This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty: Q2 2026

Nate Graham, Kevin Ottens, and John Veness — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:00:01 +0000

Welcome to the inaugural edition of This Quarter in KDE Digital Sovereignty!

This blog series will cover the work done throughout KDE’s software stack that’s funded by the investment KDE received earlier this year from Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency.

Commissioned work on a variety of projects has been done by KDE contributors working for KDE e.V. itself, as well as the Techpaladin Software and enioka Haute Couture companies.

This post will cover the work done in the second quarter of 2026. Let’s get into it!

Quality assurance and testing

The bulk of the work consisted of getting KDE’s house in order when it comes to automated testing — ensuring things that are working stay working, and providing early warnings about incompatibilities from updated dependencies.

The Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE included substantial funding for this work across KDE Plasma, KDE Linux, and KDE PIM, providing a strong technical foundation for all of the future funded work.

On the PIM side, we set up a dedicated test suite and an extensive set of newly-created tests for both IMAP and CalDAV/CardDAV resources. You can read more about it on Kevin Ottens’ blog. In any case, it helped uncover some issues which were promptly fixed (most notably recurrence exceptions are properly handled now), and identify dead code which has been cleaned up.

A similar process unfolded on the KDE Linux side, with a dedicated testing server managing a new openQA-based system that runs integration tests for many high-level cases relevant to Plasma in general and KDE Linux specifically. You can read more about it in this blog post by Thomas Duckworth. And it has also already borne fruit, including detecting an accidental regression in KWallet and protecting users from a KWin crash caused by a brief regression in Arch Linux’s gcc tooling.

IMAP4 revision 2

Beyond the QA, work also proceeded on the PIM side for the topic of improving support through the KDE PIM suite for IMAP4 revision 2. This led us to add support for more IMAP4 extensions in our stack like BINARY, LIST-EXTENDED, or LIST-STATUS. We also completed support for CONDSTORE and QRESYNC. Altogether, it allowed us to speed up IMAP resource syncing while using less network bandwidth — sometimes in a fairly drastic way, lowering the sync of a given mailbox to a single server round trip in the best cases!

We had more good news on this front too. It turned out to be less work than expected, as our IMAP implementation is in a fairly good shape! It will free some time to go further on the QA and testing side.

Automatic account configuration

Additional PIM topics included initial work to build a system for automatically discovering and setting up resources based on nothing more than an email address and password. We already have partial support for this kind of magic in KMail, but it doesn’t go beyond configuring email; that will change soon!

For this work, we’re preparing a new library which will implement the relevant draft RFC. The API is mostly in place, although we keep improving it. We’re now at the stage where we can plug this new implementation into KMail, and later on integrate the whole feature set via System Settings’ Online Accounts page. It will be nice when you just give an email and password there, to automatically see all your PIM apps automatically configured: mail, calendar, and identity.

WebDAV push notifications

The latest work started on the PIM side is about supporting push notifications for DAV calendars. This is based on a draft specification proposed by the DAVx⁵ folks. We’re currently mostly in the design phase, even though some adjustments to KDAV are already being made.

Ultimately this should lead to more targeted syncing when something changes on the server, reducing the network bandwidth requirements. It will also make your calendars sync with the server almost immediately instead of waiting for the next poll interval.

On the Plasma side, work also began to overhaul the way network shares are handled throughout KDE. So far the work has concentrated on beefing up KDE’s FUSE-based network share mounting in a variety of ways.

Perhaps the most notable way being explored is to create the FUSE mount in response to a request to access a file on a network location even if the user has not already accessed it from Dolphin. This work is in progress.

Work is also in progress to mount these FUSE mounts at a standardized and predictable path, and to surface them in the standard Places panel for ease of access.

Data integrity

To improve data integrity throughout KDE, we created a new service for interfacing with Btrfs snapshots. This will form the backbone of various user interfaces integrated throughout KDE software (starting with Dolphin) to offer users the possibility to restore earlier versions of their files from snapshots, and use those snapshots for traditional backup systems.

In addition, we put some work into improving KDE’s Kup backup system, in the form of UI improvements for determining what gets included in backups, and modernizing the user interface of its Plasma widget.

Configuration management

Work began on an overhaul of KDE’s configuration management infrastructure in the form of porting software to use the more modern KConfigXT system. This system uses a declarative syntax with defined schemas, allowing KDE software’s available configuration options and default settings to be knowable without having to read the source code.

This effort will eventually open up the possibility of writing a management app similar to GNOME’s DConf Editor tool that can offer administrators the ability to graphically visualize and change configuration options.

Looking forward

So it was a busy quarter of shoring up some of the foundations in KDE to lay the groundwork for future efforts. We’re very grateful for the Sovereign Tech Agency’s investment in KDE that made this possible! Once the QA efforts wind down, we’ll be in a great position to start working on the more user-facing elements of the investment.

Kevin Ottens on KDE Blogs