For those of us that want nothing to do with AI hook enabling Wayland, staying on XLibre (X11) while also prefering the KDE Desktop, October 14th is a precarious time as KDE is dropping X11 support and going Wayland only with KDE 6.8. Some of the people involved in XLibre are involved with SonicDE designed to keep X11 support alive (and remove Wayland) with their forked version of KDE, though they have issues on occasion after KDE updates. Consequently, after waking my computer today SonicDE was broken from the updates yesterday. But after running Cinnamon for the morning I checked for updates and there were quite a few from SonicDE getting the desktop environment working again, which I’m using now. This was pretty quick work on their behalf, but I think eventually they’ll need to take over more packages as I believe KDE is doing this purposely as they were pretty vocal about not liking the fork, which is a free software right (and SonicDE is just trying to continue X11 support they’re dropping when half of the Linux users still use X11). And really, Cinnamon was working pretty well this morning as I even have KDEConnect working with my two LineageOS phones… Also, I have XFCE4 and i3 installed as desktop environment options as well, but I think SonicDE is going to work out nicely. And it will be nice to have non-woke developers working behind the extremely woke KDE developers. Furthermore, XLibre and SonicDE are supporting BSD operating systems which is great too, as the Linux Kernel Team is getting a bit too loose with AI contributions (developers are getting too lazy with AI generated code and not doing due diligence on auditing the code for exploits), so a move off Linux looks like a solid future prospect.
https://linuxiac.com/kde-gear-26-08-2-released-with-kdenlive-neochat-and-dolphin-fixes/
KDE Gear 26.08.2 brings bug fixes to Kdenlive, NeoChat, Dolphin, Okular, and other KDE applications, along with updated translations.
By Bobby Borisov
KDE has released Gear 26.08.2, the second maintenance update to its 26.08 application suite.
In the new version, Kdenlive, KDE’s open-source video editor, fixes an incorrect proxy parameter that could break NVIDIA hardware encoding, along with several problems involving proxy clips, including crashes and cases where a proxy was mistakenly treated as the original video.
Audio recording also receives fixes for cases where recording appeared to work but produced no sound, and a potential freeze after a failed recording attempt. Other corrections address subtitle preview refreshes, missing title images when opening projects, incorrect master audio levels, and issues in the title editor.
NeoChat, KDE’s Matrix messaging client, receives some stability improvements. These include fixes for crashes involving message threads, malformed polls, invalid geographic URLs, and notification replies after a room has been deleted.
Additional changes improve connection switching, pinned messages, stickers, custom emoji, and notifications. A bug preventing notifications from appearing correctly when NeoChat was minimized to the system tray has also been fixed.
Dolphin, KDE’s file manager, fixes an issue that made selected text hard to read with certain styles and color schemes. The update also corrects zoom behavior when toggling file previews, improves the folders panel, and ensures view settings for special folders are preserved.
Okular, KDE’s document viewer, fixes a crash that could occur when refreshing a document while the digital signatures panel was open. Several internal changes also improve memory safety and JavaScript handling, particularly how objects and timers are managed.
Moreover, KDE Itinerary receives fixes for booking card visibility, journey progress indicators, and warnings about unreachable transfers. Its ticket recognition components now support additional formats, including Spanish ALSA bus tickets and reservation emails from Delta Air Lines and Frontier Airlines.
Other notable changes include:
- KMail fixes a crash when sending digitally signed emails.
- KDE Connect addresses a race condition during connection handling and improves HTML escaping in notifications.
- Konsole fixes an issue involving graphics creation while scrolling.
- PlasmaTube corrects a bug that removed the protocol portion of URLs.
- KClock fixes timer display resizing and improves alarm looping.
- Marble receives several crash fixes.
For more details, refer to the official announcement or the complete changelog.
The new versions will become available through Linux distribution repositories as maintainers package and distribute them. The third and final release in the 26.08 series, KDE Gear 26.08.3, is scheduled for November 5.