KDE published Gear 26.08, delivering 171 packages and the first net additions to the suite in years. New entries include the kdominate library and the KeepSecret password manager, while Kdenlive receives a major overhaul with GSoC-contributed effect widgets and timeline improvements. Dolphin and Konsole gain practical UX upgrades like regex filtering and drag-and-drop from terminal links, alongside Akonadi's long-overdue C++ modernization and Python bindings. Source tarballs and Flatpak updates are available immediately, with distribution packages rolling out over the coming weeks.

KDE Gear 26.08 drops with kdominate, KeepSecret, and a substantive Kdenlive refresh

KDE published Gear 26.08 on Thursday, August 20, 2026. The August 2026 release brings 171 packages, adds two new entries, removes one that has been fully absorbed into KDE Frameworks, and delivers what might be the most useful set of video editing improvements in the project's history.

KDE has stuck to its four-month release cadence like a calibrated metronome. The source tarballs hit download.kde.org the same day the announcement went live. If you are running KDE Neon, your rolling track should pick this up shortly. Distributions that bundle their own package sets will move at their own pace.

New packages and absorbed libraries

The headline additions are kdominate and KeepSecret. kdominate is a C++ library for programmatically building HTML and XML documents. It spent a long time in the experimental phase before earning a stable spot in Gear. This marks the first net addition to the package set since the project adopted its current naming convention. KeepSecret is the suite's first proper password manager. Linux password managers have a history of being either painfully insecure or painfully complex. The mobile selection mode Roshani Kumari shipped this cycle suggests the team at least knows what users actually want on small screens.

The standalone kmime tarball has vanished. Its code now lives upstream as KF6::MIME. If your build scripts were manually linking to the old module, you will need to update your dependencies. The shift is the kind of forward compatibility move the framework team has been pushing for years.

Desktop stack improvements

Dolphin got a quiet but practical refresh. The most visible change is a new Open KDE Connect button that appears at the top of the window when you are browsing files on a paired phone. The filter bar now accepts plain text, glob patterns, and regular expressions, and it highlights matches in real time. You can sort files alphabetically while grouping them by type, and right-clicking a tab gives you directional close options. Konsole's drag-and-drop workflow just got a serious upgrade. Hold Alt and click any underlined filename, URL, email, or hex color code, then drag it somewhere else. Drop a hex code on Krita and it triggers a flood fill. Drop it on a text editor and it pastes exactly as typed. It is the kind of feature that makes you wonder why terminal emulators never shipped with this out of the box.

The video editor gets the meat of this release. GSoC 2026 contributor Yash Bavadiya shipped three major effect widgets. The Curves filter now lets you adjust channels independently via tabs, complete with a GIMP-style ghost overlay and per-channel color overrides. The Gradient Map filter supports up to 32 color stops with an alpha checkerboard preview. The Speed Ramp widget expanded time remapping from four hardcoded easing types to all 13 MLT options. Timeline-wise, you can now copy a selection into a new sequence, audio tracks auto-generate as you drop clips, and tracks support configurable clip-type colors. The development effort is not cheap, but the result is genuinely useful for editors who actually rely on keyframes.

Okular merged its settings dialogs into a single pane, added triple-click line selection, and now auto-includes highlighted text in annotations. Akonadi started shedding deprecated C++ patterns, added Python bindings for the core and calendar modules, and fixed the long-standing race condition that crashed MariaDB during heavy PIM workloads. KDevelop gained a Find All References feature powered by clangd. The build system quietly migrated from kdesrc-build to kde-builder, and clang-tidy runs across 80 plus packages finally caught the leftover dead code.

KDE Gear 26.08 is not trying to reinvent the desktop. The official announcement spotlights five applications, though the real work is happening across the build system and backend stacks. The first net additions to the package set in years, paired with Kdenlive's long-overdue effect widgets and Akonadi's C++ modernization, make it one of the more substantive August releases we have seen.

Source tarballs are live. The full automated changelog sits here. Flathub and Snapcraft publishers have already started mirroring the release.