Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week (or so) we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps.
With January well under way, the news regarding KDE apps is coming thick and fast. Let's dig in!
Tobias Fella added an option for remembering the signing/encryption configuration from the last operation (26.04.0 - pim/kleopatra MR #427).
Florian Richer fixed some issues with the identity configuration dialog (26.04.0 - pim/kidentitymanagement MR #40).
Mickael Sergent released Calligra Plan 4.0.0 — the first version of Calligra Plan built with Qt 6! Also thanks to all packagers who fixed and modernized some of the CMake code after the release.
Siddharth Chopra fixed the the font selection dialog (1.4.0 - office/marknote MR #82).
Laurent Montel added support for drawing filled rectangles (graphics/drawy MR #216) and arrows (graphics/drawy MR #199), as well as changing the opacity of elements (graphics/drawy MR #205).
Abdias J Moya Perez implemented a fixed centered playhead mode for the timeline. When enabled, the playhead remains locked at the center of the timeline view while the timeline content scrolls smoothly beneath it during playback, scrubbing, and seeking (multimedia/kdenlive MR #785).
Noah Davis added a floating zoom bar (26.04.0 - graphics/koko MR #253).
Nate Graham removed two unnecessary buttons that appeared when hovering over songs in the playlist (26.04.0 - multimedia/elisa MR #737).
Sahil Verma added support for importing user templates from local folders, which can then be used to generate files from specific templates (26.04.0 - utilities/kate MR #1969).
Joshua Goins split up the Permissions settings for rooms, because the members list (with lots of moderators) tended to dominate the page. He also moved the search bar for members to the top, and re-organized various permissions into more suitable groups.
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Joshua also added a "Seen By" dialog to allow you to view the read markers in something that isn't extremely small!
Another new and useful feature introduced by Joshua is private notes. Someone has a confusing username and you can't remember who they are? Need to jot down their birthday or keep track of the bad jokes they keep telling you? 😛 Since this isn't standardized between clients, it's only available in NeoChat. But on the flipside, it will sync between NeoChat on different computers.
And regarding safety-related changes, there were a few small additions too. Joshua added a new helpful dialog where you can view your server's support information in-app if available. It also wasn't clear where reports are sent to, which has caused confusion.
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Finally, Joshua also fixed a lot of small bugs all over the place. You can read his Mastodon thread to learn more!
Darshan Phaldesai made some nice visual changes to the reaction buttons: now they use rounded rectangles instead of circles, and their text is more legible.
The Kaidan team released Kaidan 0.14.0. This release introduces advanced media sharing, filtering of XMPP providers when creating an account, support for XMPP URIs, and more.
You can see more details at the announcement post.
Additionally, Melvin Keskin added support for audio/video calls (network/kaidan MR #1472).
Stephan Seitz made sure that the sample commands provided by KDE Connect for the "Run Commands" plugin are OS-specific (26.04.0 - network/kdeconnect-kde MR #897).
Thomas Friedrichsmeier made some progress in adding support for Quarto files (education/rkward MR #73).
Sandro Andrade ported Minuet to Kirigami (26.04.0 - education/minuet MR #54).
Thanks to Akseli Lahtinen, binary files and scripts are now executable from the context menu (KDE Frameworks 6.23 – frameworks/kio MR #2113).
xi ota has added the option to always show the tab bar (24.04.0 – system/dolphin MR #1152).
Klaas Freitag presented version 2.0 of Kraft this week. Kraft is a business tool that helps you keep track of payments as well as creating quotes, invoices, and other business-related documents.
Version 2.0 is easier to install, implements a legal document life cycle from draft to finalized, comes with better PDF output, makes it easier to migrate from your earlier versions, and continues to protect your privacy as it integrates well with your own Nextcloud or OpenCloud instances.
Manuel Alcaraz Zambrano added a bye editor to Chessament (games/chessament MR #39). What's a "bye editor"? Learn about Bye on this Wikipedia page.
This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out This Week in Plasma, which covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment every Saturday.
For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.
The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.
You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.
You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.
Extended Security Maintenance Is Now Available
In the Qt Company's R&D organization we have made it a tradition to start the year with a Hackathon where anyone can work on anything they find interesting. It's a great opportunity to work on or with something else than usual, to try out new technologies, or to generally scratch whatever might have been itching. We started with a pitching session the week before so that people that are looking for inspiration or projects to join know what's on the buffet. And then on Wednesday morning we kicked off the hacking, giving everyone two full days to work on their project before the presentations on Friday noon.
The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.3.2, the second bugfix release for Amarok 3.3 "Far Above the Clouds"!
3.3.2 features a number of small improvements, including various small behaviour changes and bugfixes in e.g. user interface, audio backend and saving of playlist files. Additionally, 'added to collection' date, which previously was available in collection search only, is now displayed in track's details in tag dialog. KDE Framework depedency is now set at version 6.5, which was released in mid-2024. All in all, Amarok 3.3.2 should bring improved usability and stability, ensuring you can keep enjoying your music in 2026.
In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.3.2 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.
You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.
Last weekend I attended a rather spontaneous Transitous Hack Weekend in Berlin, again hosted at Wikimedia’s WikiBär.
Data about current and planned future elevator outages is becoming available in a standardized format (SIRI SX and SIRI FM), in Germany and Switzerland at least. That’s crucial information especially for wheelchair routing, and MOTIS, the routing engine used by Transitous, can take this into consideration. However, it doesn’t support the SIRI format yet.
The main challenge here is identifying the affected elevator:
So far all static schedule data used by Transitous is using the GTFS format. That’s a relatively simple set of CSV files in a ZIP. There’s a another format for this though, NeTEx. It’s a vastly more complex and rather verbose XML, but it can also model a number of things that cannot be represented in GTFS so far, such as vehicle attributes.
MOTIS v2.8 added initial support for NeTEx, but due to the complexity of the format and its tendency to offer multiple different ways to model the same thing it remains a case-by-case investigation whether a specific NeTEx feed is working sufficiently well.
We looked at three feeds that seem particularly promising at this point. While using NeTEx there would give us clear benefits, all of them would also introduce regressions over the status quo that need to be addressed first.
DELFI NeTEx feed for Germany:
SNCF NeTEx feed for France:
Swiss national NeTEx feed:
While it will still take a bit of time before any of those feeds will enter production on Transitous, we have started to prepare Transitous’ import pipeline and documentation to not exclusively assume GTFS as the input format anymore.
There were plenty more topics discussed beyond those two:
For more details, also see the meeting notes.
And to end this with a screenshot, we also fixed the font rendering on the Transitous map which was missing labels in e.g. Egypt, Georgia and Thailand.
There’s several more opportunities in the upcoming weeks to meet members of the Transitous community:
There’s of course also the Transitous Matrix channel to get involved.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we closed the door on features for Plasma 6.6, which opened another one for those features to land in 6.7. As a result, several features were merged for Plasma 6.7, including some particularly juicy ones!
As for Plasma 6.6, this starts the one-month period where the core Plasma team focuses almost entirely on fixing bugs. As you’ll see below, we already fixed quite a few this week! So there’s a huge amount of stuff to go over, and let’s get right to it:
System Monitor now lets you set the priority of processes graphically, just like the older KSysGuard app did. (Matthieu Carteron, plasma-systemmonitor MR #381 and libksysguard MR #455)
(The lack of a darkened underlay is unintentional; we’ll get that fixed up soon.)
Added a switch to the Brightness and Color widget that lets you instantly go from light mode to dark mode (or vice versa)! (Kai Uwe Broulik, powerdevil MR #576)
(At some point we’ll add a nice cross-fade transition here, too.)
Added a global push-to-talk feature: if you set a push-to-talk key, all microphones will be muted until the specified key is held down. (Kai Uwe Broulik, Aleix Pol Gonzalez, and Shubham Arora, plasma-pa MR #394, kglobalaccel MR #41, and plasma-workspace MR #6126)
The HDR calibration wizard now temporarily disables Night Light while calibrating, to ensure that you get an accurate result. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #448)
Mounting a removable disk no longer performs a file system scan by default; now this is a manual action you initiate from the expanded actions list. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #505852)
The screen chooser dialog now includes a search/filter field so you can easily find a screen by name even when there are a zillion windows open. (Harald Sitter, xdg-desktop-portal-kde MR #506)
Kicker’s search results no longer flicker or resize while typing, keeping columns stable during searches for a smoother and snappier experience. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3439)
HDR Calibrator now offers a summary page with a setting to better support Windows HDR applications and games. (Xaver Hugl, kscreen MR #443)
Replaced some technical gobbledygook in the titles of Bluetooth status and error notifications with more relevant and user-friendly text. (Nate Graham, bluedevil MR #238)
(The body text isn’t great either, but that’s also being worked on!)
If you happen to have a keyboard or other input device with “Seek Forwards” and “Seek Backwards” buttons, pressing them now works as expected out of the box. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #514680)
System Settings’ Game Controller, Mouse, and Touchpad pages now only appear when the devices they configure are present. (Alexander Wilms, plasma-desktop MR #3436)
Discover now shows sub-categories in its “Games” group for game launchers and game tools. (Jakob Dev, discover MR #1224)
Improved how the global edit mode works with a touchscreen. (Shubham Arora, plasma-workspace MR #6161 and plasma-desktop MR #3442)
On System Settings’ Accessibility page, the Mouse Navigation tooltip now explains how to switch mouse click modes with the numeric keypad. (Jaimukund Bhan, KDE Bug #505687)
Searching for “memory” now turns up the System Monitor app in search results. (Nicolas Fella, plasma-workspace MR #6194)
Improved the touch-friendliness of open/save dialogs. (Méven Car, KDE Bug #513606)
Improved the icon selection algorithm for missing icons so that it no longer returns downscaled versions of much larger icons, which may have a completely different style. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #466678)
By default, sidebars and left edge drawers in Kirigami-using apps now have exactly the width needed to avoid being too wide or too narrow. Some apps still override the default width, and that will need to be un-done now, so expect the weirdly-sized sidebars to get fixed over time, rather than all at once when you upgrade to Frameworks 6.23. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #505693)
System Settings’ pages related to audio CDs (if you have them installed) now only appear when the computer has any optical drives. (Nate Graham, KDE Bug #513661 and KDE Bug #513664)
Fixed a case where KWin could crash on launch when the GPU did something weird when trying to render screencasts or window thumbnails. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #513710)
Fixed an issue that made the fingerprint enrollment dialog’s “Add” button go missing if you canceled enrollment and then immediately re-opened the dialog. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #514088)
Fixed an issue that sometimes made Weather Report widget’s tooltip use the wrong unit and display numbers with excessive decimal places. (Ismael Asensio, KDE Bug #514419)
Fixed an issue that made System Settings’ search field sometimes not show the proper language-specific placeholder text. (Albert Astals Cid, KDE Bug #512187)
Fixed one of the top Plasma crashes that could happen when turning off certain screens. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bug #511757)
Fixed a crash in System Settings’ Game Controller page when using certain devices and versions of the SDL library. (David Edmundson, KDE Bug #511859)
If you have multiple Plasma panels, clicking on different ones over and over again while in edit mode no longer makes multiple panel edit dialogs appear. (Marco Martin, KDE Bug #513135)
Fixed a KWin crash that could happen when waking up a laptop connected to an external screen. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514229)
Fixed an issue relating to focus on the lock screen with multi-monitor setups. (Oliver Beard, KDE Bug #512028)
Discover’s window no longer becomes un-maximized when any popup dialogs appear. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bug #503801)
Having an exotic network setup or a lot of Docker containers no longer breaks the layout of System Settings’ Remote Desktop page while the feature is turned on. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bug #513504)
If you’ve turned on the login sound, it now plays at the right time. (Kai Uwe Broulik, KDE Bug #510923)
Fixed a regression that made KDE Connect crash due to clipboard shenanigans. (Nicolas Fella, KDE Bug #514512)
Fixed two issues with tooltips that could sometimes cause them to be offset or rapidly appear and disappear in the Kickoff Application Launcher widget. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bug #510860 and KDE Bug #511875)
Fixed some bugs and visual glitches with certain sidebars and list items in Kirigami-based apps when using an RTL language like Arabic or Hebrew. (Marco Martin and Christoph Wolk, kirigami MR #2027 and kirigami MR #2026)
Fixed a strange issue that could cause notifications from the Quod Libet music player specifically to stop appearing. (Alexander Wilms, KDE Bug #489910)
Symbolic icons for KDE Connect now re-color themselves properly when using a non-default color scheme. (Ángel Navarro, breeze-icons MR #522)
Fixed two of the most common Plasma crashes that were caused by Qt’s QML Compiler doing something weird under the hood. (Ulf Hermann, KDE Bug #513527 and KDE Bug #513012)
Implemented version 2 of the Wayland color management protocol. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8033)
Reduced some visual glitches in Firefox when turning on its off-by-default HDR mode. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bug #514599)
Implemented support for network activity monitoring on FreeBSD in the System Monitor app and widgets. (Jesper Schmitz Mouridsen, ksystemstats MR #41)
Since the Plasma 6.6 beta period has commenced, this is a great time to submit bug reports for all the niggling issues you’ve been suffering with but haven’t formally reported yet. We’re focusing more than usual on bug triage too, so your reports will be seen.
There’s a new Troubleshooting help page that can help narrow down issues, too. Check it out! And helping to triage other people’s reported issues is a big help, too.
In addition, “This Week in Plasma” needs your help! Publishing these posts is time-consuming and needs community assistance to be sustainable. Right now there are two ways to help:
Work can be coordinated in the relevant Matrix room.
Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
KDE Ni! OS is a custom flavour (configuration, not a separate distribution) of NixOS that showcases KDE software. It builds on NixOS with the aim to reimplement the same features other popular immutable distributions have, while providing a first-class KDE Plasma setup.
The Plasma Login Manager support has been merged into Ni! OS.
If you want to use it, there are two prerequisites:
It is in the “works for me” state. I don’t use auto-login, virtual keyboard, etc.
If you are on the stable channel, which would surprise me as
you’re reading this post, it is easy to switch to unstable just
by running these commands as root user (sudo,
or su, or…).
toscalix
#this-week-kde-apps:kde.org
nix-channel --add https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-unstable nixos
nix-channel --update
nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade This will switch you to the unstable version of NixOS.
Mind that, as NixOS is an immutable distribution, you can easily boot back into the stable version – the previous version of your system is still accessible in the bootloader menu.
There’s a new option in Ni! OS called experimental.use_plasma_login_manager.
The only thing you need to do in order to switch from SDDM to the Plasma
Login Manager is to set it to true, and just
switch your setup to the new configuration with:
nixos-rebuild switch
Switching back is also trivial – just change the value back to
false and do the switch again.
One new thing in Ni! OS is a custom label for the versions of the system (derivations in NixOS terminology).
If you enable an experimental feature such as the Plasma Login Manager, the label will clearly denote that. It makes it easy to get back to a version without the experimental features enabled.
As you can see in the following screenshot, the default label is
kde-ni-os and all enabled experimental features are
appended to it – when enabling the Plasma Login Manager, the label
becomes kde-ni-os:plasma-login-manager. These labels can be
seen in the following screenshot:
Was notified by NixOS KDE maintainer K900, that PLM will officially become a part of nixpkgs as Plasma 6.5.5 gets updated to 6.6.
You can follow the progress of the patch here.
Once Plasma 6.6 is released, and it becomes available in nixpkgs, Ni! OS will start using the official package instead of my local hack.
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-03.
Tags: tech, foss, politics, europe
Go and get your voice heard! This is important matter, especially if you’re interested in Free Software.
https://lwn.net/Articles/1053107/
Tags: tech, gafam, business, politics, europe
They’ll do anything to further their grip on tech. The European Union is sleep walking on this one.
Tags: tech, politics, law, surveillance, privacy
Clearly the regulators don’t really understand the level of intrusiveness they’re unleashing with mandating age gates. This is one more layer of surveillance for large parts of the population.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/so-youve-hit-age-gate-what-now
Tags: tech, innovation, foss, business, community
This is a very rich article. There’s indeed more and more a rift between Open Source projects used by hyperscalers and the ones used by smaller businesses and individuals. You likely want to aim for the latter.
https://blog.glyph.im/2026/01/the-next-thing-will-not-be-big.html
Tags: tech, linux, foss, desktop
Looks like the trend continues. Let’s hope the Linux desktop user base will keep growing this year.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/451196
Tags: tech, markdown, history, blog, commons
Wondering where Markdown is coming from and how it became such a success? The piece helps answer those questions.
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/
Tags: tech, foss, community, email
Interesting points. Forums are clearly not good replacements for mailing lists. They might be a good complementary to mailing lists but both have very different affordances.
Tags: tech, messaging, foss, security, privacy, foss
If you needed a reminder about why you can’t trust WhatsApp, this is a good explanation.
https://toki.la/posts/whatsapp
Tags: tech, security, api, secrets
Friendly reminder that securing APIs and secrets is a must. Not doing so can have really bad consequences.
https://eaton-works.com/2026/01/14/bluspark-bluvoyix-hack/
Tags: tech, web, standard, fediverse, social-media
This is a welcome development at the W3C. Let’s hope this working group will bring good things and stewardship for the related standards.
Tags: tech, http, failure, standard
Maybe we can expect improvements in how HTTP rate limiting is handled?
https://dotat.at/@/2026-01-13-http-ratelimit.html
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, ethics
I agree with this so much. It’s another one of those I feel I could have written. I have a hard time thinking I could use the current crop of “inference as a service” while they carry so many ethical issues.
https://yarnspinner.dev/blog/why-we-dont-use-ai/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, quality, ethics
There is a real question about the training data used for the coding assistant models. It’s been a problem from the start raising ethical concerns, now it shows up with a different symptom.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-coding-degrades
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, foss, law, ethics, copyright
I’m not sure the legal case is completely lost even though chances are slim. The arguments here are worth mulling over though. There’s really an ethical factor to consider.
https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/tales/on-floss-and-training-llms/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, business, economics, work, quality
Is this really to improve your work? Or make you dependent? In the end it might be the users who loose.
https://calnewport.com/be-wary-of-digital-deskilling/
Tags: tech, python, debugging, containers
OK, this is definitely a very cool hack. It can definitely help to debug locally.
https://savannah.dev/posts/the-coolest-feature-in-314/
Tags: tech, python, tests, exceptions
Neat little Python trick for testing exceptions.
Tags: tech, security, secrets, shell
What’s the right way to manipulate secrets in your shell to avoid leakage? The answer definitely varies, here is the paranoid version.
https://linus.schreibt.jetzt/posts/shell-secrets.html
Tags: tech, rust, supply-chain, security
There are growing concerns regarding the Rust supply chain. It’s still time to address them but it’s became important to tackle this area.
https://mr-leshiy-blog.web.app/blog/crates_io_analysis/
Tags: tech, graphics, 3d, shader, physics
Long and good walkthrough on how to render nice clouds in real time.
https://www.jacktollenaar.top/articles/clouds.html
Tags: tech, programming, language, learning, craftsmanship
There’s a lot to this. Learning different languages to get out of your habits definitely brings compound benefits.
https://ficd.sh/blog/permission-to-begin-learning/
Tags: tech, codereview
This is an interesting way to frame where the effort should be spent in code reviews.
https://bastrich.tech/perfect-code-review/
Tags: tech, engineering, management, productivity, kanban
This is good advice. To improve your organisation, focus only on the biggest constraint. Otherwise you’ll quickly be spread thin.
https://www.theengineeringmanager.com/growth/one-bottleneck-at-a-time/
Tags: management, agile, lean, culture, trust, leadership, problem-solving
This has been documented for a long while. Of course, it’s been followed by an unhealthy fascination for the “Toyota way”. This kind of cargo cult of course lead you nowhere to doing things properly. And yet, now that the dust settled, there are good lessons to learn from Toyota management back then.
Bye for now!
Happy New Year! The first maintenance release of the 25.12 series is with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights of this release include further polishing of the new welcome screen, added AMF encoding profile for Windows, fixes to audio capture and effects alongside numerous smaller improvements throughout the interface. See changelog for more details.
For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.
