I can totally vouch for the "the developers care, answer questions, and actually accept PRs" aspect. I had some time last summer and decided to spend it on Kate

I can totally vouch for the "the developers care, answer questions, and actually accept PRs" aspect. I had some time last summer and decided to spend it on Kate (KDE advanced text editor) and the experience was great! I had never approached KDE or Qt development before, and never even done actual C++ development (just some small course exercises). The devs were great at coaching on their IRC channel and in the GitLab issues. The maintainer even made a blogspot at some point to explain my contributions: https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-features-august-2022/ https://kate-editor.org/post/2022/2022-08-24-kate-new-featur... Globally KDE is a fantastic experience, whether from a user's or a developer's perspective.