fidzu : KDE

The last post regarding work on fixing Oxygen was a month and a half ago. With all that's happened in between, it feels like so much more time has actually passed. With this post, I'd like to do a sort of mid-term update summing up all of the improvements done so far. These improvements are...... Continue Reading →

05 Apr 2026 7:00am GMT

For the next digiKam releases, the digiKam team needs photographs for digiKam and Showfoto splash-screens. Proposing photo samples as splash-screens is a simple way for users to contribute to digiKam project. The pictures must be correctly exposed/composed, and the subject must be chosen from a real photographer's inspiration. Note that we will add a horizontal frame to the bottom of the image as in the current splashes.

05 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

1.

05 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

The Kdenlive 26.04 Release Candidate is ready for testing. Many bug fixes and workflow adjustments should make your editing sessions nicer. It is also worth noting that we had quite a few new contributors helping our small team on this, so thanks to all those who helped us!

Please remember that this is an RC version, not yet final, to be used only for testing and reporting issues.

Features highlights:

• Added animated previews for transitions
• Added a feature to mirror the monitor to an external monitor, allowing you to see the image in the usual interface, while duplicating the output to a secondary monitor
• Added an entry in the timeline context menu to directly import a clip to the project and add it at click position
• Added an option to always zoom on the mouse position instead of the timeline playhead
• Generate audio thumbnails for sequences
• Dropping a transition to timeline will automatically adjust its duration to the above/below clips
• Allow changing speed of multiple clips

Feedback Needed

Now is your chance to test it and let us know if you encounter any bugs or have suggestions to help us polish the final release. Share your feedback in the comments below

Available Binaries

The AppImage and Windows versions can be downloaded through the links below. Update: the MacOS binaries are now also available

Download the binaries from below and give it a spin!

Pre-release binaries can be downloaded here.

04 Apr 2026 9:00am GMT

Last week I attended this year's FOSSGIS-Konferenz in Göttingen, Germany, focusing on public transport and indoor navigation topics.

OSM indoor mapping

As it is tradition by now, Tobias and I hosted the Indoor OSM BoF.

The (translated) session notes are in the wiki. There's some recurring themes, such as increasing the level of detail in the third dimension, as well as how to properly map inclined areas and two-dimensional walls. None of that has a good solution yet, so we are trying to get the right people together for a multi-day in-person workshop to finally progress those topics.

I'm also increasingly wondering whether we need to replace the term "indoor" in this context, as that means different things to different people:

• Mapping physically within a building. That separation is all but clear-cut though, in particular in and around train stations.
• Mapping using areas rather than ways. That's also not unique for being "indoor".
• Using the level tagging from SIT. While referring to "floor levels", this is the best way we have to place features vertically, and that's also something that isn't limited to buildings.

Kate getting syntax highlighting for ISO 10303-21 STEP files, a file format used in building information modeling (BIM) (ie. the best possible data source for importing building geometry into OSM) is of course purely coincidental.

Indoor routing

Triggered by talks on indoor navigation in previous years which weren't as forthcoming with actually publishing their code or papers as one might expect for a conference with "FOSS" in the name already, I presented the work we did in KDE for OSM-based indoor routing for Itinerary and Kongress.

The implementation is part of the KOSMIndoorMaps library and uses Recast Navigation under the hood. This works solely on areas, without needing an explicit routing graph. And it allows for routing to/from any arbitrary point, which is a requirement for localization/navigation use-cases. There's drawbacks as well, directional cost on inclined ways are hard to consider with this for example.

Richard from TU Dresden presented an alternative approach for indoor routing, semi-automatically generating routing graphs inside areas. This provides visually nicer results in narrow corridors, but becomes more challenging in open areas. By pure chance both our talks used the same building for demonstration, quite useful for discussing the strength and weaknesses of both ways.

Another topic of discussions was how to scale this up from working on a single building to something a planet-scale router such as MOTIS could integrate. Neither approach is well suited for that out of the box.

Transitous

Transitous was featured in Felix' and Robin's talk about new developments in MOTIS. Many of the new features presented there can already be seen in use on Transitous.

The conference provided the opportunity to talk to data providers about what we would need or would like to have for Transitous, as well as to data consumers, such as CoMaps, who are exploring integrating public transport routing.

And with several Transitous contributors around we also discussed a bunch of topics being currently looked into:

• How to integrate the Danish Siri-over-AMQP feeds.
• Parsing issues with the Swiss aerial lift NeTEx feed.
• Sorting out the API key handling for the Baden-Württemberg Amarillo ride sharing feed.
• Implementing spport for temporary POIs such as events.
• Getting "DIID" elevator identifiers into OSM, for matching SIRI-FM realtime status feeds to OSM data for routing.
• How to integrate empirical delay data into the MOTIS API.

KDE Itinerary

I also met a few Itinerary users and got feedback on current issues. An area that needs work is the fallback handling in the KPublicTransport library. We aren't very good (yet) at switching to different sources when the primary one fails to deliver useful results. With the DB API becoming increasingly unreliable due to randomly blocking access (not just our apps, also affects their website), this becomes increasingly visible.

FOSSGIS e.V.

FOSSGIS e.V. is the German local chapter for OSM, and the organizer of the FOSSGIS-Konferenz. Given the significant overlap in topics (and some overlap in people) FOSSGIS e.V. has been one of the obvious organizational umbrellas for both the Open Transport Community Conference and Transitous.

This has been moving forward recently, and will solve a few practical problems:

• Allow us to hold assets like domains independent of individual contributors, removing single points of failure.
• Allows us to receive and spend money in a clean way.

This is rather important for the long-term sustainability of both initiatives. Being able to handle money is especially pressing for the Open Transport conference, as given the rather expensive location this year we'd like to offer some form of travel support for people who aren't attending this as part of their job.

Dynamic traffic data

Following a joined HeiGIT/BKG talk on routing quality there were a lot of hallway discussions on dynamic traffic data, as well as a session during the unconference part, all focusing on a proper free and open solution for this.

Dynamic traffic data includes:

• (Aggregated) realtime traffic flow data (ie. current traffic jams).
• Raw traffic flow sensor data, ie. sensors counting vehicles or floating vehicle position/speed vector data.
• Statistical traffic flow data (ie. high traffic expected during specific times).
• Dynamic traffic sign data, such as adaptive speed limits.
• Temporary closures due to construction work, accidents, etc.
• Realtime availability data for bike or car parking spaces.

This is crucial information for road routing, traffic planning and research. However currently this data is collected and owned by a few proprietary vendors. Google is a particularly big player here, using the position data submitted by Android phones.

In order to build a free and open replacement the only chance we have is to do that jointly, between all parties with any interest in this, otherwise this wont gather the necessary critical mass. Doing this under the OSM umbrella seems to be the obvious choice, especially since this needs to be mapped on to the static OSM road network data anyway.

It would certainly be an ambitious project, but there's a bunch of building blocks to work with already:

• Sensor data from some public authorities, with various levels of processing applied.
• A few cases of realtime data for dynamic traffic signs from their operators.
• (Planned) construction site data in Datex II format by public authorities,
• Floating vehicle information from GTFS-RT vehicle position feeds for busses (which we consume for Transitous already).
• A community maintained road closure/construction database from SOSM.
• Realtime parking data, partially even in standardized ParkAPI or Datex II formats.
• Crowd sourcing in end user apps like CoMaps is likely also a viable option, similar to the work on crowd sourcing delay information for Transitous.

While this is mostly affecting roads (and thus cars and busses), construction work can also affect pedestrian and bike routing, either entirely or by changing e.g. relevant accessibility properties for wheelchair routing. There was agreement that any free and open effort should equally consider those modes of transportation.

The open source routing engines either already have support for integrating dynamic traffic data, or have adding support on their roadmap, Transitous would certainly integrate that as well. Public agencies were equally interested in open traffic data, but not all of them did show quite the same enthusiasm for also contributing to that yet.

All this gave me a slight déjà vu to the state of public transport routing prior to FOSSDEM 2024, there seems to be a critical amount of interest and willingness to join such an effort, somebody™ just needs to kick-start it.

04 Apr 2026 5:45am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This was a somewhat quiet week mostly full of UI and stability improvements, perhaps because many KDE contributors are gearing up for next week's mega-sprint in Graz! For the same reason, expect next week's post to be short or non-existent.

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.7

Breeze-themed menu items throughout KDE's software ecosystem now visually change when clicked. (Akseli Lahtinen, breeze MR #605)

A variety of tooltips throughout Plasma now follow the styling of the active Plasma theme as expected. (Nicolas Fella, libplasma MR #1435)

Improved the Mouse Mark effect's support for touchscreens: now you can draw multiple lines at a time if you have a multi-touch-capable screen. (Tin Dao, kwin MR #8951)

Synchronizing settings to the Plasma Login Manager now includes the current set of keyboard layouts. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bugzilla #516778)

Simplified the UI for the Clipboard widget's QR code page: now the copy button is in the header, rather than all alone on its own row. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6451)

After

Before

Removed the feature to force the Task Manager and System Tray widgets to use a large spacing and icon size while in touch/tablet mode; it just didn't work out, and caused un-resolvable sizing bugs. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #511439)

Improved the accuracy of widget positioning on the desktop: dragging a widget somewhere it won't fit will now show its preview rectangle in the nearest place where it will fit, which is where it will end up. (Tobias Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6452)

Discover now uses consistent terminology when it asks you to restart. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #517630)

Frameworks 6.25

Trying to paste when your clipboard is empty now fails silently rather than showing a notification about it. (Tobias Fella, kio MR #2168)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.4

Hardened Plasma against crashing while trying to load a broken widget. (Harald Sitter, libplasma MR #1456)

Fixed a case where the KDED background daemon could die with a Wayland protocol error when changing the screen resolution. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #516217)

Fixed a bizarre issue that mangled certain text formatted with Markdown styling while Plasma's on-screen keyboard was enabled but not visible. (Devin Lin, KDE Bugzilla #516511)

Fixed a case where System Settings' Plasma Style page could crash on certain distros shipping Qt 6.11 with asserts turned on. (Ismael Asensio, plasma-workspace MR #6458)

Fixed usage graphs for certain NVIDIA GPUs being broken in the System Monitor app and widgets. (Bernhard Friedreich, libksysguard MR #465)

Popups for editing widgets while in Plasmas's edit mode now work with a touchscreen. (Marco Martin, KDE Bugzilla #509880)

Hardened KWin against XWayland apps being sized incorrectly on systems with config files containing inappropriate scale values. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #9049)

Rolled out a more complete fix for context menus of System Tray icons sometimes having ugly square black corners. (Nate Graham, KDE Bugzilla #513307)

Plasma 6.7

Made two technical fixes to the process of configuring OpenConnect VPNs (Aviral Singh and Alexander Becker, KDE Bugzilla #385395 and KDE Bugzilla #518289)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.7

Implemented support for the xx-fractional-scale-v2 Wayland protocol, which improves visual fidelity by reducing gaps between adjacent items. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #9023)

Continued with the work to add Vulkan support. (Diego Gomez, kwin MR #9027)

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 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's go for my web review for the week 2026-14.

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The Last Quiet Thing

Tags: tech, ux, design, business, attention-economy

A good piece, well designed too. Shows how demanding our current devices are. So much attention requested and so much complexity the user has to deal with. We clearly lost the plot as an industry.

https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem

Tags: tech, philosophy, learning, reading, design

Indeed it's not simply books vs screens. It's about design and how our attention gets fractured (on purpose). We need to recognise there are many ways to learn and to produce ideas, then design for it. We'd be better off as a civilisation rather than staying with the current attention economy.

https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem

Here's why I've installed a Dead Man's Switch on my home server

Tags: tech, self-hosting, life, death

You're self-hosting? Better keep in check what happens to the people who depend even indirectly on your services when you're gone.

https://www.androidauthority.com/home-server-dead-man-switch-3648903/

LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer

Tags: tech, linkedin, surveillance

Are we surprised? Of course depends on the browser and they're looking mostly for extensions. Clearly they try hard to map what people use, it's corporate espionage.

https://browsergate.eu/

DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market

Tags: tech, embedded, memory, economics, ai, machine-learning, gpt

The price hike on RAM due to the LLM as a service bubble is really killing interesting fields. Can't we have nice things? Will the arm race end soon?

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/dram-pricing-is-killing-the-hobbyist-sbc-market/

Nations priced out of Big AI are building with frugal models

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research, innovation, economics

Real innovations come from constraints. The frugal AI movement is clearly where we will see interesting things emerging. Interestingly, those approaches are closer to what AI is about as a research field than the industrial complex which got unleashed with all its extractive power.

https://restofworld.org/2026/frugal-ai-big-tech/

The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning

Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, git

We're not helped much by our tools here… Clearly provenance needs to be double checked.

https://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-03-24-the-comforting-lie-of-sha-pinning/

handymkv: A tool to simplify use of MakeMKV and the HandBrakeCLI tool

Tags: tech, bluray, video, codec, tools

You got bluray discs to encode for use on your NAS? This looks like a nice option.

https://github.com/dmars8047/handymkv

Running out of Disk Space in Production

Tags: tech, architecture, storage, failure

Are you sure your understand how your reverse proxy works and the impacts it can have in production?

https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-04-01-running-out-of-disk-space-on-launch.html

your hex editor should color-code bytes

Tags: tech, hex, data-visualization, debugging

Interesting color coding for hex editor. It indeed brings interesting properties.

https://simonomi.dev/blog/color-code-your-bytes/

Git Bayesect

Tags: tech, git, tools, tests

Git bisect won't help much for flaky tests… but maybe this bayesian approach can.

https://hauntsaninja.github.io/git_bayesect.html

slowql: SQL static analyzer for performance, security, compliance and cost

Tags: tech, databases, sql, tools, performance, security, ci

Looks like an interesting tool to check your SQL queries on the CI.

https://github.com/makroumi/slowql

Joins are NOT Expensive!

Tags: tech, databases, performance

Interesting article which goes deep in comparing joins vs denormalised big tables. The conclusion is in the title, bit it's worth a read for the other insights.

https://www.database-doctor.com/posts/joins-are-not-expensive

C++26 is done!

Tags: tech, c++, standard, reflection

The new standard is upon us and it'll be massive. It indeed looks like another C++11. If used it'll feel like a very different language.

https://herbsutter.com/2026/03/29/c26-is-done-trip-report-march-2026-iso-c-standards-meeting-london-croydon-uk/

What happens when a destructor throws

Tags: tech, c++, exceptions

A good reminder of why destructors shouldn't throw. It really has to be a last resort measure and only carefully considered. There's a reason why they are nothrow by default since C++11.

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2026/04/01/when-a-destructor-throws

Why Don't You Use String Views (as std::wstring_view) Instead of Passing std::wstring by const&?

Tags: tech, c++, c, memory

Indeed be careful at how you use strings when interacting with C APIs. String views are likely not what you want in that context. There is a reason why they don't have c_str().

https://giodicanio.com/2024/05/14/why-dont-you-use-string-views-like-std-wstring_view-instead-of-passing-std-wstring-by-const-reference/

Watch out for missed warnings on vendor C++ toolchains

Tags: tech, c, c++, compiler, embedded

Vendor toolchains should see only a limited trust. Like in this case they're often partial or old.

https://blog.poly.nomial.co.uk/2026-03-31-watch-out-for-missed-warnings-on-vendor-cpp-toolchains.html

Why Fakes Beat Mocks and Testcontainers

Tags: tech, tests, fake, failure

I vehemently agree with this piece. Fakes are unfortunately underrated. They're the most powerful test double, I wish more projects would invest in them (can be quite an investment, which the article doesn't quite show unfortunately).

https://pierrezemb.fr/posts/why-fakes-beat-mocks-and-testcontainers/

Working software runs locally

Tags: tech, developer-experience, tests

This is indeed very important to ensure the tooling around your project supports running the whole thing locally. Too often projects sacrifice the ability to do this, it's clearly a hindrance to testability and a short feedback loop.

https://nickmonad.blog/2026/working-software-runs-locally/

Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons from Tech Lead to CTO

Tags: tech, architecture, debugging, observability, orm, backend, frontend, organisation, leadership

Lots of good insights in here. Of course YMMV and some definitely depends on your context. That's a lot of dimensions to keep in mind though.

https://www.semicolonandsons.com/articles/scaling-a-monolith-to-1m-loc-113-pragmatic-lessons-from-tech-lead-to-cto

Why the verb "to be" is so irregular

Tags: linguistics, history, english

Fascinating origins of "to be". As usual to understand this kind of phenomenon, or at least start to build a theory, you have to go back quite far in history.

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-the-verb-to-be-is-so-irregular

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Bye for now!

03 Apr 2026 12:33pm GMT

Falkon Connect: The Roadmap Ahead (WebXDC, XSLT, and Daily Puzzles) In my previous post, I broke down the architecture of building Falkon Connect from scratch-turning the KDE Falkon browser into a decentralized XMPP client.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

Here are the new CMake changes in Qt Creator 19:

01 Apr 2026 4:06pm GMT

Welcome to the March 2026 edition of development news for KDE Linux, KDE's up-and-coming general-purpose operating system.

I'm going to try to publish one of these posts every month, so you get this one just two weeks after the last one! Despite the abbreviated timeframe, the weeks were fairly busy in KDE Linux land.

Hardening updates against breakage

Probably the most consequential thing to happen was several users experiencing a series of bad updates that rendered the system unbootable.

Harald Sitter has root-caused everything and is working on making the issues impossible to experience in the future. But this is the reason why https://kde.org/linux recommends against deploying KDE Linux's Alpha release on your non-technical uncle's computer or across the accounting department at work!

"Wait, you told me this distro uses atomic updates that can't ever make the system unbootable, you filthy liar!"

Well, it turns out that our updates weren't as atomic as intended. You see, a system update in KDE Linux consists of multiple steps:

1. Download an image file that contains the OS
2. Download a "unified kernel image" (UKI) that tells the boot manager about the OS image
3. Reboot, choosing the boot manager's entry for the new OS image
4. During the boot process, relevant changes from the new OS image are deployed to /etc, which is not immutable

A fairly serious bug in systemd's newly-released version 260 made step 1 fail silently while step 2 succeeded. Thus, the boot manager would let you try to boot into a non-existent OS image, which would fail. Eek.

But no problem, right? Just roll back to the previous OS image!

Well, here's where a bug in step 4 broke that. Our custom system for deploying changes to /etc was not hardened against the case where the OS image was missing but the boot manager let you try to boot into it anyway; doing so would erase much of the content in /etc and prevent booting into a known-good OS image. Oops.

Fortunately, KDE Linux includes built-in Btrfs snapshots of /etc, so there's a documented set of recovery steps. And Harald Sitter has since improved error logging for this situation and fixed the bug on our side so rolling back from a botched update won't damage /etc anymore.

Our focus now shifts towards implementing a system to automatically roll back and forward /etc as you roll back and forward OS builds, so each OS build is permanently associated with the version of /etc it was known to work with. This would have also prevented the issue.

In addition, we're looking into merging steps 1 and 2 as much as possible so this type of failure can't even happen in the first place.

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But that wasn't all the "excitement" around updates: systemd-260 also opted the "sysupdate" functionality that KDE Linux uses out of systemd's API stability guarantee, and then broke compatibility - resulting in Discover being unable to update the system. updatectl update in a terminal window remained working.

Fortunately, Akseli Lahtinen has already adapted Discover's sysupdate support to the new approach in systemd-260, so that's working again.

We also uncovered a few more bugs introduced by systemd-260, including https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/41303 and https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/41299. And if anyone from Systemd is reading, https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/41288 is also a highly relevant issue; this really shouldn't happen.

I've been told that sysupdate is expected to return to the API compatibility guarantee in systemd-261 or -262, so expect some more churn here. If it gets too bad, we'll consider rolling back to systemd-259 (or even -258, since -259 broke many TPM chips).

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Thankfully there's also good news!

Better memory management

I tweaked the parameters of our zram setup to stop causing system freezes when close to the limit. I also fixed our "out of memory" handler so that it works, and now memory-hogging apps will be terminated instead of letting the whole system freeze.

This whole endeavor came out of some deep research into memory management that I expect to yield more positive changes in the future.

More user-friendly handling of incompatible packages

Thomas Duckworth integrated a component he's been working on that displays sane feedback when you try to open a package or app that isn't supported on the system, like a Windows .exe or a .rpm package.

Better out-of-the-box hardware support

John Kizer pre-installed usbmuxd, which makes plugged-in Apple iOS devices visible in Dolphin and file dialogs. So now you can, for example, plug in one such device and copy pictures off of it.

Thomas Duckworth fixed an issue that prevented non-NVIDIA systems from fully sleeping. This workaround was only needed for systems with NVIDIA GPUs, and no longer takes effect for systems with other GPUs.

Vishal Rao slightly increased the amount of time that the OS image chooser is visible on screen, making it less likely that you'll miss it entirely when using KDE Linux with a TV or a slow monitor that takes a while to turn on.

Better out-of-the-box software support

Hadi Chokr added support for mounting optical disk images.

I added support for SSTP VPNs, and also for encoding audio on CDs using the Opus format, indexing really old Microsoft Word documents, and opening archives compressed with more types of compression algorithm.

Internationalized "command not found" handler

I made the "command not found" handler display translated text if you don't use your KDE Linux system in English. Thanks a lot to Albert Astals Cid for helping me with the details here!

Smarter settings

Yago Raña Gayoso disabled screen locking and update checking while in the live session, as these don't really make sense there. Yago also disabled canceling the installation in the middle, as this is not supported right now and would produce a broken system.

Thomas Duckworth configured the sudo command-line tool to display a little "*" for every character you type, instead of nothing. This matches the standard behavior in password fields that people are familiar with.

I configured the cp and rsync command-line tools to preserve metadata (such as modification times, extended attributes, and ACLs) when copying files.

Fixed spellchecking, at least for English

I fixed our spellchecking setup by installing the English backend for hunspell, and removing the redundant aspell to save some space. These language packages can be quite large, so it's not super feasible to ship them all in the image right now. In the future we'll be building a system to let them download at runtime.

Technical changes

Thomas Duckworth fixed an issue that made newly-installed OS images sometimes get de-prioritized in the OS image chooser for no good reason.

Akseli Lahtinen set the $SSH_ASKPASS environment variable to to point to KSSHAskPass by default, smoothing out some SSH-based workflows.

Hadi Chokr added ~/.local/bin to every user's default $PATH variable, allowing kde-builder and other user-installed binaries to work without an extra setup step.

How you can help

Does this project sound exciting? I hope it does! We're building a general-purpose operating system for normal people, aiming to integrate all components out of the box in a way that rivals Windows and MacOS. If you'd like to help out with the project, there are multiple ways.

If you're an adventurous and technical person, install KDE Linux and report issues.

If you're good at writing, KDE Linux's documentation can always use improvement. Submit merge requests here.

KDE Linux leans heavily on Flatpak, so fixing packaging or code issues in Flatpak-packaged apps is very helpful.

You can even help us build the OS itself! The Beta milestone is currently 71% complete, and there's plenty to do:

• High priority tasks for technical experts
• Other tasks to make the user builds better
• Tasks for newcomers

And if you're already using KDE Linux, let us know how your experience has been! Is it good? What can we do better?

01 Apr 2026 12:05am GMT

pURL and SWHID are both software identifiers with similarities, but they are fundamentally different. pURL is assigned by a registry. SWHID is derived from the code itself. They are not competitors - they complement each other.

31 Mar 2026 8:58am GMT

Today we're releasing Krita 5.3.1 and 6.0.1.

This release mainly fixes an issue for Windows users: some applications, like Microsoft Windows Powertoys' Fancy Zones or the Google Drive plugin cause problems for Krita. These applications query all running applications for their accessibility abilities.

Until Qt6, Qt's QML module, which is used extensively in the new text tool, would then recursively query all active screen objects, like comboboxes or buttons, and up and down the entire class hierarchy for accessibility features. This slowed down Krita to the point where even menus would be slow to open.

It was extremely tricky to figure this out, since none of the Krita developers actually use these external applications... But it should be fixed now!

There are more fixes in this release:

• The mutator shortcut is now Ctrl-alt-shift-m instead of Z in accordance with the plugin's manual.
• On Android, the canvas will not pan up when you use the text tool
• On Android, the OnePlus stylus middle click button works
• Animation Key Frame copy pasting now works in Krita 6
• On Wayland, drag and drop is fixed (Wayland clears the clipboard when a new window is opened, so now we have to cache the data.)
• The canvas resize dialog now works correctly when changing units (bug: 517857)
• The Incremental Backup/Version saving function now works in Krita 6.
• On Android, text fields should no longer block stylus movements, pressing spacebar should work as a shortcut and the view should no longer turn blue when pressing a keyboard key. These issues only occurred on some devices.

Check out the release notes for a full overview of all the new features in Krita 5.3 and 6.0.

[!WARNING] One again, we consider Krita 5.3.1 suitable for productive work; 6.0.1 is, because of the many changes from Qt5 to Qt6 more experimental.

5.3.1 Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

[!NOTE] We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-5.3.1-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-5.3.1.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

[!WARNING] Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.3.1-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.3.1-signed.dmg

Android

Krita on Android is still beta; and is meant to run on chromebooks and tablets only.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK

• 64 bits Arm CPU APK

• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

For source archives, please download one of the 6.0.1 archives and build with Qt5.

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.3.1/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

6.0.1 Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

[!NOTE] We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-6.0.1-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-6.0.1.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

[!WARNING] Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-6.0.1-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-6.0.1-signed.dmg

Android

Krita 6.0.1 is not yet functional on Android, so we are not making APK's available for sideloading.

Source code

[!NOTE] Note for distributions: if you package both PyQt5 and PyQt6, you will want to patch our source code with this patch: Disallow importing conflicting version of PyQt

• krita-6.0.1.tar.gz

• krita-6.0.1.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/6.0.1/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).

31 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT

Strand is a PWA runtime for running web applications in a more integrated manner for KDE Plasma.

Right now Strand has two parallel development tracks; an AI-driven prototyping track to test the feasibility of features, and a second human-driven track where I'm building the final product.

I'll mostly cover the events of the AI track in this post, which I've been dogfooding as I slowly get the human track on-rails. The usual caveats of code quality and security are in full effect.

Performance & Structure

The first version of the runtime used one WebEngine per application process. Part of this was me receiving incorrect information from the AI. After understanding the WebEngine and WebEngineProfile structure more thoroughly, I decided a system of dynamically determining the host process would lead to better resource efficiency.

Now, instead of one process per app, when a webapp starts it generates a "Process hash" based on the configuration and flags being applied to WebEngine. It will then see if there's a Strand process running with that hash, using it if available. This immediately lead to hundreds of megabytes in savings when running multiple instances, while still allowing apps to potentially use alternative settings if required.

One major pain point is hardware acceleration. I'm having significant of trouble getting it to work as it really requires the stars to align quite precisely. Right now there's just no acceleration for reasons ranging from my specific hardware, to Wayland, to a witches brew of flags - and if anything is wrong there's just no acceleration. I checked to see if I could run another KDE QtWebEngine-oriented app at full speed - Falkon - but it also suffered. Commentary online is underwhelming.

New Features Tested

The most significant new feature is header integration, which is the culmination of 3 smaller features.

• 

• 

• 

The most visually obvious is the addition of custom CSS with system color support. Strand injects CSS variables into applications with system colors, and when used by the custom CSS, can easily give web apps much more cohesive headers. Strand pays special attention to header-oriented colors, guaranteeing their availability along with the accent color. These apps are also smart enough to update their colors when changed on a system level. Of course, custom CSS can be disabled. The only caveat is that some apps still have the scrollbar peeking in, which could potentially be fixed case-by-case with CSS.

The next addition is the ability to list "Drag Region Selectors" in the manifest files. These are simple DOM selectors which trigger native window dragging when an element matches the selection criteria. This system accounts for interactive child elements, so things like buttons and fields in drag areas work as-expected.

Toolbars and menubars are no longer mandatory. In the manifest file you can specify "Safe Toolbar Removal" selectors paired with URLs. If the selector criteria is met and "Allow Smart Hiding of Toolbar" enabled for the app, Strand will auto-hide the toolbar. This works very well! The toolbar will re-appear if the app navigates away from a "Safe Situation", allowing users to access browser-like navigation. A good example of this is an SSO flow; if SSO is occurring, the toolbar re-appears, and the user can navigate back to the app if the sign-in process is interrupted. Even then a user holding the alt key will re-show the toolbar, and if Strand blocked an outgoing link, the toolbar will resurface so the user may interact with that event.

These 3 features together make headers in web apps feel shockingly native at times. I'm particularly impressed by how integrated Teams feels. Placed between Dolphin and Kate it looks great, and the dragging behavior of the header areas are spot-on.

The header-centric features are also designed to degrade gracefully. We are connecting to ever-changing websites and I didn't want to introduce injections libel to break entire applications. In the event a web app changes significantly, only the integrations should be lost, so at worst you'll still have a functional web app. This is also one reason why I won't be introducing app-specific Javascript injection.

Stand applications can now be added to menus via the welcome screen, and applications are appropriately categorized when added. The next step will be to have a complete installation flow.

• 

• 

• 

Conclusion / Future / The Human Track

Right now the AI track is getting very, very close to what I'd like in terms of functionality and main-window presentation. As the AI churns overall code quality goes down, but it does continue to feed me methodologies which would have easily cost me weeks of research, letting me research on the actually important topics. It also continues to show me what's possible in general, and when it starts to fail I know I'm probably moving in a bad direction.

Next steps for the AI track are likely going to be in the permissions system, and ensuring advanced functionality like streaming and various portals work. After that there will only be minor additions to the prototype software.

I'll end with an update on the human track; progress is going intentionally slowly. I wanted to flesh out the process management in the AI track first before over-committing to what will ultimately be the final structure. The human track has the first steps of the startup sequence, and a much better organized set of utilities and data-management classes. I'm also re-assessing the use of Kirigami/QML for building the GUI, as it just leads to nicer interfaces and I do have some experience with it.

Anyway, that's the updates so far!

If anyone knows the secrets of WebEngine + Wayland + Nvidia, I'd love to hear. I might assemble some memory benchmarks in the next week or two as well, too. There's also a .deb package I can produce of the AI track; I wholly would NOT recommend installing it, but if people want to see where this idea is going, or even the AI slop source, I can put it up. But I'll literally name it the "eatYourCat" deb and put it in the "shootYourDog" repo, and it will be with the express understanding that it's not fit for use and will not be maintained.

29 Mar 2026 4:13am GMT

In the past two months since the previous report we added a new welcome screen, warnings about some potentially expensive mistakes and support for more data sources in Switzerland to KDE Itinerary, among many other improvements.

New Features

Improved welcome screen

The welcome screen shown on the first start of Itinerary has been reworked and now contains the most relevant settings instead of a wall of text:

• Confirming or correcting your home country if it hasn't been correctly detected based on the system locale. This is needed for country-dependent warnings to work correctly, such as the features in the next section.
• Enable online services. Those are all off by default for privacy reasons and the settings page offers very finegrained control over what exactly to use. All that remains the case, but the welcome page now has a quick shortcut to enable all of this in one go.
• Request permissions for showing popup notifications, on systems where that is necessary, such as newer Android versions.

EU roaming regulation warning

When living in the EU roaming regulation area you'll now get notified when leaving that, as depending on your mobile data plan this can be rather costly when not paying attention.

Misleading airport/port name warning

A similarly unpleasant surpise can be ending up at a port or airport in the middle of nowhere rather than close to the city you intended to travel to. Marketing names particularly popular with certain low-cost carriers can be especially misleading, see the naming controversy around (Frankfurt-)Hahn Airport as one such example.

Itinerary can now warn about such locations, with the option to silence the warning per trip or indefinitely.

The list of warned about locations is currently still manually maintained, and is totally not based on traveling mishaps of community members.

Infrastructure Work

Swiss Open Transport Data APIs

There's now support for version 2.0 of the OpenJourneyPlanner (OJP) API from opentransportdata.swiss as well as their train formation API.

This gives us a couple of additional features and information:

• Earlier/later paging of journey search results.
• Transport modes served at stops.
• Occupancy information.
• Service alerts.
• Pickup and dropoff constraints for stops.
• Coach layouts for trains.
• Vehicle attributes such as the availability of accessibility or comfort features.
• Emission information.

All of this also benefits KTrip.

Kirigami Addons date/time picker localization

The date and time entry controls used in Itinerary received a number of fixes for languages using a right-to-left layout and/or non-ASCII numerals.

This benefits all applications using the Kirigami Addons.

Events

In February we had another OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe, with a few features for Transitous being worked on that will eventually also benefit Itinerary.

FOSSGIS-Konferenz in Göttingen is ending today, and included a talk about our OSM indoor router.

And in two weeks I'll be speaking about Transitous at Grazer Linux Tage.

Fixes & Improvements

Travel document extractor

• Added or improved travel document extractors for Booking.com, DRK, Entur, European Sleeper, Eurostar, Eventyay, FCM, FRS, Get Your Guide, Hostelworld, MÁV and Thai railways.
• Improved generic boarding time extractor for Apple Wallet passes.
• Improved street address matching.

All of this has been made possible thanks to your travel document donations!

Public transport data

• Trip queries (ie. efficient updates of an existing public transport connection) are now also available with Entur's OpenTripPlanner instance in Norway.
• Improved and extended vehicle attribute mappings for a number of Hafas-based backends.
• Support for Hafas location remarks, providing e.g. stop map links with some Hafas backends.
• Support for Hafas pickup/dropoff constraints of on-demand services.
• Fixed coordinate-based journey queries with Deutsche Bahn.
• Added support for server-side mode filters for stopover queries with MOTIS backends.
• Made Deutsche Bahn vehicle layout parser more robust against unknown UIC coach numbers.
• Fixed INVG mode mapping for bus lines showing up as ferries.
• Fixed elevators being shown on null island on the map.
• Made path spike filtering less aggressive on low-resolution paths. Fixes e.g. the path of a Barcelona <-> Paris train connection incrementally deteriorating on the map.
• Expanded Transitous coverage to Greenland, Japan, Morocco and Oman.

All of this also directly benefits KTrip.

Itinerary app

• More consistent display of delays, by always showing the actual time in full. Avoids having to compute this from delay offsets in your head.
• Fixed manual flight number entry (bug 516999).
• Correctly account for the platform label width when eliding stop name in public transport departures view.
• Word wrap vehicle feature descriptions.
• Fixed platform section end separator positioning.
• Fixed doubled lines for flights on the map when using MapLibre.
• Default to creating a new trip group when importing a named trip group.
• Set a better default for event entrance times without a start time yet.
• Also detect osm.org short URLs for importing OSM elements.
• Retain attached documents from event templates.
• Handle nested events correctly when computing trip group end times.

How you can help

Feedback and travel document samples are very much welcome, as are all other forms of contributions. Feel free to join us in the KDE Itinerary Matrix channel.

28 Mar 2026 6:00am GMT

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week saw a large variety of improvements in fields as diverse as better support for multi-screen and multi-GPU setups, support for new portals, performance improvements, UI improvements, crash fixes, and more! Lots to get excited about this week:

Notable new features

Plasma 6.7

Implemented a feature that lets you record yourself with your microphone and play it back, making it easy to tell when the recording level is too high or too low. Then you can adjust the level until it's just right. (Ramil Nurmanov, KDE Bugzilla #435256)

Reworked how the notifications portal is implemented, which, among other things, allows configuring the notifications sent by Flatpak and other portal-using sandboxed apps in the same way that you can configure notifications for traditionally-packaged apps. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6312)

Frameworks 6.25

KRunner-powered searches can now convert to and from the "momme" unit, which measures weight for silk textiles. (Nate Graham, kunitconversion MR #82)

Notable UI improvements

Plasma 6.6.4

The bouncy app launch feedback animation by the pointer now looks better when using a fractional scale factor. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #489403)

Sped up the process for selecting a weather station for the Weather Report widget using the keyboard. (Nate Graham, kdeplasma-addons MR #1016)

You can now drag recent items in launcher menus onto the desktop. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-workspace MR #6431)

The Networks widget now instantly reports the last-used network, rather than only after restarting Plasma. (Aviral Singh, KDE Bugzilla #512951

The Task Manager widget now instantly updates the icon of a pinned or running app whose icon you've changed, rather than only after restarting Plasma. (Kai Uwe Broulik, plasma-workspace MR #6443)

Plasma 6.7

The screen chooser UI (e.g. for screen sharing/casting) now features fancier visualizations for screens, showing their wallpapers in the background. (Harald Sitter, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #532 and plasma-workspace MR #6409)

The super-custom folder chooser dialog, seen throughout KDE software, has been removed; now choosing a folder uses the standard "Open" dialog, and it only shows folders. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #197938)

Locked Plasma Vaults now have their mountpoints made read-only and badged with a lock icon, so it's clearer what they are, and you or your apps can't accidentally save files in there, which would block mounting the vault. (Matthias Pleschinger plasma-vault MR #72)

You can now limit the Wi-Fi band for networks in infrastructure mode. (Piotr Balwierz, plasma-nm MR #536)

Frameworks 6.25

Various message dialogs throughout KDE software now wrap their text at around 70 characters instead of at a point based on the screen width. (Thomas Friedrichsmeier, kwidgetsaddons MR #339)

Notable bug fixes

Plasma 6.6.4

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when connecting another screen. (Harald Sitter, KDE Bugzilla #477941)

Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when the underlying services for apps with System Tray icons went away. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518128)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash under certain circumstances when using multiple screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, layer-shell-qt MR #95)

Fixed an issue that could make OBS crash on quit under certain circumstances. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #517599)

The Digital Clock widget's feature to copy the current date and time to the clipboard in various formats now uses the correct time from your local time zone, not the UTC time. (David Edmundson, KDE Bugzilla #517692)

Fixed some cases of missing transparency in certain apps' System Tray icons. (Qiancheng Sun, plasma-workspace MR #6427)

Fixed an issue uncovered by the upgrade to Qt 6.11 that applied the wrong color to the window snapping overlay. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bugzilla #518178)

Plasma 6.7

Fixed an issue that made the System Monitor app and widgets show the wrong names for CPU cores on systems where there's more than one physical CPU. (Kevin Tipping, KDE Bugzilla #515435)

Notable in performance & technical

Plasma 6.6.4

Blur in Konsole now plays nicely with the Wobbly Windows effect. (Jérôme Lécuyer, KDE Bugzilla #474196)

Plasma 6.7

Screen recordings made using Spectacle and other KPipeWire-using software now use the correct render device with multi-GPU systems, so the resulting recordings are always correct and valid. (Marsh Land, KDE Bugzilla #518008)

Implemented a "multi-GPU swapchain" for KWin, which unlocks future performance gains with multi-GPU use cases and Vulkan support. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8926)

Improved the System Monitor app and widgets' ability to detect multiple GPUs. (Michael Bauer, ksystemstats MR #130 and #132)

Made the System Monitor app and widgets no longer ignore fully-encrypted disks and RAID elements for the purposes of gathering disk I/O statistics. (Christoph Cullmann, ksystemstats MR #86)

Improved performance for the Alt+Tab switcher while the "Highlight Window" effect is on (as it is by default) and there are a lot of minimized windows. (Sushi Trash, kwin MR #8997)

Wayland 1.48

After over 6 years in development, the Wayland session restore protocol is complete and merged! KWin already has a draft implementation, so we should start to see some serious movement on this long-standing topic soon. (Jonas Ådahl and many others, wayland-protocols MR #18)

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 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT

Eight weeks in and it's time for the Season of KDE wrap-up - somehow survived the university exams, the KXMLGUI docs, and a dead motherboard to get here.

For the past couple of months, I've been working on KDE's computer-aided translation tool, Lokalize, under the mentorship of Finley Watson. What started as a menubar bug turned into XML configs, C++ backends, a bookmark manager, and somehow a new laptop.

Fixing the "Jumping" Menubar

If you use Lokalize, you've probably run into this bug: the menubar reshuffles every time you switch tabs. Go from the Editor to the Project Overview, and suddenly the Edit, Go, and Sync menus disappear or swap places. It totally breaks muscle memory. As part of my Season of KDE project, my task was to fix it.

I restructured how Lokalize handles its menus globally. I created a "Global Skeleton" layout that reserves a permanent spot for every menu, regardless of which tab is open. I then wrote logic that hooks into the application's tab-switching events. Now, if a menu isn't needed for your current tab, it simply greys out instead of disappearing completely. The result is a much more predictable UI!

Ghost Actions & The Bookmark Manager

While exploring the codebase, i discovered a graveyard of 'ghost actions' features that were defined in the underlying XML files but had zero C++ code behind them, meaning they never actually showed up in the menubar. After surveying the KDE translators' mailing list to understand their daily workflows, i got to work building them:

• Core Editing & Batch Actions: I built the backend logic to make Cut, Copy, Paste, and Alternate Translations work seamlessly. I also implemented batch actions (Save All, Close All, Revert All), complete with a safe shutdown sequence that prompts users for unsaved changes so they never lose their work.
• The Bookmark Manager (In Review): There was no way to actually see what you had bookmarked - you could toggle them and jump between them, but that's it. I built a standalone dialog that lists all bookmarked entries with text previews and checkboxes so you can clean them up properly. It's currently in UX review with the KDE Visual Design Group (VDG).

The Hardware Crisis

Honestly, the whole project almost derailed in Week 8. Just as the SoK deadline and GSoC proposal dates were creeping up, my laptop's motherboard completely died. With the repair shop giving me a "no promises" timeline, I had to panic-buy a new laptop on the spot. RIP my bank account, but a huge thanks to Finley for providing an extension so I could set my environment back up and finish strong!

What I Learned

The technical work was a lot, but honestly not even the most interesting part. Two things stuck with me:

• Read before you touch anything: My first instinct in Week 1 was to blindly shuffle tags around and hope the UI fixed itself. That went nowhere. It took a few days of actually digging into the KXMLGUI docs and tracing how the merge worked before things started making sense, but once they did, the fix became obvious.
• Talk to the actual users: Emailing the KDE translators' mailing list before implementing the ghost actions was really useful, i had assumptions about which ones mattered that turned out to be wrong. Their responses shaped a lot of what i actually built.

List of Contributions

Merged:

• Menubar Standardization: Fix inconsistent menubar ordering across tabs
• Edge Case Fixes: Lokalize: Refresh top-level menu availability on Welcome screen
• UX Improvements: editor: focus relevant tab before unsaved changes prompt in fileOpen()
• Ghost Actions I: editor: implement cut/copy/paste and alternate translation attach
• Ghost Actions II: editor: implement file save/revert/close all actions

Pending Review / Ongoing:

• New Feature: editor: add edit bookmarks action and dialog

What's Next?

SoK is over but i'm not done with Lokalize. The Bookmark Manager still needs to land, and while testing my last MR i found another bug in "Revert All" that i want to fix. Also working on my GSoC proposal right now.

Special Thanks

Huge thanks to my mentor, Finley Watson. The code reviews were incredibly detailed, you were patient when i was going in circles, and you gave me an extension when my laptop decided to die at the absolute worst time. Really appreciate it 🙏 Also thank you to the translators on the mailing list who actually responded to my email - that shaped a lot of what i ended up building. And to the KDE community in general for being so welcoming to a first-time contributor.

See you in the KDE Git logs! 👾

---

P.S. Read my weekly SoK work here: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Weeks 4 & 5 | Week 6 | Week 7, 8 & Extension

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT