fidzu : KDE

I spent last week in Bern, Switzerland, for the second edition of the Open Transport Community Conference, attending that but also being part of the organizer team.

Open Transport Community Conference

Compared to last year the event has grown quite a bit. The event got merged with the OTP Summit, a yearly event by the OpenTripPlanner community with a lot of overlap in topics.

Besides the two unconference days there now also were two less structured "hack days". Due to venue constraints those had to happen before the unconference part, which worked for the larger project teams that already knew each other and had prepared agendas, but would probably have been better the other way around for new people not knowing anyone yet.

A lot of work had also gone into moving the event under the umbrealla of the FOSSGIS e.V.. That enabled us to handle sponsors and (optional) paid tickets this year, to cover lunch for all days. And it hopefully put the event on a sustainable base for years to come.

There were about 140 people attending at the peak, from all over Europe as well as a few people from North America. German speakers were still over-represented, while e.g. the French community was clearly under-represented. We had a good mix of people representing different roles and stakeholders though, covering transport operators, public agencies, standardization, research, politics, FOSS and Open Data projects, etc.

I'm very happy we managed to find an organization to host the event again with SBB and opentransportdata.swiss. Hopefully we can continue this, and keep rotating between different countries, to give more people a chance to attend.

Hack Days

So much for the organizer perspective, now to the content. During the hack days I mainly discussed Transitous and KDE Itinerary topics:

• Meta stations in Transitous, ie. what happens when you search for a journey from Paris to London. The expectations there is usually not an exact route between city center points, but between appropriate major transport hubs such as major railway stations or airports. Large cities can have more than one of those though, which means all of those should be considered (ie. treating those as one "meta station"). It's however non-trivial to define exactly what the expected outcome is here, and we went through many different approaches for which we found unfixable counter-examples. There's two possible approaches left now that could work generically and mode-independent, those would need to be implemented for more wider testing.
• Geocoding issues in Itinerary, ie. searching for locations resulting in unexpected or confusing results. Jonah improved result merging for this, and we found some issues with parsing Photon responses that added misleading results.
• Decoding Spanish and Norwegian train ticket barcodes. Updates to the Train Ticket Wiki and the Train Ticket Kaitai Spec repository are under way.
• Implementing the MOTIS journey refresh API for KPublicTransport. Turned out the partial results we were seeing there were due to not setting all required parameters correctly.

There's of course many more things that other people worked on, see for example the notes in the Transitous wiki. Transitous now also covering the Chinese railway system is another significant outcome.

Máté showed an experimental iOS port of Itinerary. The amount of code changes needed for that throughout the stack looked manageable from what I saw, and the first patches to KDE Frameworks are already being upstreamed now. The big challenge for bringing that to production is the building, packaging and delivery part though.

Unconference

Session planning for the unconference part went a lot smoother this time, despite having fewer rooms for parallel sessions. The selected topics seemed even broader than last year.

• Evolving data standard like GTFS, GTFS-Flex, NeTEx and SIRI. I'm particularly excited seeing the community getting more and more actively involved in shaping these.
• Deckplan data. This is very relevant for wheelchair accessibility but also when traveling with bikes or a stroller. Also nice to see that the standardization work there isn't limited to trains but contains anything from a simple bus to a larger ferry.
• Opened Data. Somehow this term stuck, referring to all kinds of legal, technical or political approaches to obtain data that isn't voluntarily Open Data.
• Crowd-sourcing data. When data cannot be obtained or isn't available, people are increasingly looking for ways to fill those gaps themselves, with increasing scope and creativity.
• Ticket standards. A somewhat niche topic, but an amazing examples of how the entire domain got infiltrated and taken over by the community, from reverse engineering a few years ago to now working on the next generation EU ticket standard with an official mandate. We need more of this.
• Dynamic traffic data. This has already been a hot topic at OSM events recently, with various bits of ongoing work presented here.
• C-ITS was also a prominent topic in this context, but also for e.g. priorizing public transport at traffic lights and the additional security implications that come with it.
• Routing algorithms and journey planners like MOTIS and OpenTripPlanner, as consumers of much of the above.
• Aligning schedule, stop and infrastructure data with OpenStreetMap, as well as upstreaming data to OSM or building OSM QA tooling. This matters as we ultimately route on the OSM data, and for that need to be able to match e.g. realtime elevator data to the right OSM object.

There were also more sessions this time focusing on primarily political aspects rather than technical ones, such as passenger rights and illegal border controls.

We also had a small session about onboarding in the Open Transport community in general and the conference in particular. Open Transport encompasses a lot of different very specialized topics meanwhile, with many of the conversations being very jargon- and abbreviation-heavy, which can be off-putting.

Much of this has grown organically over time from local and fragmented efforts, so it's not always easy to find who to talk to about a specific topic. We recently added the Open Transport Community Matrix space to make it easier to find the right communication channel, ideally we'd also turn the open-transport.org website into a more general entry point. Help welcome.

Most sessions have notes that can be found in the wiki, next to the lightning talk slides.

Outlook

The event got again very positive feedback, people seemed to enjoy it and consider it useful, as e.g. also Brede's report indicate. There's clearly interest and demand for a third edition, but we still need a venue and people doing the work for this. If you happen to have a lead on a venue or want to help out by other means, please get in touch, via the conference Matrix channel or by email.

There's several options to meet before that as well, a few members of the Transitous team will be at the upcoming OSM Hackweekend in Berlin next week for example, and there's already work ongoing for organizing the Open Transport presence at 40C3 and FOSDEM 2027.

17 Oct 2026 7:45am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we released Plasma 6.8, but we didn't stop there: work on Plasma 6.9 has been coming in hot and heavy, and there's a lot to talk about! So let's jump right in:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.9

The Weather Report widget has received massive changes: a new layout that includes per-hour temperature and precipitation forecasts, and support for weather forecasts from Open-Meteo. (Bohdan Onofriichuk and tusooa the west wind, kdeplasma-addons MR #1037, KDE Bugzilla #451767)

Plasmas's on-screen keyboard has been extensively re-worked, and now includes multiple desirable features: the option for a full-size keyboard including arrow and modifier keys; a flick keyboard for Japanese; and distinct layouts not tied to system locales. (Devin Lin, plasma-keyboard MR #109)

The Night Light feature now lets you temporarily enable or disable it for a specific period of time, independent of its normal schedule. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin work item #321)

If you'd prefer your System Tray icons to be really small, you can now configure them that way. (Jin Liu, plasma-workspace MR #6978)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.8.1

Plasma now shows an OSD when you use the keyboard to increase the brightness when it's already at its maximum level, just like it already does when when you do try to increase the volume when that is at its maximum level. (Pavel Radzivilovsky, KDE Bugzilla #505558)

Plasma 6.9

Clipboard-related keyboard shortcuts shown in System Settings are now grouped into their own section, rather than in the generic "Plasma Workspace" section. And the feature to basically rotate the entire clipboard history up or down (such that a new item becomes the top one, and you can easily paste it) now uses that terminology to make it easier to figure out how the feature works. (Taras Oleksyn and Tomáš Hnyk, plasma-workspace MR #7208, KDE Bugzilla #467252)

Plasma no longer shows a notification about a new screen being connected if it's a virtual output. But if it's a real physical screen, the notification now shows more information about that screen. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7233, plasma-workspace MR #7195)

Removing a network on System Settings' Wi-Fi & Networking page no longer hides the right pane until you select a new network in the sidebar. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #511362)

On operating systems that configure Discover to use both PackageKit and "offline upgrades", the page that includes details of every package being updated now also tells you the current package versions, not just the new ones. (Taras Oleksyn, KDE Bugzilla #500663)

Qt 6.13.0

Qt now renders fonts with hinting when using a scale factor over 100%. (Infinality, Qt Bug #128874)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.7

Fixed a bug that made Plasma's built-in RDP server crash when the client uses a very large pointer. (Curious J Tuber, kpipewire MR #285)

Plasma no longer fails to launch on a system with a broken MIME type database. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7214)

Fixed a bug that made section headers go missing on System Settings' Bluetooth page when using a language other than English. (Kai Uwe Broulik, bluedevil MR #270)

You can now disable the "running out of disk space" notification, if you'd like. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #7202)

Plasma 6.7.6

Fixed a bug that made Plasma's built-in RDP system unstable when using the Microsoft RDP client on Android. (Yury MonZon, KDE Bugzilla #520260)

Fixed a bug that prevented the feature to save your current settings as a new Global Theme from successfully saving whether or not the panel should float. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #526843)

Plasma 6.8.1

Fixed a bug in the Task Manager widget that would occasionally make Plasma crash. (David Edmundson, plasma-workspace MR #7149)

Plasma's built-in RDP system is now more reliable when receiving connections from the Microsoft RDP client on Windows. (Mauricio de Lima, krdp MR #251)

Fixed a few cases in the Audio Volume widget and its System Settings page where tooltips showed un-escaped HTML or ate ampersands. (Tobias Fella, plasma-pa MR #433)

Fixed a bug that made the Kup backup system's background daemon auto-start when it wasn't actually being used. (Iyán Méndez Veiga, kup MR #68)

Plasma 6.9

KRunner-powered search fields once again find power-related items like "Shut Down" and "Restart" without you having to type out the entire text. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #522158)

On System Settings' Region & Language page, languages can now be dragged up and down in their list view without functional and visual glitches. (Vsevolod Stopchanskyi, plasma-workspace #7189)

Task Manager tooltips for Flatpak apps now always show media and volume controls when needed. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bugzilla #518840)

Frameworks 6.32

Fixed a bug in the Breeze icon theme that resulted in GTK apps that respect the icon theme displaying certain Breeze icons at the wrong size. (Alexey Varfolomeev, KDE Bugzilla #493975)

Qt 6.12.1

Fixed a bug in Qt that could occasionally keep Plasma from quitting properly during logout when any panels had a visible Pager widget on them. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #525727)

WirePlumber 0.5.19

Bluetooth devices renamed in the audio settings now correctly use their new name throughout the UI. (Julian Bouzas, wireplumber issue #1043)

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.

17 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

This is the release schedule the release team agreed on

https://community.kde.org/Schedules/KDE_Gear_26.12_Schedule

Dependency freeze is in less than 3 weeks (November 5) and feature freeze one
week after that. Get your stuff ready!

16 Oct 2026 10:15pm GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-42.

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The importance of communities around software

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, community, ethics, governance

Good reminder that licensing is only one signal. The governance is what matters for Free Software communities. This means looking at more than just the license to pick your folks.

https://lumi.codeberg.page/blog/software-community.html

The RSS Universe - Readers, Tools & Standards

Tags: tech, rss, self-hosting

Nice resource listing many tools available around RSS. Plenty to choose from including self-hostable options (but not only).

https://toolbox.rss.here.now/

WING COMMANDER III to get a surprise remaster

Tags: tech, gaming, culture, history

OK, now that's a blast from the past. I liked this game.

https://thewertzone.blogspot.com/2026/10/wing-commander-iii-to-get-surprise.html

Triple-A Minesweeper

Tags: tech, gaming, satire

OK, that's a funny one. You thought there was no back story to minesweeper? Time to see it differently.

https://minesweeper.mikelacher.com/

How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet

Tags: tech, amazon, business, criticism

Or how Amazon manages to enshittify things even outside of its platform…

https://www.not-ship.com/how-amazon-pushes-up-prices-all-across-the-internet/

'Unprecedented' Cyberattack cripples supermarket fridges across Europe

Tags: tech, iot, security

Looks like connecting everything isn't the best idea after all.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supermarket-fridges-across-europe-as-hackers-activate-automatic-defrosting-delivery-and-store-prices-also-impacted-by-incident

How Technology Empowers-and Imperils-Dictators

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

Interesting opinion piece on how autocracies benefit greatly from the current AI arm race. But the short term benefit will also create new weaknesses.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/10/how-technology-empowers-and-imperils-dictators.html

AI agents aren't 'going rogue.' Frontier labs are skipping security basics

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security

Between this and the scrapers behavior… the disregard for infrastructure and best practices is obvious. It's just another externality those so called "labs" don't want to deal with. And well, it makes for a marketing stunt each time isn't it?

https://www.csoonline.com/article/4234854/ai-agents-arent-going-rogue-frontier-labs-are-skipping-security-basics.html

Steering AI Beyond Automation

Tags: tech, ai, economics, research

I'm not agreeing with some of the points in here. That said the core position of "it should be about collaboration not automation" I'm very much aligned with. It's after all at the center of how we designed AI systems in my team twenty years ago. We really wanted systems helping the user in their task. It was about co-constructing the result with the support of the machine rather than answers from some kind of "oracle".

https://www.normaltech.ai/p/steering-ai-beyond-automation

My self-hosted infrastructure with Incus OS

Tags: tech, infrastructure, incus, self-hosting

Looks like a very neat setup. Probably a few good ideas to borrow in there.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2026-10-15-selfhosting-infrastructure-incus-os.html

Branches in branch-free code

Tags: tech, cpu, compiler, security

Interesting case of the compiler not generating the code you'd expect on some platforms. The problem is that it can bring security implications you don't want.

https://00f.net/2026/10/09/llvm-compiles-branch-free-code-into-branches-on-risc-v/

Lifeguard is a static analyzer to detect Lazy Imports incompatibilities in Python

Tags: tech, python, linting, tools

Early days but this could help better use lazy imports in Python. It's not exactly a transparent process.

https://github.com/Facebook/lifeguard

2D Vehicle Physics Prototype

Tags: tech, game, physics, simulation

Nice! A recreation of the 2D physics simulation used in the very first GTA. Loved that game and it had a very nice feel in its simulation at the time.

https://patkerr.co.uk/2d-vehicles/

CSS for underlines

Tags: tech, html, css

This is finally a solved problem. No more ugly border workaround.

https://www.rubenerd.au/css-for-underlines/

The Boots Theory of Software Architecture

Tags: tech, architecture, business

Unexpected metaphor but it kind of works. Indeed, architecture work is expensive, that doesn't make it unnecessary.

https://kevlinhenney.medium.com/the-boots-theory-of-software-architecture-e18cf0fa5a1b

The geometric model of maintenance

Tags: tech, maintenance, estimates

The article equates effort with lines of code a bit too much for my taste. That said I think this model can be useful to describe how maintenance works in a given project.

https://entropicthoughts.com/geometric-model-of-maintenance

How To Sound Smart When Talking About Charts

Tags: tech, data-visualization

Aphorisms and ideas on how to treat data visualization properly.

https://graphpaper.substack.com/p/how-to-sound-smart-when-talking-about

You Can't Change Your Boss

Tags: management, work

Unfortunately it's true. Terrible bosses are generally the one who can't handle feedback and so won't change.

https://jacobian.org/2026/oct/12/you-cant-change-your-boss/

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Bye for now!

16 Oct 2026 11:09am GMT

Kdenlive development for the 26.12 release is very active, and we would like to request some feedback regarding two of the upcoming features.

Title Editor

One of the feature is related to the title editor. Our title editor has always been functional but rather limited. A new feature was recently implemented by klg that allows having different font styles in a single text block.

Note that several other great improvements were made by other contributors, like: Undo/redo support, implemented by Jaimukund Bhan, and Copy/paste support, implemented by chocolate image.

Relative paths for projects

The second large change is the switch to relative paths in project files. This means that if your videos or images are in the same folder as the project file (or a subfolder), you can easily move your work to another drive and reopen it without issue. This should really improve the experience for people editing projects on several computers, or switching between different operating systems. And this should also fix issues for teams doing collaborative work with projects on network drives or removable drives.

How you can help

We did some regression testing and have some unit tests for both these new features, of course, but some real-life scenarios may not be covered, which is why having feedback from testers is very valuable to us. Download the binaries from the link below and use this development version (26.11.70) to test the steps as described below, then report your findings in the comments section.

To test the title editor changes

The goal is to ensure existing titles display exactly as before and that there are no changes to the position or attributes of the titles.

1. Open your project files, ensure your existing titles display and render correctly.
2. Save your project to a new file, try to reopen and ensure it still displays and renders fine.

To test the relative paths changes

The goal is to ensure that all files in existing projects are correctly found, that you can render, save, open again, and all files are still correctly found.

1. Open your projects, ensure that all files appear correctly.
2. Check in the project settings that the project folder is correctly detected (default location, parent folder, or custom folder).
3. Check that rendering works correctly (no missing images ore videos).
4. Save the project with a new name (Save As), then repeat steps 1 thru 3.
5. If you sometimes edit from multiple computers, save the project under a new name and ensure that you can open and save the project file correctly from your different computers.

Download

Linux Appimage can be downloaded from Kdenlive's unstable download folder. Make it executable from your file manager before running it.

Windows installer can be downloded from Kdenlive's unstable download folder.

Development Flatpak can be installed from KDE's cdn server.

16 Oct 2026 8:30am GMT

Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 6, versioned 6.6.7.

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

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

KDE today announces the release of Plasma 6.6.7: the first bugfix release in the Plasma 6.6 Long-Term Support (LTS) series, which will still receive bugfixes and backports for a period of 3 years. Plasma 6.6.7 includes numerous bug fixes, improvements, and backports, addressing issues reported by users and developers, improving the overall quality of the desktop.

View full changelog

16 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

For more than 20 years, I've been part of the KDE community, one of the largest and most impactful Free and Open Source software community world-wide. Yesterday, KDE turned 30 and this went accompanied with the premiere of the KDE documentary.
As former release manager, Plasma core developer and KDE e.V. board member, I've also been interviewed. A fairly prominent NPC role went out to Skippie, my cat.

Lately, I have been back into Free Software development, working on two apps that are closely related to hobbies of mine. Watch this space for news! Something nice has been cooking!

15 Oct 2026 2:32pm GMT

Tagoross published its first open content package, one day after KDE turned thirty. Two good days in a row Yesterday was a great day for me. KDE turned thirty years old. The KDE documentary, published to celebrate the anniversary, was delightful. Today is no less special for me. The first Tagoross package This morning, Tagoross … Continue reading Tagoross releases its first open content package on AI openness

15 Oct 2026 11:00am GMT

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 21 Beta2.

15 Oct 2026 8:49am GMT

When I joined KDE in 1999 I already thought of it as a mature project. I used the KDE desktop every day, and I was delighted with what it could do and how it felt. I had no idea that this would be one of the most impactful decisions of my life, or where it would lead me.

Today we are celebrating the 30th anniversary of the original announcement of KDE. The project is still alive and kicking. I still use it every day, just like millions of other people. Not only because it's great software, but because of the values it embodies.

KDE stands for freedom and being able to shape your own destiny. As the KDE vision says: "A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy." While I originally joined for the technology, this is what made me stay.

One of my favorite pictures illustrating the spirit of the community is the group picture of Akademy in Dublin in 2006. Brilliant people having fun working towards a shared purpose of digital freedom.

KDE gets a wonderful present for its birthday. The KDE documentary is premiering today. It tells the story of the founding, the rapid early development, and the license conflicts. How it became a solid product used by many people, and then put it all at risk with KDE 4. How we learned from that and turned it into this extremely resilient and lively community it still is today. I'm happy I could contribute to this story, and that I'm one of the people telling it in the documentary.

For me, KDE shaped my career and my life, and gave me the opportunity to grow and learn. It led to things I would never have expected when I started: my code running on millions of computers, talking to hundreds of developers at conferences, sitting at the negotiation table with Nokia in Helsinki, consulting as an expert in the German parliament. And much more.

Today, KDE is maybe stronger than ever. We reached a lot of new users with the Steam Deck. The Sovereign Tech Fund is investing more than a million euros in KDE. With the strategic goals the community set this year, we are addressing enterprise, documentation, and styling. It shows how much the project has matured, beyond what I could ever have imagined. It also shows in its contributors. While contributors leave over time, new generations come in every year and keep the community growing over the long run, combining stability and rejuvenation.

I'm proud and grateful. Proud of what the KDE community achieved. Grateful that I could be part of this amazing group of people. A team nobody could have hired.

Happy birthday, KDE.

14 Oct 2026 12:28pm GMT

14 Oct 2026 9:34am GMT

Improvements you can use today

Better accessibility

Part of our continued effort to bring digital control to everyone, a new "dwell clicker" feature can send a mouse click when the pointer stops moving. Designed especially for users with mobility issues, an external app is no longer required to use your system in this way; now it's built right in!

Serving more users worldwide

Plasma 6.8 gains support for the Bikram Sambat calendar in the Digital Clock, and the Amharic language in the on-screen keyboard. These are just two more additions of the dozens incorporated into Plasma over recent versions in our effort to make Plasma a truly universal desktop.

Bikram Sambat calendar

Amharic on-screen keyboard

System monitoring

Gain an extreme level of control over your system with Plasma's System Monitor. In Plasma 6.8, you can assign compute-intensive tasks to only the CPUs of your choosing from directly within the monitor, and keep your machine running smoothly.

You can also monitor your VRAM more easily, as it now shows the load as an easy-to-read percentage.

Remote desktop

We've invested a great deal of time into polishing the experience provided by Plasma's built-in remote desktop server. In Plasma 6.8, you'll be able to enjoy the following improvements - with more in the pipeline:

• Much better performance and quality that prioritizes latency and responsiveness by adapting to slow networks and rapidly-updating screen content.
• Exclusive mode optionally locks the server's screen and provides the client with a virtual screen that exactly matches its window size.
• Bi-directional clipboard synchronization makes it easier to exchange content between the server and client.

These features will only take effect in remote desktop client apps that support them.

Screen casting and recording

Spectacle can now optionally include both system audio and microphone input in its screen recordings, making it possible to narrate a recording or accurately record everything that's going on.

Plasma's screen sharing portal dialog lets you create a virtual screen to share, instead of an existing display. In Plasma 6.8, you can now specify the resolution of the virtual screen instead of being limited to only 1920 × 1080.

In addition, the quality of screen recordings and screencasts has been improved.

Nicer-looking third-party app windows

We've added support for window rules that add desktop shadows, outlines, and rounded corners to client-side-decorated windows that can't provide these visual niceties themselves. Plasma 6.8 ships with one such rule for Steam, making it feel more at home in Plasma.

Window management

We've added new global shortcuts to help power users manage their open windows with the Task Manager widget. By pressing Meta + Ctrl + Page Up or Page Down, you can cycle between the previous and next tasks. By also holding Shift, you can move the active task backwards and forwards.

Setting the stage for decades to come

Theming

Four months ago, Plasma 6.7 included an alpha release of the new Union theming system, demonstrating its ability to style Qt Quick applications.

Plasma 6.8 builds on this with a beta release of Union, including not only refinements for Qt Quick theming, but also the ability to style Qt Widgets applications! This includes KDE's more traditional desktop applications, such as Dolphin, Kate, and Konsole.

While Union is not quite ready to be used by default, Plasma 6.8 brings it ever closer to being a single source of truth for styling all of KDE's products, and more. To learn more about the current state of Union, read the blog posts from Arjen and Akseli.

To try Union, ensure the union package is installed (name may differ depending on your distribution), apply "Breeze (Union)" in System Settings → Colors & Themes → Application Style, then restart your apps or the system.

Apps are expected to look nearly identical to how they do with the traditional Breeze theme. If you've found a Union-specific issue, please report it.

If you're interested in experimenting with creating your own Union style, you can find out more in Union's documentation.

Wayland

30 years is an impressive milestone for a community like KDE. But even older is the venerable X Window System (or "X11"), first released in 1984! After 42 years of faithful service, support for starting X11 sessions in Plasma is being retired, in conjunction with full adoption of the newer Wayland system.

Compared to X11, Wayland offers better support for modern screens and graphics cards, and is actively developed.

The small number of individual apps that still require X11 will continue to work via the "XWayland" compatibility layer.

KDE applications will continue to support X11 for the foreseeable future.

Performance, colors, and graphics

As part of the backend improvements included in Plasma 6.8, we've made changes to help Plasma load faster and use less memory. Discover's update notifier now uses less memory, too.

With KWin, NVIDIA GPUs now use triple buffering by default, and all users will have better-looking HDR when using an ICC color profile. We've also added support for the HLG transfer function, which means that certain media and applications that did not previously work in HDR are now working as expected.

But that's not all…

Plasma 6.8 is chock-full of smaller changes, including:

• A new kscreenctl tool makes managing displays from the command-line easier and also offers the potential for scripting and automation.
• Kup, the KDE backup tool, has been polished up and is now released as a part of Plasma.
• We have added EAP-TTLS authentication support for StrongSwan VPNs.
• You can enable and disable auto-starting apps without having to delete and recreate their entries.
• Use the arrow keys to move screens pixel-by-pixel in Display Configuration.
• The system shows a warning notification when trying to print using an unavailable printer.
• Copying secrets such as passwords to the clipboard now clarifies why they are not included in history.
• Emojis in the Emoji Selector can now be shown at different sizes.
• …and countless bug fixes and small tweaks to make Plasma better than ever!

To see a high-level overview of all user-facing changes, see the Plasma 6.8 wiki page.

To see the full list of all changes, read the complete changelog.

14 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

The second maintenance release of the 26.08 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include improved project handling and ability to set the frame count to start at 1 in the Dynamic Text filter which is useful for animation workflows. This release also fixes several issues in proxy clips, titles, and audio levels.

Kdenlive needs your support

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

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

13 Oct 2026 6:45pm GMT

This year's edition of International Calligraphy Festival Keralam was yet another great experience, consisting of workshops, demonstrations and talks surrounding calligraphy & typography, much like the last time. Eminent calligraphers of about a dozen scripts shared their expertise and experience.

Pictures of a sample collection of the calligraphy works at the exhibition below.

For my talk, I presented the historical evolution of Malayalam script from rock inscriptions to the digital age, and how the vigilant volunteer community reclaimed the script with its rich conjuncts and conjoined reph/matra shapes, and made all the foundational digital technologies openly available for public good.

The video recording of the talk is available.

Many type designers, companies and enthusiasts were also at the 4-day programme, enabling lot of productive hallway talks as well. A recurring question was the usage of Open Font License, which I hope to have helped to clarify.

The most useful feedback after the talk came from a good friend, who pointed that my slides didn't do enough justice to the body of work we've done (particularly as open-source); and helped me walk through some possible improvements. I did make some of those changes, and the slides (created using TeX) are made available.

12 Oct 2026 11:58am GMT

Welcome to the latest edition of This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty!

This blog series covers the work done throughout KDE's software stack that's funded by the investment KDE received earlier this year from Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency.

Commissioned work on a variety of projects has been done by KDE contributors working for KDE e.V. itself, as well as the Techpaladin Software, enioka Haute Couture, and MachineSoul companies.

This post will cover the work done in the third quarter (Q3) of 2026. Let's get into it!

Quality assurance and testing

QA work continued in Q3, this time largely to polish and improve upon the work that was landed in Q2.

On the KDE Linux side, the OpenQA system received a lot of work both to maintain it, and also to reduce ongoing future maintenance needs, as well as adding more tests. Some highlights include:

• Verifying bootability of the prior build after an upgrade
• Verifying that secret service credentials are preserved after an upgrade
• Testing Btrfs snapshotting facilities

On the PIM side, the end-to-end tests continue to pay dividends. Lots of effort went into fixing the issues they uncovered. This included issues like:

• CalDAV handling of recurrence exceptions
• KOrganizer missing some recurrence exceptions
• Parsing custom properties in CalDAV
• Broken foreign keys cascading when Akonadi server uses sqlite as backend
• Unwanted iTIP sequence incrementation when accepting invitations

This allowed us to remove all the expected fail marks which were still present on some of the tests.

With this QA safety net in place, we've been working on landing long-needed improvements around DAV support. For instance, it's been migrated away from KIO to use QNetworkAccessManager leading to a large performance boost. Further performance enhancement is expected from the work to port the DAV Akonadi resource to ObserverV3 allowing batching of some operations.

IMAP4rev2 and WebDAV-Push

The work on QRESYNC support in the IMAP Akonadi resource has been completed, providing a very nice boost to email syncing by making it faster, and drastically reducing the network bandwidth used for a sync. This pretty much concluded the work on the IMAP4rev2 upgrade of our stack.

Focus then shifted to WebDAV-Push support for DAV Akonadi resources. More of the protocol is getting implemented like support of the "Don't Notify" header to avoid getting notified of our own changes. The DavPush notification subscription code path has also been completed.

This allows us to move to the next step which is integration of the various components involved and the addition of new end-to-end tests to validate the whole chain.

An interesting side effect of this work has been the need to implement support for DAV sync-tokens, which is supported by most servers. This will simplify calendar syncs even if your server doesn't support WebDAV-Push. We expect it to improve the syncing of calendars in a similar way to the improvements with emails we've experienced with QRESYNC.

This work is not completed yet, with a few merge requests still in flight. But expect next year's release to fly for syncing IMAP and DAV.

Security

Plasma's security infrastructure received a great deal of work in Q3. Much of it is non-flashy, but rather intended to shore up and modernize the foundations. As part of that work, Plasma's lock screen gained a more flexible system that supports multiple authentication methods being configured and made available in different combinations:

Work is now ongoing to apply this feature to Plasma Login Manager, and share more security infrastructure between them.

Recoverability

Work began on adding a "safe mode" to Plasma, wherein you'll be able to log into a dedicated troubleshooting environment that offers tools to help you get back to a working session.

This work is all in progress, with parts expected to start landing in Q4.

Network share handling

KDE's network share handling improved in two significant ways in Q3. First, network FUSE mounts created by kio-fuse will now be automatically mounted if needed when you open a file that was previously accessed from a kio-fuse mount path. And those paths are now stable across logins, meaning that paths involving kio-fuse mounts also remain accessible across logins.

Work also began to remove blocking file access calls in KDE software, so that network shares accessed via mounts (FUSE or otherwise) are less likely to cause freezes and hangs - starting with Dolphin.

Data integrity

Q3 also saw a significant amount work on the topic of data integrity, from multiple angles.

First, the kio-snapshot service built in Q2 received a large amount of technical and user interface polish to make it a practical and reliable tool for users whose systems take Btrfs snapshots.

That tool was then integrated into KDE Linux, along with the Snapper Btrfs shapshotting system, thereby providing automatic user-level file snapshots by default. You can read a bit more about this in the August 2026 KDE Linux blog post.

The Baloo file indexing system was also made aware of Btrfs snapshots - specifically, how to not index them!

And because the concept of "free space" can be somewhat fuzzy on snapshotted filesystems, work is ongoing to surface information in more comprehensible ways, starting with KDE's Filelight app.

Finally, the Kup backup system - which was previously released independently - was made a part of Plasma, so it will now see regular releases on the same schedule as Plasma itself. As a prerequisite to this, Kup was fully ported to Qt 6 and its widget received some more polish. Kup was also configured to avoid backing up large Flatpak apps and runtimes installed at the user level by default. And in the process, a longstanding bug afflicting multiple System Tray widgets was fixed.

Configuration management

The topic of strengthening KDE's configuration management continued in Q3. First, even more apps and parts of Plasma were ported to use KConfigXT, and some had their settings refined to move volatile state data out of their configuration files.

Leveraging this expanded use of KConfigXT, the team created a GUI config editor app that offers system administrators the ability to graphically visualize and change configuration options. This app is still a work in progress, but shows the promise and potential of fully adopting schema-based configuration.

Account Autoconfig

On the PIM side, work to ease setup is moving towards exposing the new facilities to the user. Indeed, the KAccountAutoconfig library is almost feature-complete with one patch still to go through review.

Once it's merged, we'll start the process of moving the library to KDE Frameworks, and then begin integrating it into KOnlineAccounts and the individual PIM apps. We already have a prototype port of kmail-account-wizard to use this new library - a good first use of this library to prove it works properly.

Kontact Flatpak

Last but not least, work on the Kontact Flatpak integration with Plasma has started, and we're currently scoping out requirements. The dependency chain between Plasma and the PIM stack will be completely reworked: it will be D-Bus based, and we're working on defining the interfaces.

Attending Akademy 2026 definitely helped, as we got interesting input during the PIM BoF on the direction to take. This will lead to options which might benefit more contexts than the desktop, and so hopefully one day help Plasma Mobile as well.

Stay tuned for more details when the implementation work will be underway.

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Looking forward

User-facing work has begun! We anticipate that this will continue in Q4 of 2026. And we're very grateful for the Sovereign Tech Agency's investment in KDE that made this possible!

11 Oct 2026 12:01am GMT

Great news for the community! The integration of QML Quick Editor into Qt Creator is now 100% complete. The plugin is officially available, bringing native workflow integration directly to your development environment. Give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Features:

Designed as an all-in-one QML code editor, this extension allows you to quickly prototype and test QML snippets without the overhead of creating a full project. Simply edit your code and preview the visual output instantly inside Qt Creator-speeding up your UI experimentation and debugging workflow.

10 Oct 2026 1:00pm GMT