News from the Planet

Version 6.8 of the KDE Plasma desktop has been released. The The KDE project has timed the release to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Matthias Ettrich's email announcing the project: Unix popularity grows thanks to the free variants, mostly Linux. But still a consistent, nice looking free…

New feature cuts local working-copy storage requirements by up to 50%, extending Subversion’s long-standing strength in version control for huge repositories and huge files Wilmington, DE –  October 14, 2026 – The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the global home of open source software the world…

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap, coming in at $699 (or $749…

When I joined KDE in 1999 I already thought of it as a mature project. I used the KDE desktop every day, and I was delighted with what it could do and how it felt. I had no idea that this would be one of the most impactful decisions of my life, or where it would lead me. Today we are celebrating…

Twelve years ago, I was complaining that IoT devices were too expensive. Last week I bought a colour changing Zigbee lighbulb for £4. Not a typo - less than a fiver. While the aipocalypse is devouring RAM with its insatiable appetite, Moore's Law appears to be keeping up its end of the bargain…

So... a bit of news. KDAB have just published a video featuring me talking about design, QML, and something I keep coming back to: what happens when the tools we use to make software become more capable, while the interfaces we build with them seem to get increasingly…

Exploring how Large Language Models can Improve Search in Spatial Data Infrastructures Every day, a huge amount of spatial data is produced by public agencies, research institutes, companies, and other data providers. Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) have been set up at local, national and…

Stem op OSGeo.nl voor de Geo Prestige Award! TLDR; Direct stemmen via https://geomares.typeform.com/to/YUyu9jo8 . De vakvereniging Geo-Informatie Nederland (GIN) reikt jaarlijks vakprijzen uit, de Geo Prestige Awards. Er zijn drie categorieën: Professional, Startup en Organisatie.…

Me, calmly assessing the implications of LLMs for programming language design(ers). As someone who has made a career of programming language design, I definitely have moments of existential dread about the rise of LLMs. I started coding in 5th grade on an x861 that ran at 5MHz, had something like a…

Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust! Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software. This is a weekly summary of its progress and community. Want something mentioned? Tag us at @thisweekinrust.bsky.social on Bluesky or @ThisWeekinRust…

Review: Ties That Bond in Gretna Green, by Linzi Day Series: Midlife Recorder #3 Publisher: Linzi Day Copyright: February 2023 ISBN: 9798376517017 Format: Kindle Pages: 616 Ties That Bond in Gretna Green is a…

Debian Contributions: 2026-09 Contributing to Debian is part of Freexian’s mission. This article covers the latest achievements of Freexian and their collaborators. All of this is made possible by organizations subscribing to our Long Term Support contracts and consulting services. DebConf site…

Celebrating thirty years of KDE Plasma 6.8 is released on a very special day: KDE’s 30th birthday. Today we celebrate three decades of the KDE community providing the world’s greatest free and open-source software. Plasma 6.8 is no exception, offering enhancements across much of the user…

Github Link The following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org: Bug 2079152 - Unable to select content-type when creating attachment Bug 2079453 - Upgrade devbridge-autocomplete to 2.0.1 and fix autocomplete dropdown reopening after the field loses focus Bug 2065173 - Migrate Group REST…

On or before August 10th, a macOS system at Northwestern University which builds and hosts Racket snapshots was compromised. The attackers installed a crypto miner, which was detected by Northwestern network monitoring. By August 18th, the machine was fully deactivated, and was subsequently…

A new release 0.4.29 of RQuantLib arrived on CRAN this evening, had already been built for r2u as well as on r-universe and has just been uploaded to Debian. QuantLib is a rather comprehensice free/open-source library for quantitative finance. RQuantLib connects (some parts of) it to the R…

The second maintenance release of the 26.08 series is out with the usual batch of stability fixes and workflow improvements. Highlights include improved project handling and ability to set the frame count to start at 1 in the Dynamic Text filter which is useful for animation workflows. This release…

(This is an updated version of an older post - the introduction remains the same, the technical details are different) Linux draws a distinction between code running in kernel (kernel space) and applications running in userland (user space). This is enforced at the hardware level - in x86-speak1,…

(This is an updated version of an older post - the introduction remains the same, the technical details are different) Linux draws a distinction between code running in kernel (kernel space) and applications running in userland (user space). This is enforced at the hardware level - in x86-speak1,…

With the WebDriver related release notes part of the MDN developer release notes and having a 2-week cycle for new Firefox releases now we are going to stop publishing this newsletter. This one will be the last one of the series of blog posts that we did since Firefox 114.Thank you to everyone who…

Everyone knows the QGIS Plugin Repo but have you had a look at the QGIS Hub yet? It’s similar to the plugin repository in that it allows sharing of resources between community members, but it so many different types of resources, that warrants multiple blog posts: from styles and projects…

OSGeo.nl has been nominated for the most prestigious geo-award within The Netherlands: the Geo Prestige Award 2026. This is a callout to our community: vote for us! TL;DR: Vote directly via https://geomares.typeform.com/to/YUyu9jo8 or click image above, or use QR. Sorry, form is in…

The latest version of the Firefox Profiler is now live! Check out the full changelog below to see what’s changed: Highlights: [Markus Stange] Speed up activity graph drawing (#5888) [Florian Quèze] profiler-cli: accept several marker handles and ranges in marker info (#6277) [Nazım Can Altınova]…

Dear Reader, Here is a closer look at GeoNode 5.1.0, the first feature release built on top of the renewed 5.0 architecture. The release notes list everything in detail. Where GeoNode 5 was about rebuilding foundations, 5.1.0 is about putting those foundations to work. It significantly broadens the…

During a bit of football banter about League 1 over the weekend, Ken said to me “I bet you’ve never been to any of those places either. All a bit far north” – it turned out I had visited 18/24 of the places in the League. That prompted an idea for a geography quiz, could I make a quiz that combined…