Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!

This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.5, and I think it’s gonna be a pretty darn good release when it comes out in 3 days! So eyes started turning towards features and UI improvements again, and you’ll notice a few of them this week.

Let me also draw your attention to another topic: KDE’s birthday! KDE is 29 this week and celebrating by kicking off our annual fundraiser. It’s a great time to donate if you’ve been on the fence or just want to show your love for Plasma!

The majority of KDE e.V.’s yearly budget comes from fourth quarter fundraising at this point, so it really does make a big difference. Donate today! And then check out this week’s goodies:

Notable New Features

Plasma 6.6.0

The Application Dashboard widget can now be configured to follow the color scheme, though it remains dark by default. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Keep in mind this dashboard hasn’t had any visual sprucing-up in years; if you’re tempted to complain that it’s ugly or unpolished, we probably agree, and would welcome any contributions!

You can now resize the area between Application Dashboard widget’s Favorites and Applications areas, allowing for one or the other to take up more space. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Klipper actions can now be disabled, without having to remove them. (Jonathan Marten, link)

Notable UI Improvements

Right Now

The Plasma Browser Integration add-on’s settings window now has a dark background when its browser is using dark mode. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

KWin’s Dim Inactive effect is now clamped to strength levels between 10 and 90%, because anything outside that range doesn’t really make sense and can produce nonsensical results. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

If you’ve deliberately masked the Systemd service for the firmware updater (fwupd), Discover no longer considers this an error to bug you about. (Nate Graham, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

The highlights for top-level menu items are now slightly rounded. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

When using the Bing Picture of the Day wallpaper provider, the thumbnail preview for the day’s wallpaper will now reflect the wallpaper’s actual aspect ratio — landscape or portrait — instead of always showing a portrait version of it. (Gergely Kovács, link)

Passwords for Wi-Fi networks are, by default, now stored globally (in a root-owned location, so not just anyone can go look at them), rather than per-user. This yields multiple benefits, including:

• No more KWallet popups on misconfigured systems
• New user accounts on the same system don’t need to manually log into common Wi-Fi networks all over again
• Login screen features like LDAP account login that need internet access now always work out of the box

(Kristen McWilliam, link)

Frameworks 6.20

KRunner’s search results no longer dynamically change the priority of search results based on how often they’re used. This was a very clever feature, but ultimately made it impossible to offer a good default sort order because the actual sort order would be different for every person. Removing that makes the search result ordering predictable, and hence learnable. (Harald Sitter, link)

Notable Bug Fixes

Plasma 6.4.6

The app chooser window now respects whether the app that opened it wanted it to be modal or not. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Plasma 6.5.0

Fixed two cases where KWin could crash when you put a laptop to sleep with an external display connected, and then woke it up again with the screen disconnected. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link 1 and link 2)

Fixed a case where KWin could crash while the screen was locked. (Vlad Zahorodnii, link)

Fixed a case where Spectacle could crash while closing after saving a file. (Noah Davis, link)

Fixed a bug that could make remote desktop connections fail when using a recent version of ffmpeg. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Fixed a bug that made it possible for screen content to not update frequently enough when using one of the full-screen colorblindness correction effects. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a visual issue that could make full-screen HDR content in certain games not actually look HDR. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Rotating a screen with HDR active no longer makes it become brighter than the surface of the sun for a few milliseconds. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed a bug that made System Monitor sensors display the wrong values for certain NVIDIA GPUs. (David Redondo, link)

Notifications marked “transient” once again stay out of the notification history even if they include actions. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)

Fixed the scroll handle of the Application Dashboard widget; dragging it now works. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Fixed two layout issues with custom System Monitor layouts when using the “Maximum” height option, or more than 11 rows. (Arjen Hiemstra, link)

Large panels can no longer cover up the Edit Mode dialog when there are several of them in a complex layout. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Worked around a newly-introduced Qt 6.10 issue that made notifications about downloaded files inappropriately remain visible until manually closed. (Nicolas Fella, link)

Plasma 6.5.1

Fixed some UI issues in System Settings’ Remote Desktop page. (David Edmundson and Nate Graham, link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4, link 5, and link 6)

Fixed a bug that could cause minor visual glitches when moving the pointer in and out of certain apps’ windows. (Xaver Hugl, link)

Fixed an issue that made Plasma tab bars not look quite right with non-default Plasma styles. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Plasma 6.6.0

Discover no longer crashes when you’ve got Flatpak installed but it’s nonetheless not available for some reason. (Aleix Pol Gonzalez, link)

Fixed a bug that would store the IPsec passwords of some VPNs incorrectly, making them ask for the password every time you connected. (Mickaël Thomas, link)

Frameworks 6.19.1

Fixed a serious regression accidentally introduced into Frameworks 6.19 that made it impossible to write files into Samba shares. The relevant code will be covered with an autotest soon so it doesn’t regress again. (Akseli Lahtinen, link)

Frameworks 6.20

Separator lines throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps are now pixel-perfect, resolving an issue that could make them look much brighter than intended with a dark color scheme. Marco wrote an interesting blog post about this, too. (Marco Martin, link)

System Settings pages opened standalone using kcmshell6 no longer sometimes experience the bottom part of scrollable views being cut off. (Jakob Petsovits, link)

Fixed a bug that made the icon chooser dialog not let you re-select the same icon you selected the last time it was open. (Niccolò Venerandi, link)

Other bug information of note:

• Zero very high priority Plasma bugs! (down from 1 last week). Current list of bugs
• 31 15-minute Plasma bugs (up from 29 last week). Current list of bugs

Notable in Performance & Technical

Plasma 6.5.0

Made some improvements to nested KWin sessions, including better performance and inhibiting global shortcuts outside of the nested environment. (Xaver Hugl and Kai Uwe Broulik, link 1 and link 2)

Plasma 6.6.0

kcmshell6 --list now sorts its output alphabetically. (Taras Oleksyn, link)

How You Can Help

Donate to KDE’s 2025 fundraiser! It really makes a big difference.

If money is tight, you can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved somehow. 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, too.

To get a new Plasma feature or a bugfix mentioned here, feel free to push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.

Changelog

• Correction bug 479854: The tool "Align sub-operation date..." don't update an operation
• Correction bug 498606: ##WARNING: QFSFileEngine::open: No file name specified
• Correction bug 507235: bad Unit import for Ms Money
• Correction bug 507414: Regression: Error importing ISO20022 XML into Skrooge
• Correction bug 510022: MS Money import: Dividends cause Unit Value = 0
• Correction bug 510025: MS Money import: split transaction comments lost/overwritten
• Correction bug 510027: MS Money import: Investment transactions not grouped
• Correction bug 510115: MS Money import: Ignore (/import?) Classifications
• Correction bug 492495: Empty New Account after CSV Import
• Correction bug 491382: Wishlist: Add an option for work days in Schedule Transactions
• Correction bug: Increase width of unit combo box
• Correction bug: Not possible to create SEK and NOK units because they have the same symbol. Fiw by using CurrencyUnitSymbolUnambiguous
• Feature: Search transactions from tool bar
• Feature: Add benchmark mode in debug page
• Performances: Improve various sql performances

I have a laptop – a Framework 13, AMD CPU – which I received for the purpose of making KDE-on-FreeBSD good on it. For KDE Akademy Reasons, that laptop is covered in stickers: bicycle stickers, KDE, RUN BSD .. and it got three Linuxes installed on it next to FreeBSD. I mentioned that KDE Akademy is people, and I’d like to thank Doug (openSUSE), Neal (Fedora) and Harald (KDE Linux) for helping me get the bits in place. Here’s some brief notes about the resulting systems.

• I must have botched the openSUSE installation. This is my go-to Linux distro for the past ten years at least and … this time it just isn’t a very good experience. A KDE Plasma 6 session auto-starts, but it is the X11 version, and scaling is messed up on the 2880x1920 screen, such that fonts are too big and UI elements too small. The KCM for scaling doesn’t work nicely, and clicking on buttons like Apply is haphazard. It might just be X11 bitrot, though, and I have not sat down with the system to figure out what’s going on.
• KDE Linux, I know it’s there, it starts, but I find that I don’t have confidence that the immutable + flatpak does anything useful for me, and I fear that it takes stuff away – although I can’t exactly articulate what, since I don’t want to sit down to try to turn it into my daily driver and then on day three find out that spacebar-heating is disabled in the flatpak portal. Dangit, I need my spacebar heating. Someday I’ll sit down longer with KDE Linux, but not with this laptop.
• That leaves Fedora, which doesn’t deliver a stock wallpaper but does provide a really nice KDE Plasma 6 experience. Here, too, I can’t put my finger on what makes it nice, it just … is. It’s a wayland session. Using the Keyboard KCM and swapping ctrl- and caps- just works, and it stays there even in the face of jiggery-pokery with connected keyboards (unlike in an X11 session on FreeBSD). Scaling is reasonable at 170%. Scrolling with the touchpad goes the “right” direction. Focus-follows-mouse is easy to configure.

FreeBSD works pretty well on this machine, right now except for the oops-poor-choice WiFi, but that is enough to keep my from daily-drivering it just yet, and that’s why this post is all about Linuxes. The configuration space is the same, though.

One hardware trick I found since I last wrote about this machine: the hardware turns out to have a “Fn-lock”. Press Fn-ESC to prefer function-keys over media-keys. (Source: forum posts) It even says “Fn-lock” on the physical escape key, but I had not connected those letters with the desired functionality yet. This setting is preserved across hibernation and reboots.

Takeaway: fear of change is a genuine cause of non-adoption of technologies; Fedora KDE Workstation is pretty darn nice; like many others I have covered over the laptop’s branding with queer stickers.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-42.

Free Software hasn’t won

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, law, politics, business

It’s a bit of a sour article but it rings so true… We let Open Source take the mantle in companies which are mostly free loaders and churn closed products, or even worse have them closed and DRM protected. There’s really quite some work to still realize the Free Software goals.

https://dorotac.eu/posts/fosswon/

How to encrypt your device, like a boss

Tags: tech, storage, cryptography, tools

Tiny intro to using cryptsetup. I confirm it’s surprisingly easy.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_007.pdf#page=63

The Attack

Tags: tech, security

An old one but it shows quite well how social engineering works. It’s often way more powerful than the technical defense you try to raise.

https://shaanan.cohney.info/2013/04/the-attack/

Casting shade on your Postgres performance

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, performance

This article is short but very interesting. That’s indeed something to keep in mind when using Postgres, you could have surprisingly bad performance results in some cases otherwise.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_007.pdf#page=35

Abstraction, not syntax

Tags: tech, config, complexity, yaml

A reminder that if there’s too much complexity in your configuration the syntax used to represent it probably won’t save you from issues.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/abstraction-not-syntax

Lua is so underrated

Tags: tech, programming, language, lua

Indeed it is. It’s not the perfect or most sexy language, and yet it has some interesting properties.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_007.pdf#page=37

Can We Know Whether a Profiler is Accurate?

Tags: tech, profiling, research, java

Interesting approach to gauge how accurate a profiler is. With some results in the Java ecosystem, so now you know which profiler to pick there.

https://stefan-marr.de/2025/10/can-we-know-whether-a-profiler-is-accurate/

Complex Object Initialization Optimization with IIFE in C++11

Tags: tech, c++, design, performance

This is an interesting pattern that I still seldomly meet in C++ codebases. Of course don’t go overboard with it, but don’t be scared of using it for wrong reasons.

https://articles.emptycrate.com/2014/12/16/complex_object_initialization_optimization_with_iife_in_c11.html

API design principle: Don’t tempt people to divide by zero

Tags: tech, api, design

Good reminder that it’s better to design your APIs to avoid putting people in the situation of inadvertently creating a divide by zero.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251013-00/?p=111677

Gamma correction on fragment shaders.

Tags: tech, graphics, colors, shader

Wonder what is gamma correction and why it’s needed? This is a nice and short explanation.

https://riccardoscalco.it/blog/gamma-correction-on-fragment-shaders/

HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The

Tag

Tags: tech, html, accessibility

Interesting tag… It’s indeed been totally forgotten somehow.

https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag

Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture

Tags: tech, tdd, tests, security, team, culture

A very long read but contains lots of insights. Goes from two very famous security related failure, to highlighting how a test first approach could have helped. It then finishes with a long section on how to foster a testing culture in an organisation.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/testing-culture.html

Why we’re leaving serverless

Tags: tech, cloud, performance, complexity

Serverless based architectures leading to bad cases of complexity and latency when used for more than trivial workloads… who knew!? ;-)

https://www.unkey.com/blog/serverless-exit

Don’t make Clean Code harder to maintain, use the Rule of Three

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, refactoring

Apparently people need to be reminded that “Don’t Repeat Yourself” is more a guideline than a rule. So “The Rule of Three” is a way to do that (although I find ironic it’s called a “rule”).

https://understandlegacycode.com/blog/refactoring-rule-of-three/

Emergent Design

Tags: tech, agile, xp, design, history

What’s behind the notion? Some historical musing about self-organizing teams and the design they produce.

https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/emergent-design/

How we do large scale retrospectives

Tags: tech, agile, retrospective

A few interesting ideas for having retrospective at a larger scale than the single team.

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2015/11/large-scale-retros

All-Remote Meetings

Tags: tech, remote-working, meetings

Once again GitLab has plenty of good advice for operating remotely. This time it is about meetings which are obviously part of life in an organisation. And actually, quite some of the good tips also apply to in person meetings.

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture//all-remote/meetings/

No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic

Tags: tech, productivity, research, team

Interesting stuff, very rich I think I’ll have to get back to it. This gives good clues and ideas of metrics to look at when evaluating teams output. Some of the findings confirm hunches which is welcome. It also shows that measuring productivity keeps being a messy business, there are so many factors influencing it in some way.

https://johnflournoy.science/no-silver-bullets/

Hiring Trap: Don’t Hire Anyone Older Than…

Tags: tech, hiring

I still think we have an ageism problem in our industry. I feel it’s less than before, but this short article shows well how far it went.

https://www.jrothman.com/htp/hiring-process/2014/03/hiring-trap-dont-hire-anyone-older-than/

The Humane Tech Interview

Tags: tech, hiring, interviews

I’m trying to approach interviews like this as well. It’s better for everyone when it feels like a conversation rather than constant questioning. The trick is to still capture information about the skills you need to evaluate though.

https://www.thelins.se/johan/blog/2017/07/the-humane-tech-interview/

Bye for now!

This week marks KDE’s 29th birthday, which is pretty special. Did you know KDE has been around longer than Google, PayPal, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, Tesla, Spotify, Uber, VMware, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Github? Seriously! That’s a long time producing high quality, autonomy-respecting, non-exploitative software.

And humanity needs and deserves it, so we’re gonna keep going! We’re celebrating KDE’s birthday by kicking off our annual end-of-year fundraiser: https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2025/

The money raised here will support the ability of KDE e.V. (the nonprofit behind KDE) to continue hosting Akademy, funding development sprints, affording server hardware and hosting, and employing engineers, marketers, documentation writers, and support personnel (but not board members; we’re unpaid volunteers).

There’s a big set of initiatives, and they’re growing all the time as KDE gains in prominence worldwide! We have extremely ambitious goals of spreading humane software throughout the world.

Looking at the kind messages people have written in their donations, it seems like we’re seeing some success. Here are a few recent examples:

Thanks for KDE Plasma, can’t wait for KDE Linux!!! HB

To the most consistently feature rich Desktop Environment and just generally awesome set of applications! Thanks for the hard work!

Happy Birthday! Thank you, the Plasma Desktop and the KDE family of applications have made my life so much better. Keep up the good work on the newly-minted KDE Linux.

I’m giving you guys the money that would have gone to Windows 10 ESL had I not switched to Kubuntu earlier this year!

This might sound dumb but the wobbly windows option convinced one of my friends to install Linux so you win

Plasma is the best, very excited for Bigscreen!

KDE’s really great for both enthusiasts and newcomers. Without it, I’d be worried about “the linux desktop” hehe.

Thank you for you great work! One day I’ll find the time to contribute!

I know it’s only the minimum amount, but I love using your DE and software and want to help out any way I can. Thank you!

Thank you for your work and contribution!

Keep up the kood kork!

With love from Spain!!

Keep up the great work!

thank you for a fine desktop

KDE is my daily driver for personal computing. It’s abundance of features and the distraction-free experience is great. Keep it going! I’ve been an on-and-off user since the KDE 1 Beta 3.

Thank you KDE team for your wonderful work. I use Neon daily and it’s truly a joy to use

Thanks for making the computing world a significantly better place.

Happy Bday, KDE has be rock solid this year!

VIEL ERFOLG von der Alten (84) !! (GOOD LUCK from the old folks (84) !!)

I love your work – thank you for everything! Greetings from Germany

Hope this helps you keep up the great work!

Thanks for the hard work! Keep it up! From a french user!

To many more birthdays to come.

Great work, KDE!

First time donating. I really love to use KDE.

Thank you, KDE developers & KDE application developers, for 29 years of FOSS-licensed desktop software for Unix.

Grazie mille per tutto quello che fate. Fedora KDE è fantastico!

Thank you for bringing Plasma and Kdenlive to the world. Keep doing what you’re always doing.

Just a small donation for now, more in December

I dunno why, but I really love what you are doing! I really enjoy KDE’s vibe overall and everything that you guys did!

We’ve set the comparatively modest goal of raising €50,000, and I’m happy to see that we’re already a quarter of the way there after only three days. But we need to keep up the push, as typically the first few days see the most donations. So please donate if you can, and spread the word far and wide!

The KDE community created in the last decades a lot of interesting projects.

Unfortunately, not all projects survive the test of time, be it because the developers leave or technology moves on and stuff gets less relevant.

The same happens for our communication channels or web sites. 20 years ago, mailing lists and IRC were still kind of common place, today more people hang around on stuff like discuss.kde.org or in our Matrix channels.

Unfortunately our community is not that good at cleaning dead stuff up or deciding that the zombie state of some things hurt.

Dead Web Sites

A no longer updated website might be a small issue, that just looks bad, but most people will see that stuff with news from 2010 will likely be not alive.

Still, I think it makes sense to remove such sites and just redirect them (if there is any follow up information online).

It is no good state if we have stuff up that rots away since a few years, at least if it contains no other valuable info, like documentation or howtos.

Zombie Git Projects

Worse than dead web sites are zombie Git repositories that still get merge requests but nobody takes a look as all people are just gone but the stuff is not clearly marked as archived.

People waste their time and will likely be upset their contributions are not even looked at.

If a project is really dead, that should be archived, one can still resurrect it with easy later on, it is not gone, just clearly marked as dead.

Blackhole Mailing Lists

Even worse are in my eyes dead mailing lists.

People will drop questions there, in worst case that will even already hang for days in moderation or then forever without answer on the list.

That turns away people, you have a question or contribution and it ends in a black hole? No good first contact.

Solutions? Gardening!

What can we do?

We not just need to create new stuff and maintain what we have, we need to do some house cleaning or gardening.

We did that in the past, we can do it again :)

If you want to help, or just turn up and tell that your old project, web site or list it dead, show up on one of these issues:

• Repository & Bugzilla Cleanup

• Mailing List Cleanup

• Website Cleanup

Discussion

Feel free to join the discussion at the KDE reddit.

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 18 RC.

Sometimes an application can look kinda wrong due to very small details, few pixels can make or ruin the first impact. And since today a lot of monitors, especially laptop ones have to use fractional scaling, making things look sharp and pixel perfect is even harder.

Here is System Settings, on a screen scaled at 175%: