A lot has happened in the KDE Plasma desktop environment in the last year. Marco Martin, a KDE contributor who spends most of his time working on Plasma, took the stage at Akademy 2026 in Graz, Austria to give an update on Plasma's major new features, some of the minor-but-interesting ones, and a preview of what's coming soon. The biggest upcoming change, dropping X11 support from Plasma, has been well-advertised; but there are also plans afoot to further improve remote-desktop support and more.

Serving on the TAB is a good way to help the kernel-development community. Please see this article from last year for an overview of what the TAB does and why membership is rewarding, then consider putting in your nomination.

Christian Legnitto is the maintainer of rust-gpu and Rust CUDA, two libraries that make it possible to program a computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) from Rust. He isn't satisfied with the current state of GPU support in Rust, however. In a talk at RustConf 2026, he explained his vision for how the GPU could become an ordinary compiler target for normal Rust code, without the need for any special libraries or new ecosystem support. That vision is not yet fully implemented, but he does have a prototype that he is preparing to release.

The Sovereign Tech Agency (STA) is investing nearly €1.3 million in KDE through 2027. At Akademy 2026 in Graz, Austria, Nate Graham and Kevin Ottens, two of the contributors who helped bring in the investment, explained how the funding was secured, provided tips on how projects should approach organizations like STA, and talked about how that money will be improving KDE for everyone. In addition to keeping the community informed about the work, the pair hoped to pass on what they have learned to encourage others to help raise funds for development as well.

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.2.8 and 6.18.54 stable kernels. Each contains a number of important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.

The F-Droid project has announced the release of F-Droid 2.0, which is a complete redesign of the official app. Notable changes in the release include making it easier to discover and install applications, more useful app categories, improved search, and much more.

For more than a decade, F-Droid has helped people discover and install free and open source Android apps. F-Droid 2.0 builds on that foundation with a modern interface, better app discovery, improved search, and a simpler experience that works well, whether you're new to F-Droid or have been using it for years.

This isn't just a visual refresh. The user experience was redesigned to integrate smoothly with current Android patterns, like Material Design, while keeping familiar F-Droid interactions in place. Key components were reworked and rewritten using Kotlin Compose, the standard toolkit these days, creating a foundation that will help us deliver improvements more quickly in the years ahead.