bugs being found here: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/union/-/work_items/205 And more will be found. There will be weird edgecases where application expects everything to work like in Fusion style, as it's the default Qt style, but Union does not handle that situation yet well.

So here's what I need from you, dear reader: See what breaks. Document it. Make a bugreport. Let's find these weird things and figure them out, so that the QtWidgets side can finally be themed without so much pain.

Of course, there's also the design side: Like I mentioned earlier, the Breeze CSS we have now is very QtQuick oriented, so QtWidgets applications can look and feel odd.

Something to keep in mind though is that QtQuick and QtWidgets applications will likely never look the exact same, due to the way how they work and are drawn. But we can try to make the QtWidgets style work reliably first and then try to make it look as close to QtQuick side as possible.

My todo list is pretty much following:

• Fix as many bugs as I can before 6.8 release
• Figure out a layouting system for the QStyle that is robust
  • Even if it can't do all the tricks QtQuick can
• Make sure the QStyle is backwards compatible with as many applications as possible

So, more work. A lot of work.

But at least we can now properly start that work, which is what this first release is about. Getting the tedium out of the way, so the interesting parts can begin.

And boy how much tedium that was. I would never do it again, but honestly.. It was fun at times. Super interesting to figure out. Like a very tough puzzle game. I'm happy with what I've achieved here, even if it's not perfect yet. And I hope all this work is useful for you too, dear users. I really want to see the crazy things you all will come up with.

Thanks for reading!

ps. Again sorry if this reads all over the place, I just needed to get it out of my system. I don't like writing drafts much, so I just write a braindump and go.

28 Aug 2026 6:34pm GMT

As you might already know, Transitous is a project that runs a public transport routing service that aims to work wold-wide. To make Transitous results more useful, there needs to be a simple way to book the individual sections of a multi-modal route. It is important to mention that Transitous can not legally sell tickets itself, and there are no plans to change that, so booking in this case means directing users to a ticket shop that can sell tickets for the route.

Ticketing Extension

Transitous is primarily based around the GTFS format for its transport schedules, although NeTEx is increasingly being used as well. The first step naturally was to implement reading ticketing information from the schedule files. Although ticketing is not a core part of GTFS, there is the Google Transit ticketing extension.

Its most important feature is specifying booking urls and a way to pass the stop ids, trip ids and times to the ticket shops. The extension also allows to define ids for stops and trips that the ticket shop can understand. This is important because often the ticket shop software is different from the piece of software that writes the GTFS files. These don't necessarily have to agree on the identifier they use.

If each trip had it's own booking deeplink, the size of the schedule would increase massively, as well as the size of the data we'd need to store on the Transitous servers. To solve this, the ticketing extension only stores the base url, and assembles the parameters for each deep link only if needed.

However, this requires a separate shop-specific server side step to convert the standardized parameters to something that the ticket shop understands.

My work

Transitous is mostly just an instance of the MOTIS routing engine, so much of the work happened there.

This work has partially been funded by NLnet through the NGI0 Commons Fund with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme.

Unfortunately that did not magically give us booking links everywhere. The ticketing extension does not (yet) play such a big role in the open-data / open-source GTFS ecosystem. However since Google Maps supports it, many feeds made for it already contain ticketing_deeplinks.txt. Maybe you can get your local transit operators to add support for it as well :)

To do my part in improving the situation, I added support for it in some of my own GTFS feeds and the library I use for creating them.

Since the problem of needing to translate the url parameters for the ticket shops comes up in every inofficial feed, I also wrote a generic server for doing the redirecting. Adding support for a new ticket shop there is very easy. Since I already host it, it also removes the burden of needing to run a server side component for each feed one publishes.

You can see the results on Transitous: Route from Nikšić to Podgorica.

It also already works in KDE Itinerary.

Adding Ticketing

Adding ticketing to your own feeds is fortunately quite straightforward in many cases. These examples are based on my gtfs-generator rust crate, but it would be very similar in other language ecosystems.

Assuming there is one shop for all trips in the feed, you only need to add one ticketing link:

generator
.add_ticketing_deep_link(TicketingDeepLink {
ticketing_deep_link_id: "tickets-zpcg".to_string(),
web_url: Some("https://jbb.ghsq.de/ticket-redirect/zpcg/".to_string()),
android_intent_url: Some("https://jbb.ghsq.de/ticket-redirect/zpcg/".to_string()),
ios_universal_link_url: Some("https://jbb.ghsq.de/ticket-redirect/zpcg/".to_string()),
}).unwrap();

If the IDs the ticket shop and the feed use are already the same, you already know the IDs and just need to copy them over:

generator.add_ticketing_identifier(TicketingIdentifier {
ticketing_stop_id: stop.stop_id.to_string(),
stop_id: stop.stop_id.to_string(),
agency_id: "zpcg".to_string(),
})?;

Then all that's left is editing the agency entry to reference the new ticketing link. For more complicated cases, you can also reference a different ticcketing link per route.

If the IDs don't match, chances are this is still relatively easy. Often the ticket shops' autocompletion allows to retrieve a full list of stops, ideally including coordinates as well. Then matching these to your stops is relatively straightforward.

If you import your feed into MOTIS with these changes, you should already get a clickable "Tickets"-button. To make it redirect somewhere useful, the redirect server needs to be tought how the url scheme of the ticket shop works by adding a little function like this:

func redirectZpcg(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, from []string, to []string, date []time.Time, trip []string, departure []time.Time, arrival []time.Time) {
baseUrl, _ := url.Parse("https://www.tickets-zpcg.me/en/rezultati.php")
q := baseUrl.Query()
q.Set("from", from[0])
q.Set("to", to[len(to)-1])
q.Set("date", date[0].Format("2006-01-02"))
baseUrl.RawQuery = q.Encode()
http.Redirect(w, r, baseUrl.String(), http.StatusSeeOther)
}

The parameters are arrays, since in the ticket links allow to buy multiple tickets via one link. This feature might not be possible to support with every ticket shop.

Maybe this motivated you to add support for this in some new corner of the world :)

27 Aug 2026 9:35pm GMT

Svenska språket uppfinns.

"Hej! Här kommer en uppdatering av våra villkor! Du kan nu använda upp till två tusen ord i månaden med vår gratistjänst, sedan måste du uppgradera till Basic Plan för 129 kr/månaden. Ska du använda svenskan i jobbet kostar det som innan 1299 kr/månaden. Behöver du läsglasögon? Våra enbart godkända leverantörer finner du här. Vi påminner om att pensionärsutgåvan finns inte mer. Vi hörs!"

Wow. Vilken teknologi. Vilken innovation. Vi alla köper.

År 2026, och så har det varit ett tag, så är det så här uttrycksfrihet fungerar på nätet. Vill du skriva till någon som är på Facebook men du är inte? Går inte. Vill du ta del av samhällsaktörers meddelanden och debatt utan annonser och material från den vinstdrivande aktören X? Sorry. Vill du chatta med dina kompisar på SnapChat med en app som är designad på ett helt annat sätt? Det får du inte. Välja leverantör av din feed på TikTok? Nope. Och så vidare.

Grunden i Internet, så som e-post och webbsidor, som byggs upp av specifikationer och organisationer, var designad runt att vara öppen. Du kan välja e-postprogram, webbläsare och vem som helst kan skapa en webbsida. Syftet med dess design var att hålla Internet neutralt, utan så kallade proprietära teknologier och nedlåsning med vinstdrivande intressen. Detta bidrog till stor del till dess succé, och varför det är bra. (Och gammal teknologi, uttrycksfrihet och demokrati har också sina utmaningar.)

De lager och applikationer som vi alla använder i nuläget är långt i från det. Det hela kännetecknas av vad ekonomer kallar marknadssvikt: de sociala medier-apparna tjänar oss konsumenter dåligt.

De samhällsproblem så som psykisk ohälsa och en systemisk sänkning av vår förmåga är ett resultat av hur teknologin och juridiken ser ut. Vi vill digitalt kommunicera och ta del av media, men kan i nuläget inte välja hur eller faktiskt vilket innehåll. Att hålla vinstdrivande aktörer samhällsmässigt ansvariga fungerar inte, men de respekterar marknadens spelregler. Ändra dem.

Så här finns det utrymme för innovation. Dra ihop jurister, samhällsvetare, teknologer och uppfinn de moment i form av teknologi (tänk API:er, referensimplementationer, specifikationer), lämplig juridik och de (supranationella) samarbeten som behövs för att göra den korrektion som är nödvändig. Teknisk separation mellan den app som visar och konton med material? Obligatoriska standarder? En EU-motsvarighet till Finansinspektionen? Här är några utmaningar med det: dåligt betalt, folk fattar inte riktigt poängen, och klurigt.

Kanske det är viktigt nog. Vad är första steg?

27 Aug 2026 8:55am GMT