fidzu : KDE

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released a public beta of Plasma 6.7, ready for testing. A last-minute virtual keyboard feature snuck in… and with that, it's now frozen for further features, and focus will shift to polishing and bug-fixing for the next month or two.

So let's have a look:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

You can now configure what triggers Plasma's virtual keyboard to appear. (Kristen McWilliam and Yelsin Sepulveda, kwin MR #9206 and plasma-workspace MR #6548)

The per-window "Hide from Screencast" feature now also hides the window from static screenshots, too. It's been renamed accordingly. (Elliot Flint, kwin MR #9171)

You can now allow an app that's controlling input devices to do it every time it asks, instead of having to authorize it each time. (David Redondo, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #496 and flatpak-kcm MR #175)

Plasma 6.8

Plasma's virtual keyboard now has a dedicated layout and mode of operation for the Amharic language! (Abenezer Wesenseged, plasma-keyboard MR #118)

System Settings' Networks page now lets you configure wireless access points to automatically select a channel. (Mickaël Thomas, plasma-nm MR #523)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.6

Made a couple of buttons on System Settings' Fonts page readable by the Orca screen reader. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #519471)

Plasma 6.7

Discover now groups items on its "Installed" page into categories by default! This makes it much easier to find what you're looking for. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #423344)

Plasma notifications now slide in from off-screen, rather than fading in. It looks really good, and helps draw attention to new notifications without being too attention-grabbing. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9139)

Improved the Kickoff Application Launcher's ability to launch the item you searched for with a very fast press of the Enter key after some very fast typing. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #519579)

Gwenview is now set to be Plasma's default SVG viewer, so these files won't open with GIMP by default anymore. (Darafei Praliaskouski, plasma-desktop MR #3712)

Made multiple improvements to the workflow around unlocking the session using a smart card. (Andreas Lundqvist, kscreenlocker MR #310)

Moved the "Keep Above Others" window tweak to the top level of the titlebar context menu so you can reach it more easily. We reasoned that this is likely to be one of the more frequently-used items, so it ought to be faster to access. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9201)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.6

Fixed an issue that made Plasma crash when restarted using systemctl restart --user plasma-plasmashell.service on systems with multiple screens and multiple panels. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #515234)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma crash when switching Activities using the Activity Pager widget on systems with multiple screens. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #520065)

Cloning a panel now successfully copies any standalone launcher icons, too. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #519502)

The System Monitor app and sensors no longer continue to report phantom network activity while the system isn't connected to any networks. (Kartikeya Tyagi, KDE Bugzilla #508516)

Typing on the desktop to invoke KRunner now works when pressing keys on the number pad, too. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #504304)

App reviews in Discover no longer get duplicated if you install, uninstall, and re-install the app while Discover remained open. (Tobias Fella, discover MR #1325)

Frameworks 6.27

Fixed a layout issue that could sometimes break Discover completely when the system language was set to Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #517091)

The Breeze Icons repo no longer inappropriately uses copyrighted third-party icons. (Nate Graham and Martin Sh., KDE Bugzilla #487595)

Fixed a subtle issue in the common icon browser dialog that made it impossible to select a standard icon from the active icon theme after first selecting an icon from a specific location on disk. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #520007)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Implemented support for "progressive encoding" for Plasma's built-in remote desktop server, which can be used when a client doesn't support H.264 encoding, or codecs for it aren't available, or when progressive encoding would be more bandwidth-efficient. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #165 and krdp MR #173)

Improved performance and reduced latency for Plasma's built-in remote desktop server. (David Edmundson, krdp MR #170)

Implemented support for version 3.2 of the Wayland Text Input protocol. (David Edmundson, kwin MR #8970)

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.

16 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-20.

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EU calls VPNs "a loophole that needs closing" in age verification push

Tags: tech, surveillance, vpn, europe, politics

Urgh… That was only a matter of time before they notice I guess. That'll go straight in the authoritarian playbook if they make a real move on it.

https://cyberinsider.com/eu-calls-vpns-a-loophole-that-needs-closing-in-age-verification-push/

Linux Compromises, Broken Embargoes, and the Shrinking Patch Window

Tags: tech, linux, security

We've seen a stream of those security issues lately. It says something about the security practice in the industry right now. Things need to be improved.

https://www.askbaize.com/blog/linux-compromises-broken-embargoes-and-the-shrinking-patch-window

Can Someone Please Explain Whether Cloudflare Blackmailed Canonical?

Tags: tech, cloud, cloudflare

Honestly the whole situation was bizarre… And yes it feels like Cloudflare actions were not exactly transparent here.

https://www.flyingpenguin.com/can-someone-please-explain-whether-cloudflare-blackmailed-canonical/

Why I'm leaving GitHub for Forgejo

Tags: tech, github, trust

The GitHub exodus continues. Looks like Forgejo is really benefiting from it, I wonder how far this will go.

https://jorijn.com/en/blog/leaving-github-for-forgejo/

Use Protocols, Not Services

Tags: tech, protocols, resilience, self-hosting, politics, decentralized

A good reminder of why this is the protocols which matter. People got too accustomed to centralised platforms.

https://notnotp.com/notes/use-protocols-not-services/

The BeBox: BeOS Hardware, Photos, and the Apple Deal That Wasn't

Tags: tech, hardware, system, history

This was definitely an interesting operating system and the hardware was fun too. Of course it was lacking quite a bit in applications availability. This was likely too radical for its time and not mature enough when it needed to.

https://www.jdhodges.com/blog/bebox-beautifully-overbuilt-computer/

Hey you, start communicating!

Tags: tech, blog, communication, learning

We collectively should reach out more to blog authors indeed. Not for kudos but to feed each other through conversations. That's how we collectively learn and improve.

https://forkingmad.blog/hey-you-start-communicating/

Easy is Overrated

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research, quality

As if research wasn't already having a quality problem in submitted papers… now thanks to people jumping on LLMs to churn out papers faster, this quality is cratering.

https://calnewport.com/easy-is-overrated/

Local AI Needs to be the Norm

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, nlp, ethics, performance, architecture

Which means simpler models: and this is fine for most use! It's also easier to have more ethical options with the smaller and more specialised models. Let's not forget they exist even though the big industrial complex would like people to forget.

https://unix.foo/posts/local-ai-needs-to-be-norm/

Pyrefly v1.0 is here!

Tags: tech, python, type-systems

Another type checker for Python gets stabilised. So many options and fragmentation in this space. This is odd.

https://pyrefly.org/blog/v1.0/

Just Fucking Use Go

Tags: tech, backend, go

Kind of a rant but it makes sense for the most part. Back end systems could be much simpler than they tend to be. I think this particular piece is willingly ignoring some of the weaknesses in Go error handling though.

https://blainsmith.com/articles/just-fucking-use-go/

The limits of Rust, or why you should probably not follow Amazon, Cloudflare and Discord

Tags: tech, rust, ecosystem, maintenance

As usual with this author it feels a bit too much like advertising toward the end. Still this is an important post, it shows quite well why you can't limit yourself at only the language used when picking a stack. You definitely need to look at the standard library and the wider ecosystem as well. Rust is no different there and has its own issues.

https://kerkour.com/the-limits-of-rust

C++26: Standard library hardening

Tags: tech, c++, standard, reliability, memory

It's about time such a thing gets standardised in C++!

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2026/05/13/cpp26-library-hardening

Let's Build a Regex Engine

Tags: tech, regex

Still a work in progress, but it'll likely turn out into a nice resource on how to implement regex engines.

https://kean.blog/post/lets-build-regex

Floating point from scratch: Hard Mode

Tags: tech, floats, cpu, hardware, mathematics

Nice exploration of floating point arithmetic all the way down to the silicon.

https://essenceia.github.io/projects/floating_dragon/

On Rendering the Sky, Sunsets, and Planets

Tags: tech, graphics, shader, 3d, physics

Everything you wanted to know about atmosphere rendering but didn't dare ask. Very good piece, makes me want to write a live wallpaper for Plasma. :-)

https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/on-rendering-the-sky-sunsets-and-planets/

I learned something about GPUs today

Tags: tech, gpu, 3d, shader, mathematics

Huh! Indeed I'd have fallen in this trap too. Totally unexpected behavior, and of course not all GPUs interpolate the same, so it can stay hidden until too late.

https://foon.uk/blackshift-sand-bug/

Getting peak TOPS on a Ryzen AI 7 350 NPU

Tags: tech, cpu, npu, hardware

Wondering about NPUs architecture and how they work? This is a good in depth reference article I think.

https://destevez.net/2026/05/getting-peak-tops-on-a-ryzen-ai-7-350-npu/

The Hard Parts.dev

Tags: tech, engineering

Looks like an interesting reference of patterns in software engineering.

https://thehardparts.dev/

Be a Multiplier: Lead by Guiding Others

Tags: tech, engineering, leadership

This is a short one but a good one I think. Helping others to do rather than doing directly is the needed shift to get into technical leadership. It's not an easy leap though, been helping some people getting there and it's quite the effort.

https://estherderby.com/tech-leadership-be-a-multiplier/

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Bye for now!

15 May 2026 3:45pm GMT

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.08_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in around 7 weeks (July 2) and feature freeze two weeks
after that. Get your stuff ready!

14 May 2026 4:31pm GMT

Here are the new modules available in the Plasma 6.7 beta:

• plasma-bigscreen
• union

Some important features and changes included in 6.7 beta are highlighted on KDE community wiki page.

Help stress-test the Union theming system

This releases marks the first public tech preview of the new Union theming system! In the beta, it is used to style all apps using QML and Kirigami when the union package is installed.

The intention is for these apps to look as similar as possible to how they look without Union.

To help the dev team ensure that's the case, look for visual issues in apps using QML and Kirigami (for example: System Settings, System Monitor, Discover, Spectacle, NeoChat, Haruna, Plasma widget config dialogs).

If you find any issues, make sure they're Union-specific by running the app with the QT_QUICK_CONTROLS_STYLE=org.kde.desktop variable set; this uses the old styling system so you can compare the two.

If you've found a Union-specific issue, report it here.

Everything else

View full changelog

14 May 2026 12:00am GMT

I just realized it has been a full year since I blogged last. Time flies and I will try to do (much much) better this year.

My last entry was about foss-north 2025 and now foss-north 2026 has just passed. It was a successful event and Tobias really helps bringing new energy to the event - including a whole crew of volunteers.

During the foss-north events all talks are recorded. These are then made available on YouTube and on a peertube instance. Historically this has been conf.tube which was provided by a kind supporter to the cause. However, now the costs has exceeded what is reasonable, so it was migration time.

We've looked at taking over the full peertube instance, but quickly realized the costs were too high for us as well. Instead we took over the domain (thank you!) and one of our speakers offered to host us on his instance. Thus, all past foss-north videos, and the new ones for 2026, have been migrated to https://peertube.anduin.net/c/fossnorth/videos .

So, what about migration? The intra peertube transfer failed - much because the aging conf.tube setup did not want to produce the 360GB export. So we had to take another path.

What path you ask? Python scripts! (of course)

So first, we created a Python script storing all URLs from conf.tube. Both for playlists and videos. Then we created a script collecting the corresponding links from YouTube.

Since the new peertube instance does not have direct import from YouTube enabled, the script downloads the video file, metadata and cover picture from YouTube, and then uploads the video to the peertube instance with the metadata and cover picture. As this is a fully automated flow, it is very convenient.

(for 2026 I adapted the script to sync a YouTube playlist, which is very convenient)

The final output from the migration scripts was a set of redirection statements for nginx which is now deployed to the conf.tube server. This means that all old links to foss-north material at conf.tube should redirect to the corresponding video at peertube.anduin.net, so hopefully no links are dead.

13 May 2026 9:01am GMT

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 19.0.2!

The release fixes switching to English as the UI language in Qt Creator on systems with a non-English locale as well as a few other issues.

13 May 2026 8:52am GMT

Qt Design Studio 4.8.2 ships a major upgrade to the AI assistant, transforming it into a fully agentic AI and taking AI-assisted design to the next level. It now has access to your entire QML project and can autonomously read, write, and refactor your files to complete tasks end to end.

13 May 2026 5:16am GMT

Big Tech's disregard for privacy laws and individuals' personal data has become a matter of national security. As news of willful mismanagement fill the headlines on an almost daily basis, the world is beginning to turn away from expensive and insecure spyware-riddled software imposed by the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, et al.

KDE offers the world a better way.

For 30 years, KDE has been providing the free and open-source software essential for digital sovereignty in personal, corporate, and public infrastructures: operating systems, desktop environments, document viewers, image and video editors, software development libraries, and much more.

KDE's software is competitive, publicly auditable, and freely available. It can be maintained, adapted, and improved in-house or by local software companies. And modifications (along with their source code) can be freely distributed to all users and departments within an organization.

As a non-profit, KDE has no shareholders to serve, no quarterly earnings to grow. KDE charges nothing for its software or its licensing. There are no subscriptions, no spying on users, no disclosure or resale of data that users choose to voluntarily share with KDE, and no secret training of AI models with said data.

KDE will use Sovereign Tech Fund's investment to push its essential software products to the next level, providing every individual, business, and public administration with the opportunity to regain their privacy, security, and control over their digital sovereignty.

"We have long invested in desktop technologies for a reason: they are the primary way people access and use digital services in everyday life" says Fiona Krakenbürger, Technical Director at the Sovereign Tech Agency. "The desktop holds personal data and mediates nearly every service we depend on, from booking the next medical appointment, to education, to the way we work. We are investing in KDE because it is one of the two major desktop environments used across Linux and plays a key role in how millions of people experience open technology. Strengthening KDE's testing infrastructure, security architecture, and communication frameworks is how we invest in the resilience and reliability of the core digital infrastructure that modern society depends on."

Read more about Sovereign Tech Fund's investment in KDE.

13 May 2026 12:00am GMT

How a Documentation MCP Tool Saves LLM Token Usage

Every time an AI agent searches the web for Qt documentation today, it receives full HTML pages loaded with navigation chrome, cookie banners, related-article sidebars, and search-engine snippets that have nothing to do with the answer - burning thousands of LLM tokens before a single line of useful content appears. Qt's new official Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool for Qt documentation solves this directly.

12 May 2026 6:29am GMT

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.5.

Plasma 6.6 was released in February 2026 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

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

View full changelog

12 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Recently I went on the Linux User Space show to talk about KDE Linux, business, and everyone's favorite topic: AI. It was a pretty interesting conversation; check it out:

11 May 2026 7:20pm GMT

So… while doing some work on Oxygen I noticed there was no camera-video icon.

No Oxygen one.
Wille there was already a recently done symbolic one.

Which honestly felt a bit odd considering cameras are one of those objects designers historically cant resist over designing heee… (but then again i got a bit 2 distracted about the future and forgot to look behind me at what was still pretty good)

So I ended up making both versions almost back to back.

Now… I already knew exactly what was going to happen.

I have been doing Oxygen style icons for long enough to know the amount of work involved. Big reflections, materials, shadows, details nobody consciously notices just to change how the icon feels. And to hide my incompetence as a simple designer

It was not just "camera" and realy not a video one but….. It was trying to be a camera. A object. Somthing with texture and personality. Still …. Probably 3 days of work.

The symbolic one on the other hand took minutes.

And honestly… I like symbolic icons. This is not one of those "flat design killed civilization" posts

But it did make me think again about something I keep repeating over and over:
"Less is a bore." as Robert Venturi said.

People usually read that as a attack on minimalism. But I don't.

Reduction is useful. Clarity is useful. Symbolic icons are useful. You also cant hide your design failures as easily, and they can work really well.

The problem for me starts when simplification becomes emotionally neutral. Copy of a copy of a copy of a nothing.

Because thats the thing I care about the most when designing anything. Not beauty exactly… beauty is subjective and honestly kinda impossible to define in any meaningful way.

What interests me more is emotional impact.

How does it make you feel?

Not stricly rationally. But mostly Emotionally.

The Oxygen/old\new/skeo\etc icon is probably excessive and maybe even a little ridiculous. Tiny fake reflections, fake materials, dramatic shadows… but then again thats also what gives it character I think??. It tries to create an "atmosphere" instead of just identifying a function.

And to me atmosphere matters.

Humans are not rationalist grid systems no matter how much "modern" design sometimes pretends we are. We remember things emotionally first. Movies, music, old game menus, interfaces…

Nowdays many interfaces and design languages just feel efficient. Functional. Fast. But also weirdly interchangeable.

And I think thats why so many modern interfaces evaporate from memory so quickly. Perfectly boring floating in UI space. Visually correct but emotionally silent.

Which to me always felt ironic because modernism originally was full of emotion. Optimism. Utopianism. The future as a aesthetic project. Somewhere along the way people kept the reduction but forgot the passion behind it.

Anyway… making these two icons back to back ended up being more interesting than I expected.

They will both be available in PlasmaShell near you….

P.S. welcome to my new home, I'm still alive

I'm probably gona make a video with some crazy ideas for a over the top theme in QML, kinda as a exercise on the sort of things that should be possible in theme engines. Because even with QML giving us allot more creative freedom people still somehow end up making mostly the same thing over and over again.

11 May 2026 2:18pm GMT

Hey everyone! This is my first post and Week 1 status report.

I started this week by setting up:

• The project and configuring jj, a local version control system that has been a lifesaver for testing, simulating, and keeping my commits organized.

• The first step was to build and refactor Plasma NM in parallel while setting up a bare-bones folder structure. Here is the Commit I made.

• After creating the initial folder structure, I started refactoring the main backend service for WifiSecurities, which includes creating separate components for the Enterprise section, authentication, and Wi-Fi security options.

This week, I learned a lot of new things about local version control, architecture for Qt Widgets, and QML.

10 May 2026 1:48pm GMT

Image by: Nuno Pinheiro Following posts on specific work being done on Oxygen, this post is going to try to go beyond the manifest work and look at the bigger picture driving it. The motivation for writing it came when I was listening to a music artist who had completely rebranded himself by appending "Frutiger"...... Continue Reading →

10 May 2026 7:30am GMT

Last weekend I joined parts of the FOSSGIS Community Meeting at Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany, focusing on topics related to organizing this year's edition of the Open Transport Community Conference.

FOSSGIS Community Meeting

Twice a year FOSSGIS e.V. (the German local chapter of OpenStreetMap) hosts a multi-day meeting at Linuxhotel, for people to work on primarily non-technical topics, such as organizing conferences, presence at events, public communication and outreach, lobbying and political activities around FOSS/Open Data, finances and fundraising, and operations of the FOSSGIS e.V.

I had been at Linuxhotel for a KDE sprint before, but only after looking up the group photo from back then I realized that this was already 18 years ago…

Open Transport Community Conference

While the first edition of the Open Transport Community Conference last year was very successful and ran very smoothly overall, one important thing that had to change to make this long-term sustainable was moving this under the umbrella of some form of legal entity. We are looking at doubling the length, doubling the number of attendees and a 40x increase in budget this year, way beyond something you'd want to have individuals carry the legal and financial risks for.

I'm therefore very happy that with the FOSSGIS e.V. we have found a suitable organization for this. Besides the obvious overlap in domain and partially also in people, FOSSGIS e.V. has extensive experience in organizing conferences we can tap into, as well as infrastructure we can use.

This should allow us for example to handle sponsors this year, as well as offering (optional) paid tickets for people attending for their employers. And with that we could then (given enough income) provide some kind of travel support program for community attendees to soften the impact of the rather expensive location in Switzerland.

The weekend provided an opportunity to work out a number of legal, financial, organizational and operational implementation details for that. Some aspects have still to be resolved with the tax advisor though, given Switzerland isn't in the EU, which should then unlock finally opening the registration for the conference.

Transitous

Transitous is in a somewhat similar situation, although with less time pressure for now. To improve long-term sustainability we'd also need a legal entity to hold assets (such as the domain), handle money and sign contracts.

We are extremely lucky so far that the "big" servers doing the heavy lifting are provided to us for free, including all hosting cost. While there's no indication that might change anytime soon, we at least want to have options ready should this change, or in case we need additional capacity.

Our current yearly budget is around 60€, if we'd have to pay market prices for our entire infrastructure we'd need to increase that significantly, 50x before the global madness in recent months, more like 100x now. Obviously not something we can do overnight, so starting to explore and ramping up fundraising options sooner rather than later makes sense.

And that's just the direct cost for server operations, it would also be great to be able to support community members with travel costs for example.

Just as with the conference, the plan is to attach Transitous to the FOSSGIS e.V.. FOSSGIS e.V. is "gemeinnützig" in Germany, which allows receiving tax-deductable donations, something we'd be unlikely to achieve with a separate organization on our own.

FOSS and Open Data

With my KDE hat on, there were also a number of other relevant and interesting topics:

• Rules and criteria for "recommended service providers" lists by FOSS projects, and countering misuse (e.g. KDE e.V. Trusted IT Consulting Firms, FOSSGIS e.V. Dienstleisterliste, Transitous supplier list).
• Participation and presence at the Digital Independence Day events.
• Lobbying for recognizing FOSS/Open Data work as charitable ("gemeinnützig") in Germany, to receive all the legal, tax and PR benefits associated with that, and without the current workarounds and uncertainties (see also the ongoing petition for that).
• Lobbying for FOSS use in public administration, in particular in the context of the current interest in "digital sovereignty" there.

I think for all this we could benefit from building more bridges between the various communities and organizations affected by or interesting in those topics.

You can help!

It's foundations like FOSSGIS e.V. or KDE e.V. that provide all the boring legal, financial and operational infrastructure for Free Software and Open Data communities and initiatives to do their work, and keep doing that independently. Your donations enable this.

09 May 2026 7:30am GMT

The first maintenance release of the 26.04 series is now available, with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements.

Thanks to an NLnet/NGI0 grant, we had a security audit provided by Radically Open Security. The audit found one serious vulnerability that can happen when opening a malicious project file, allowing remote code execution. This is fixed with Kdenlive 26.04.1. Thanks to Edoardo Geraci and Radically Open Security for helping us make our software safer!

We are not aware of the vulnerability being exploited so far. It is important to understand that this security issue is about a manipulated .kdenlive project file containing potentially malicious code. Therefore, it is only relevant if you open a .kdenlive project file that you received from someone else or downloaded from the internet. If you are working only with your own projects or with shared projects in collaboration with fully trusted partners, there is no security risk.

If you cannot upgrade, do not open a project file that was not created by you.

Although the vulnerability is fixed in 26.04.1, we have also implemented another layer of security checks for the upcoming 26.08.0 to warn the user if some other unexpected input is detected in a project file.

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

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

09 May 2026 4:00am GMT