7 ms·

KDE onboarding is good now

180 points by todsacerdoti 10mo ago

shevy-java 10mo ago
I just can not take KDE seriously anymore ever since the donation-daemon waylaying users Robin Hood style via pop-ups (no, not even a single use of this is "acceptable", just as "acceptable ads" by Google were never acceptable to begin with; there is a reason Google went to destroy ublock origin lateron. The reason is simple: greed aka more money via ad pop ups. Why does the current KDE dev team think that pop-ups are acceptable? The python homepage also has a pop-in slider asking for money. I also think this is not acceptable. Why does my browser allow for this, unless ublock origin hero-blocks those vile spam attempts?). This has been a paradigm shift in KDE for the worse. I am also hardly the only one to notice this going downhill: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... It was a huge mistake to try to make KDE a political entity. Then again by deprecating the xorg-server, the current KDE team already showed that they don't quite care about the users. > It was around that same time when I made the “Contributing to KDE is easier than you think” series of blog posts. I think contributing to KDE has become much harder. Now you have people be involved in KDE whom you may not be able to relate or cooperate with. How could I ever cooperate with someone who thinks Robin Hood daemon-widgets coercing people for money is acceptable? To me this is not acceptable. I have absolutely nothing against donations, mind you - the issue has never been about donations. The issue has always been about what software should be about. Software should not be about putting pressure on people - it should be about enabling people. This is what Mr. Nate does not understand, but arguably the problem with KDE go much deeper than just Nate; all the "systemd-only folks" like David. It feels like some strange kind of people took over KDE. We also saw this some years ago with GNOME and GTK, though admittedly GNOME has always been more fedora/red-hat controlled, even way before systemd. (And here, the issue is not so much about GNOME, but that GTK is now factually a GNOMEy-toolkit only.) > Moving on, 2020 was pretty active. I started contributing to KDE web, while still being a Reddit mod Ah yes, the old conflict-of-interest. People can not be critical of #kde because these KDE devs will ruthlessly censor and ban people with another opinion. Been there, done that; though this is also heavily a problem specific to reddit in general, not just for KDE alone. > All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. Ok, patting yourself on the shoulder here. I don't know how well his contributions have been so I am not judging prematurely one way or the other, but in general I dislike self-promo. I believe the only ones able to judge that are unaffiliated people aka users of that documentation. In general I find the documentation in open source projects to be horrible, but perhaps KDE docs are better than average, and improvements to documentation (if they are real improvements) are always a good thing. But just get ebassi to talk about how epic the GTK documentation is - then you check it out, and it is beyond imagination how abysmal it is. So in general I find those self-promo statements hugely problematic. They don't match reality. The best documentation in general, oddly enough, I found when people wrote working examples with explanations; learning from these has almost always been better than looking at official documentation and noticing how so many things are missing or lacking or of low quality. A wonderful example can be seen with regard to python + GTK3 and GTK4. Barely anyone wrote GTK4-specific parts, neither documentation; yes I know laszka tutorials for GTK3 and now compare it to GTK4 while also using google search. You notice such a huge discrepancy here, almost as if nobody switched to GTK4 even years after. And the documentation is also different in quality (it has gotten better in the last 2 years, but it is very strange how external contributors do more work here than the GTK devs, but that's a question you can ask the GTK dev team since they are also responsible for any drop in adoption when they constantly willy-nilly deprecate everything - soon to get another deprecation cycle with GTK5. Oh boy.).
- LorenDB 10mo ago
  For context, KDE pushes one (1) donation notification per year and includes a button to opt out of future reminders. It's made a huge difference for them in donations.
  - seb1204 10mo ago
    This should be the top response. Thanks
- digiown 10mo ago
  This is such a comically uncharitable comment. > almost as if nobody switched to GTK4 even years after Debate all you want about libadwaita but that is gtk4 and people have written new apps with it
- garciansmith 10mo ago
  The donation pop-up has been explained in various places, such as here: https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/ https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i... I get not liking it (even if it happens only once a year), but saying that the only reason is "greed" is not only reductive but incorrect in my opinion. The idea that KDE has an income source separate from large corps and vendors but regular users, for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. (And the negative blog post you cite clearly involves some not-totally-public drama; I would be very hesitant to judge a project based off something like that, especially since other people have contradicted that person's view elsewhere.) I can't say I understand a lot of your other points (what does "Software should not be about putting pressure on people - it should be about enabling people" mean, and how does KDE put pressure on people?). And what do bad GTK docs have to do with KDE?
  - wolvoleo 10mo ago
    I don't like the donation popup because i already have a monthly donation running. They should provide donors with a code to turn this stuff off :(
chao- 10mo ago
I value and appreciate good documentation, and am continually disappointed at how overlooked it is in so many ecosystems. I am also a caveman who still uses Cinnamon on X11, but I use an old system to install and test other DEs once or twice a year, just to keep a sense of what exists out there. Over my 17 years running Linux, I think KDE is the major DE I have run the least, but I have to say: KDE has gotten really good. I am genuinely impressed. I am also watching COSMIC closely, but if I ever found a reason to leave Cinnamon, KDE is currently the first DE I would give a shot at being my daily driver. I really appreciate the effort people like this (and others) put into the foundations that enable something as impressive as a major desktop environment that feels cohesive and works well.
lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s the least worst of all the real options at the moment. Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things but I can’t even remember the last time Gnome crashed on me. The ghost of KDE4 still haunts me.
- fooker 10mo ago
  > Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
  - sho_hn 10mo ago
    (Plasma dev here.) I don't think it's something the user is "doing". A crash is never the user's fault. I will say it's atypical though. We measure session uptimes in months. There is probably a very specific cause that can be addressed or mitigated.
    - lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
      If it means anything, I always make sure to send in a report when it crashes. I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too.
      - small_scombrus 10mo ago
        Not to it works for me, but I'm on tumbleweed and can't say I'm even crashing once a week
        yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
        I'll do you one better: I daily-drive Kalpa (so effectively tumbleweed packages) and I can't recall it ever crashing.
kdefanqth8er 10mo ago
KDE is pretty good for developer documentation and help offered in their IRC chats as long as you’re diligent and provide detail of your problem and can get someone’s attention. What is a huge learning curve is C++ but even worse is Qt Qml (essentially object embedded javascript, capturing js warts and all of callback hell in single swoop) slapped on top of C++. Any serious app will need C++ and short comings of separating the ui layer to an uncontrollable compiled language engine just adds a huge hurdle. Now combine this nearly useless abstraction with attempting to dig into using a library like kdepim/akonadi and you’re entering a world of pain. The entire experience would not be so bad if I could write my app entirely in Cpp. Another hurdle is using kdesrc builder takes a very long time and is error prone if you don’t account for identifying which 47 of the dependencies require release/6.x branch or a framework/15.x.x branch, or whatever the branch naming convention is across applications and libraries.
- shmerl 10mo ago
  You could combine it with Rust instead?
  - kdefanqth8er 10mo ago
    You still can’t control the Qml code via Rust or whatever interop language you use. Swapping out C++ does not fix the issue. You must use QML to be considered for a modern KDE app.
    - shmerl 10mo ago
      OK, but not sure why QML is a bad thing.
      - kdefanqth8er 10mo ago
        You didn’t read my comment entirely or what? Perhaps try building a KDE app and see how far you get.
- fooker 10mo ago
shmerl 10mo ago
> LLM sloperators Good one, saving the term :)
lunar_rover 10mo ago
Always nice to see progress. I hope KDE can have more design people working on it. Things like toolbars are often overlooked despite their importance.
cromka 10mo ago
If only they switched to vcpkg from the abomination which Craft manager is... I used to do some dev work in KDE but after realizing I spent 70% of my time with that project on managing the Craft anti-pattern hell, I gave up. KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft, even if it's a properly licensed open source, is way better and even some GNU projects have no issue with it. Any reasonable suggestions to switch to vcpkg have been met with serious hostility, only because it's Microsoft's. Had they used the more common, recognized tools and processes, they'd see more developer contributions, especially the one-offs, vastly speeding up bugfixing. Because nothing makes you want NOT to fix that annoying bug like spending 3-4 hours setting up your dev environment in the first place. Oh, and do they have macOS runners available yet in their on-premises Gitlab instance?
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  Can you give an example of a mainstream project that uses vcpkg? I've never run across it anywhere.
- reactordev 10mo ago
  Who needs vcpkg when you already have a built in package manager? If it’s not in the distro, it’s not in the tree, then it’s built by another tool like genie or whatever. vcpkg was because windows had no such capability. It’s decent but it’s not the best.
  - diath 10mo ago
    Because distros usually ship only one specific version of a library. And different distros ship different versions of libraries. If you develop your software on Arch Linux targeting a specific version of an API of the library you're using, and another developer tries to build the same software on Debian, and another on Fedora, it's basically a gamble if your software is going to build or not. With vcpkg, you can pin libraries to their specific versions, to ensure that your project builds regardless of the environment.
    - 10mo ago
mschuster91 10mo ago
Money take: > If the user can’t get a functional project by the end of a tutorial, the tutorial failed. So that should be priority number one. I did an entire Akademy talk talking about how docs is part of the product, and broken docs effectively means a broken product. So, SO many projects fail at this! The NodeJS scene is particularly bad (made worse by the constant churn), but I was playing around with OpenStack right during their Python 2=>3 migration, or many moons ago I was involved in running a DC/OS cluster, and ffs many Docker images and helm charts suffer from the same issue. There's a reason many people went for Bitnami images and charts over the "official" images/charts... at least the Bitnami documentation actually made sense and worked.
utopiah 10mo ago
Poor title IMHO that leads to strange conversations here, should be "KDE contributor onboarding is good now"
bschmidt25003 10mo ago
[dead]
effnorwood 10mo ago
Titanic onboarding still bad
smoyer 10mo ago
I didn't realize that KDE was now considered to be "lightweight". I left after installing KDE 4 as my relatively new computer slowed to a crawl. This was a bit sad because I like the Qt widget system and was writing apps for my Sharp Zaurus.
JCattheATM 10mo ago
> so I selflessly fixed all custom flairs on new Reddit (I strongly dislike old Reddit to this day) I think the fact that a KDE dev dislikes a clean usable interface in favor of something inefficient, slow and noisy says a lot.
- The_President 10mo ago
  People who actually are selfless don't talk about their selflessness - they just do the job.

180 points by todsacerdoti 10mo ago

I just can not take KDE seriously anymore ever since the donation-daemon waylaying users Robin Hood style via pop-ups (no, not even a single use of this is "acceptable", just as "acceptable ads" by Google were never acceptable to begin with; there is a reason Google went to destroy ublock origin lateron. The reason is simple: greed aka more money via ad pop ups. Why does the current KDE dev team think that pop-ups are acceptable? The python homepage also has a pop-in slider asking for money. I also think this is not acceptable. Why does my browser allow for this, unless ublock origin hero-blocks those vile spam attempts?). This has been a paradigm shift in KDE for the worse. I am also hardly the only one to notice this going downhill: https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde/ https://jriddell.org/2025/09/14/adios-chicos-25-years-of-kde... It was a huge mistake to try to make KDE a political entity. Then again by deprecating the xorg-server, the current KDE team already showed that they don't quite care about the users. > It was around that same time when I made the “Contributing to KDE is easier than you think” series of blog posts. I think contributing to KDE has become much harder. Now you have people be involved in KDE whom you may not be able to relate or cooperate with. How could I ever cooperate with someone who thinks Robin Hood daemon-widgets coercing people for money is acceptable? To me this is not acceptable. I have absolutely nothing against donations, mind you - the issue has never been about donations. The issue has always been about what software should be about. Software should not be about putting pressure on people - it should be about enabling people. This is what Mr. Nate does not understand, but arguably the problem with KDE go much deeper than just Nate; all the "systemd-only folks" like David. It feels like some strange kind of people took over KDE. We also saw this some years ago with GNOME and GTK, though admittedly GNOME has always been more fedora/red-hat controlled, even way before systemd. (And here, the issue is not so much about GNOME, but that GTK is now factually a GNOMEy-toolkit only.) > Moving on, 2020 was pretty active. I started contributing to KDE web, while still being a Reddit mod Ah yes, the old conflict-of-interest. People can not be critical of #kde because these KDE devs will ruthlessly censor and ban people with another opinion. Been there, done that; though this is also heavily a problem specific to reddit in general, not just for KDE alone. > All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. Ok, patting yourself on the shoulder here. I don't know how well his contributions have been so I am not judging prematurely one way or the other, but in general I dislike self-promo. I believe the only ones able to judge that are unaffiliated people aka users of that documentation. In general I find the documentation in open source projects to be horrible, but perhaps KDE docs are better than average, and improvements to documentation (if they are real improvements) are always a good thing. But just get ebassi to talk about how epic the GTK documentation is - then you check it out, and it is beyond imagination how abysmal it is. So in general I find those self-promo statements hugely problematic. They don't match reality. The best documentation in general, oddly enough, I found when people wrote working examples with explanations; learning from these has almost always been better than looking at official documentation and noticing how so many things are missing or lacking or of low quality. A wonderful example can be seen with regard to python + GTK3 and GTK4. Barely anyone wrote GTK4-specific parts, neither documentation; yes I know laszka tutorials for GTK3 and now compare it to GTK4 while also using google search. You notice such a huge discrepancy here, almost as if nobody switched to GTK4 even years after. And the documentation is also different in quality (it has gotten better in the last 2 years, but it is very strange how external contributors do more work here than the GTK devs, but that's a question you can ask the GTK dev team since they are also responsible for any drop in adoption when they constantly willy-nilly deprecate everything - soon to get another deprecation cycle with GTK5. Oh boy.).

LorenDB 10mo ago
For context, KDE pushes one (1) donation notification per year and includes a button to opt out of future reminders. It's made a huge difference for them in donations.
- seb1204 10mo ago
  This should be the top response. Thanks
digiown 10mo ago
This is such a comically uncharitable comment. > almost as if nobody switched to GTK4 even years after Debate all you want about libadwaita but that is gtk4 and people have written new apps with it
garciansmith 10mo ago
The donation pop-up has been explained in various places, such as here: https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-in-plasma/ https://pointieststick.com/2024/08/28/asking-for-donations-i... I get not liking it (even if it happens only once a year), but saying that the only reason is "greed" is not only reductive but incorrect in my opinion. The idea that KDE has an income source separate from large corps and vendors but regular users, for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. (And the negative blog post you cite clearly involves some not-totally-public drama; I would be very hesitant to judge a project based off something like that, especially since other people have contradicted that person's view elsewhere.) I can't say I understand a lot of your other points (what does "Software should not be about putting pressure on people - it should be about enabling people" mean, and how does KDE put pressure on people?). And what do bad GTK docs have to do with KDE?
- wolvoleo 10mo ago
  I don't like the donation popup because i already have a monthly donation running. They should provide donors with a code to turn this stuff off :(

chao- 10mo ago

I value and appreciate good documentation, and am continually disappointed at how overlooked it is in so many ecosystems. I am also a caveman who still uses Cinnamon on X11, but I use an old system to install and test other DEs once or twice a year, just to keep a sense of what exists out there. Over my 17 years running Linux, I think KDE is the major DE I have run the least, but I have to say: KDE has gotten really good. I am genuinely impressed. I am also watching COSMIC closely, but if I ever found a reason to leave Cinnamon, KDE is currently the first DE I would give a shot at being my daily driver. I really appreciate the effort people like this (and others) put into the foundations that enable something as impressive as a major desktop environment that feels cohesive and works well.

lifetimerubyist 10mo ago

KDE has come a long way but I still find it just too buggy to be usable as a daily driver…which is unfortunate because I don’t really like Gnome either but it’s the least worst of all the real options at the moment. Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things but I can’t even remember the last time Gnome crashed on me. The ghost of KDE4 still haunts me.

fooker 10mo ago
> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
- sho_hn 10mo ago
  (Plasma dev here.) I don't think it's something the user is "doing". A crash is never the user's fault. I will say it's atypical though. We measure session uptimes in months. There is probably a very specific cause that can be addressed or mitigated.
  - lifetimerubyist 10mo ago
    If it means anything, I always make sure to send in a report when it crashes. I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too.
    - small_scombrus 10mo ago
      Not to it works for me, but I'm on tumbleweed and can't say I'm even crashing once a week
      - yjftsjthsd-h 10mo ago
        I'll do you one better: I daily-drive Kalpa (so effectively tumbleweed packages) and I can't recall it ever crashing.

kdefanqth8er 10mo ago

KDE is pretty good for developer documentation and help offered in their IRC chats as long as you’re diligent and provide detail of your problem and can get someone’s attention. What is a huge learning curve is C++ but even worse is Qt Qml (essentially object embedded javascript, capturing js warts and all of callback hell in single swoop) slapped on top of C++. Any serious app will need C++ and short comings of separating the ui layer to an uncontrollable compiled language engine just adds a huge hurdle. Now combine this nearly useless abstraction with attempting to dig into using a library like kdepim/akonadi and you’re entering a world of pain. The entire experience would not be so bad if I could write my app entirely in Cpp. Another hurdle is using kdesrc builder takes a very long time and is error prone if you don’t account for identifying which 47 of the dependencies require release/6.x branch or a framework/15.x.x branch, or whatever the branch naming convention is across applications and libraries.

shmerl 10mo ago
You could combine it with Rust instead?
- kdefanqth8er 10mo ago
  You still can’t control the Qml code via Rust or whatever interop language you use. Swapping out C++ does not fix the issue. You must use QML to be considered for a modern KDE app.
  - shmerl 10mo ago
    OK, but not sure why QML is a bad thing.
    - kdefanqth8er 10mo ago
      You didn’t read my comment entirely or what? Perhaps try building a KDE app and see how far you get.
fooker 10mo ago

shmerl 10mo ago

> LLM sloperators Good one, saving the term :)

lunar_rover 10mo ago

Always nice to see progress. I hope KDE can have more design people working on it. Things like toolbars are often overlooked despite their importance.

cromka 10mo ago

If only they switched to vcpkg from the abomination which Craft manager is... I used to do some dev work in KDE but after realizing I spent 70% of my time with that project on managing the Craft anti-pattern hell, I gave up. KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft, even if it's a properly licensed open source, is way better and even some GNU projects have no issue with it. Any reasonable suggestions to switch to vcpkg have been met with serious hostility, only because it's Microsoft's. Had they used the more common, recognized tools and processes, they'd see more developer contributions, especially the one-offs, vastly speeding up bugfixing. Because nothing makes you want NOT to fix that annoying bug like spending 3-4 hours setting up your dev environment in the first place. Oh, and do they have macOS runners available yet in their on-premises Gitlab instance?

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
Can you give an example of a mainstream project that uses vcpkg? I've never run across it anywhere.
reactordev 10mo ago
Who needs vcpkg when you already have a built in package manager? If it’s not in the distro, it’s not in the tree, then it’s built by another tool like genie or whatever. vcpkg was because windows had no such capability. It’s decent but it’s not the best.
- diath 10mo ago
  Because distros usually ship only one specific version of a library. And different distros ship different versions of libraries. If you develop your software on Arch Linux targeting a specific version of an API of the library you're using, and another developer tries to build the same software on Debian, and another on Fedora, it's basically a gamble if your software is going to build or not. With vcpkg, you can pin libraries to their specific versions, to ensure that your project builds regardless of the environment.
  - 10mo ago

mschuster91 10mo ago

Money take: > If the user can’t get a functional project by the end of a tutorial, the tutorial failed. So that should be priority number one. I did an entire Akademy talk talking about how docs is part of the product, and broken docs effectively means a broken product. So, SO many projects fail at this! The NodeJS scene is particularly bad (made worse by the constant churn), but I was playing around with OpenStack right during their Python 2=>3 migration, or many moons ago I was involved in running a DC/OS cluster, and ffs many Docker images and helm charts suffer from the same issue. There's a reason many people went for Bitnami images and charts over the "official" images/charts... at least the Bitnami documentation actually made sense and worked.

utopiah 10mo ago

Poor title IMHO that leads to strange conversations here, should be "KDE contributor onboarding is good now"

bschmidt25003 10mo ago

[dead]

effnorwood 10mo ago

Titanic onboarding still bad

smoyer 10mo ago

I didn't realize that KDE was now considered to be "lightweight". I left after installing KDE 4 as my relatively new computer slowed to a crawl. This was a bit sad because I like the Qt widget system and was writing apps for my Sharp Zaurus.

JCattheATM 10mo ago

> so I selflessly fixed all custom flairs on new Reddit (I strongly dislike old Reddit to this day) I think the fact that a KDE dev dislikes a clean usable interface in favor of something inefficient, slow and noisy says a lot.

The_President 10mo ago
People who actually are selfless don't talk about their selflessness - they just do the job.