KDE & Google Summer of Code 2026

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a training/mentorship program that allows new contributors to open source to work on projects for between 175 to 350 hours under the guidance of experienced mentors.

KDE will mentor twelve projects in this year's Google Summer of Code.

Marknote

Marknote is a rich text notebooks organizer.

Prayag Jain aims to introduce a robust and high performance block editor and a proper markdown parser to Marknote under the guidance of Carl Schwan and Mathis Brüchert.

digiKam

digiKam is an advanced open-source digital photo management application which provides a comprehensive set of tools for importing, managing, editing, and sharing photos and raw files.

Srirupa Datta, who already successfully completed a GSoC in 2023 working on Krita, will this year work on digiKam to interface the database search engine to an AI-based LLM. This project is mentored by Gilles Caulier, Michael Miller and Maik Qualmann.

Drawy

Drawy is a recent addition to KDE applications! It is an infinite whiteboard tool useful for brainstorming.

Abdelhadi Wael will improve the text items by implementing rich text handling and other improvements. This project is mentored by Laurent Montel.

Kdenlive

Kdenlive is KDE's video editor.

Yash Bavadiya will work on improving the curves, gradients and time remapping effects. This project is mentored by Jean-Baptiste Mardelle.

Kirigami

Shubham Shinde, a successful participant in last year's GSoC working on Merkuro, will work this year again under the guidance of Carl Schwan to improve the Kirigami framework and the developer experience.

Okular

Okular is KDE's universal document viewer.

Ojas Maheshwari will work under the guidance of Albert Astals Cid to implement font subsetting when saving PDF files in Poppler (the PDF rendering library used by Okular).

Lokalize

Lokalize is the localization tool for KDE software and other free and open source software.

Navya Sai Sadu will improve Lokalize by redesigning the translation memory tab to help with the translators' experience. This project is mentored by Finley Watson.

KStars

KStars is the KDE astronomy software providing an accurate graphical simulation of the night sky, from any location on Earth, at any date and time.

Pavan Kumar S G will add a new AI powered guiding assistant for Ekos under the guidance of Jasem Mutlaq.

KeepSecret

KeepSecret is a password manager for viewing, editing, creating, or deleting passwords.

Roshani Kumari will work on improving the user experience and adding new features such as import/export of passwords, adding a built-in password generator, and much more. This work is mentored by Marco Martin.

Mentorship Portal

Ansh Singhal will work on creating a new join.kde.org website which aims to improve the onboarding experience by centralizing the different entry points the KDE community has. This project is mentored by Anish Tak, who was a successful mentee last year on the same topic!

Plasma Mobile

Tushar Gupta will rework some networking modules (KCM) to make them more mobile friendly. This work will be mentored by Carl Schwan and Devin Lin.

Mankala

Mankala is a two-player board game containing multiple variants.

Sayandeep Dutta will add a new interface to create tournaments for the Mankala game. This project is mentored by Benson Muite and Srisharan V. S. who completed a successful GSoC contributor on the same project last year.

Article contributed by Johnny Jazeix under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license.