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.
> QML is absolutely not JavaScript. It's a markup language to describe user interfaces, spiced with JS for certain interactions. All heavy lifting behind the scenes is done in C++ - the QML runtime as well as the application logic and data models.
How's QML useless? It's incredible language for UI. I described how I developed my Block Editor (like Notion) in Qt QML and C++: https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
When you say "cannot be written", what do you mean?
You are free to write one, and it works. I have a few internal tools that do not touch QML or the XML ui system, and it still builds just fine with then latest libraries on Arch.
Of course an upstream KDE application might not be written that way, if that's what you are complaining about.
Qt Designer .ui files I guess, these are used to generate C++ (QWidgets) code that isn't substantially worse than hand-written. There is also KXmlGui, but that is a rather particular thing IIRC mostly about merging menus from plugins and about permissions.
Edit: just browsed some of the docs for current KDE libs and I see a lot of QWidget-derived custom widgets in there. I don't see how this stuff couldn't be used in a pure C++ codebase.
What does this even mean? This is not 1980 or whatever, even a device the price of a coffee (RPi Zero ~$10) can handle a LOT, like an entire OS. I'm not saying resources don't matter but for most people doing normal computing (so not weather simulation, 4K video editing of 4hrs long content, 3D modelling of high res models...) pretty much anything in any language is equivalent.
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.
Outside of deeply integrated KDE apps, I'm shipping QML + Python apps and IMO it's a nice experience.
It's not at all like you're writing JS apps a la React or jQuery, JS syntax is used for expression eval at minimum, but you don't have to use it beyond some single handlers, formatting/convenience functions, or whatever.
I'm looking at a smaller app, with 5k lines of QML and 10k of Python. It's got 250 lines of JS according to tokei, and quickly poking at the QML for JS leads to an additional 200 lines, so let's double to 500 lines. That's like 3% JavaScript.
That said, modern KDE is centered around QML, UI frameworks like Kirigami are built using it, but it lacks comprehensive QML, Python, Rust, etc bindings for KDE frameworks.
At minimum, you will at some point be reading C++ docs and to use your bindings. If you get in the weeds with it, you will be writing your own bindings or wrappers eventually. If you want to avoid that, you will likely be writing C++ for more complicated applications.
It's complex, but I figured with QML Plasmoids they were going for a QML-first approach to future development, but that's been walked back in favor of compiled Plasmoids in recent releases.
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?
> KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft [...] only because it's Microsoft's.
And I thank them for it. Microsoft has zero regards for the FOSS community, and forcing people to use FOSS tooling made by the FOSS ecosystem to develop FOSS makes a lot of sense to me, at the very least for the dog-feeding argument, but also because it wouldn't make sense to use tooling from a for-profit company that tried time and time to eradicate your community. I understand the avoidance by developers who been around the space for two decades or more, because we remember what Microsoft has done.
Sometimes you have to bite the sour apple in order to actually stand for your ideals, and this particular choice seems like a no brainer, at least to me.
As I explained in response to other commenters, it wouldn't have to be vcpkg. Maybe I didn't articulate it best, but the inherent issue is not just Anti Microsoft stance, but more of not-invented-here paradigm. They go against the grain too much and it tangibly makes things worse for devs and users. They could have gone with other package manager instead on insisting on Craft. They hardly ever have any good arguments for it, feels like sunken cost fallacy all over.
> 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.
For sure those are important but what actually drivers a project are accepted COMMITS and GOVERNANCE. If Microsoft puts the right license sure anybody can fork it if somehow the project goes in the wrong direction... but if most contributors are Microsoft employees doing those commits, or refusing others, what will happen? The license or how "better" the project is won't help. If KDE does not trust Microsoft (one of the largest corporations who is selling proprietary software since its inception and still do this day) then even if the "better" solution is from Microsoft then strategically KDE is right to avoid it.
To put this in perspective: KDE is in this situation Qt, they were lucky to negotiate a good contract to keep Qt licensed to KDE favorably, and most importantly, open source on their terms.
Without that deal, KDE would be at Qt's behest as they changed licensing, pricing, etc over time.
Getting into that situation again with Microsoft as a non-profit would be foolish.
You're not wrong, but even then forking a well established, well designed and not anti-pattern-ridden project with a massive library of build recipes for your own purposes is still better than maintaining some bespoke code used by two projects that forces developers to go mad, give up and quit.
My point was maybe not articulated well: it wouldn't have to be vcpkg. Could be Conan or something else, as long as it's not making you waste your free time and actually help producing reproducible builds and distributables on each platform supported (Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows).
I swear I've been through three or four cycles of this now, at least. Microsoft woos some noobs, who wonder why everybody is acting on edge around Microsoft. Become dependent on Microsoft, then get burned. Then new noobs come into the scene and the cycle repeats.
Did Microsoft woo some noobs with GitHub? How come everyone is fear mongering like you do yet somehow fine with GitHub? You have plenty of GNU projects hosted there. That's my point, some things just need to be accepted and we need to move on. Reinventing the wheel like KDE does massively harms the progress.
You're grasping onto outdated wiki information. All development, including PRs, the release builds (.github folder workflows in repo) and many bug reports are on GitHub. You click Browse Source Code on main website and it takes you to GitHub. You click contribute and wiki lists GitHub for PRs. Seriously, what more do you need?
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.
KDE releases all their apps on Windows and amcOS. In fact most of their users are in Windows. Krita makes most money off of Windows Store.
This is why nobody can rely on distro managers. Not to mention FlatPaks and so on.
And have you ever had to work on different version of libraries for development and LTS branches of software? Because it doesn't sound like you had?
Lastly, KDE maintains their own Qt fork for packaging purposes.
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.
Then when distros go to actually package your software for users it'll break. I'm not sure moving the pain downstream is worse, but I'm also not sure it's better.
I mean that's C++ development in general.. even among package managers you had to deal with conan, vcpkg, hunter, and a dozen more ..
And then add to that the complexities of build systems and cross platform, cross complication headaches...
That being said, for most of kde end user applications, fixing quick little bugs is usually just installing the devel packages from your distro, git cloning the application, a couple of compile debug cycles and then sending the patch on their gitlab..
It's kind of a two way street there though.. Linux is also very indifferent to applications just statically compiling and linking their dependencies.. On top of that, Each distro has it's own story of what licences they'd permit for libraries in their repositories..
That's why a lot of open source c++ devs / applications had to publish build instructions for half a dozen Linux distros.
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.
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.
I don't know man, i have a bunch of computers, the oldest one is a 2012 macbook, then various laptops from different brands (hp, dell, lenovo), an intel nuc from 2016 and a minisforum using a ryzen 7 that i bought just before the ram craze (phew)
all these machines run debian trixie with KDE and i think i only ever seen glitches once, or twice in only one of them. I think the macbook. Granted, all devices run from the internal GPU, intel or AMD.
The only time i saw kde "krash" a lot was when i was demoing arch in a VM, to see what the fuss is all about that distro. But i don't know if it was virtualbox, or arch.
This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.
I get regular "crashes" on the newest Fedora KDE on a new Thinkpad X1 (from this year). I say "crashes" because it’s not the window manager or Wayland session crashing but some non-essential component of the Plasma desktop (don’t remember which one right now), so it doesn’t affect my work at all. From my point of view it basically just causes a crash report popup every 1-2 hours and says whatever service crashed has been restarted.
It’s normal if you use the Nvidia proprietary driver. Every notification leaks one fd, so if you get a lot of notifications it’ll segfault once or twice per day.
It is normal for KDE. KDE is mockingly called KrashDE in Linux circles for a reason. We're only 4 days into 2026 and there's already dozens of crash-related bugs filled in the bug tracker: https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_status=UNCONFIRMED&bug_...
Yes, KDE aggressively caches and indexes things by default whenever you have free RAM unless you disable this behavior in multiple places in multiple applications. For example, in Okular you can tune it to choose how much of a pdf you want to keep rendered in memory, if you have a tonne of memory, this makes it the smoothest pdf viewer I have ever used.
It has become reasonable graceful in giving it back when you you need it nowadays.
The Linux kernel does this too, yet it does not crash like KDE. At any given moment, most of your free RAM is used to cache stuff by the kernel, unless you've recently rebooted.
No, what the Linux kernel does instead is randomly kill user processes :)
It's kinda infamous for that, and had held up Linux adoption for a decade or so.
But you sort of missed the point, I think. The comment chain was about speculating why KDE could possibly crash if there was faulty RAM while other software would be fine. And the kernel absolutely crashes when there's faulty ram.
I'm guessing this doesn't capture manual restarts? I have the same experience as the commenter below: Plasma requires a restart a few times per day for me, as the panels disappear and one monitor's (of two) desktop goes black - usually after wake from sleep. This occurs on both machines that I run it on (only common component is Radeon graphics).
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
Reminds me of when people praise the efficiency of their car: "It's great, $30 lasts me all month!". Tells you nothing about the car and hardly anything about the person using it.
I have crashes on a monthly basis but I'm also pushing it pretty hard with 4 Activities, 5 Workspaces, and 3 Screens. That's 60 desktops for it to manage (granted, only about 10-15 in total actually have anything on them) with my tiling window management scripts on top of that. Plasmashell and Kwin take up 20% of my CPU on average which is unfortunate but that's the cost for my setup I guess.
I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces.
Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
Activities function best as "context domains" (the classic split is "Personal" and "Work") while preserving your existing Workspaces.
I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling).
Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
> Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them.
> Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
I missed this one. Yeah, I have the same problem and couldn't fix it but I use a tiling window manager so I didn't need that space for anything else. I've come to appreciate the overview actually and you can drag-and-drop windows between workspaces without having to jump around.
I think the best way to describe Activities is that they filter "what" is available whereas Workspaces filter/select "where" it goes. Spotify automatically chooses my "Background Tasks" Workspace when it opens and it is available on all my Activities. My task manager always shows up in my main workspace but not in my "Gaming" activity. It's a really powerful feature once you understand how it works (eg. notifications from other activities can be muted; separate file and folder views; email accounts hidden in Thunderbird, etc.)
Edit: You could probably get total isolation by using the other TTYs! A fully separate user and different desktop environment even. You just need to use Alt+F{1..9} to cycle between them. For a specialized workstation this could actually be a clean way to handle it.
I have one for general stuff, one for when I'm working, mainly to minimise distractions, and one to do 3D work.
Each activity has 9 virtual desktops because that's what I use in the main profile.
And yeah Firefox is a bit different, however you can select an option to get the regular KDE menu bar back! I've done this.
And I configured my workspaces in a 3x3 grid, that way it doesn't take so much space (and also it's much easier to navigate them than 9 in a row!). This grid function is really one of the big things that annoys me in macOS (it used to have grids but they killed it when mission control came out), windows and Gnome. I need a grid, especially because I switch with hardware keys.
Or they are just simply not on the happy path. For example, my laptop has been running KDE just fine for years, but my attempts to switch to Linux on my desktop today have turned into a project, as plasma, steam[1], discord, and sometimes kde_powerdevil[2] are crashing every time my monitors turn off.
Linux as an OS is so fragmented that the number of paths are basically innumerable. Many of them are "happy" but they can be hard to find and also change from year to year.
I have a machine that has run Debian 11 and 12 with no issues but 13 hung before launching the UI. Fixable from the terminal but still, super un-happy path!
KDE on SUSE vs on Debian vs on Kinoite and with various sound demons, file systems, file browsers etc will surely differ in ways that are beyond the direct control of the kDE devs too.
Editing text files (code), executing simple programs in the terminal (work is done on my Mac Studio, not my personal desktop), browsing the web with Firefox and playing the odd Steam game. I use the stock Opensuse Tumbleweed panel setup and don’t even tweak the animation speeds or configured effects.
So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong.
My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled.
Might be a driver issue, too. I remember Vega as a sort of short-lived in-between generation with especially many driver problems.
Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active.
There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.)
And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too.
The bootable, free memtest86+ is excellent for memory testing (not to be confused with Passmark's memtest86).
I concur on the driver issues. To my understanding the Vega driver situation is actually better on Linux than on Windows (or at least it used to be), but it's never been well-supported hardware.
Vega GPUs should be very well supported, especially for basic desktop stuff, since Ryzen mobile CPUs shipped with Vega cores for many years after the dedicated GPU line.
As an experiment, try a fresh VM of your distro and see if it still crashes.
Rolling distros are not an exact science. They can can get stuck in weird inconsistent states because of some local modification or stagnant dotfile or configuration that is not forward compatible. That sort of thing is more likely with complex software, it's usually not a bug unless upgradeability is a seriously supported thing.
Hmh, I'm running Tumbleweed on a Ryzen 5 7600 and an AMD Rx 7800. Like you I don't fiddle with the defaults and this is my gaming rig (I'm working on starting just into Steam). I just have default KDE Plasma to launch Steam and play my games, I do my work on a Debian Trixie laptop. I have set up TW two years ago and only DUP-ed it since then. Actually, it is more stable then the Debian machine :o
I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM?
Literally today I dragged a file to the trash widget on a panel and it crashed the entire WM. If you don’t have at least one story about this after using KDE for a year then you’re lying
Oh for me it happens automatically. And my OS doesn't have systemd so that wouldn't work for me. But in this case it's not needed to restart something manually anyway.
I experience similar windows crashes regularly on my old asus laptop. It’s likely from the asus drivers. The screen gets black for a fraction of a second and the explorer.exe restarts.
I love XFCE but I've had a hell of a time getting it to work nicely with multiple high DPI monitors. I finally gave up and went to KDE which.. just works.
Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.
Yep. Unless you have really good eyes, XFCE is unusable on a 4K screen. On the same screen, KDE at 150-175% is glorious at providing both more real estate than 1920x1080 while being crispy.
This is my experience too. Tried again just this week. Zero issues with Gnome or Cosmic (so likely not hardware issues), but an-least-daily Plasma crashes.
FWIW Plasma 6 is running stable and fast for me (via vanilla Kubuntu on a somewhat recent Intel Meteor Lake laptop), best experience I had with desktop Linux all the way back to the late 90s, and especially on a laptop (the touchpad finally doesn't suck anymore compared to Macs). It's also the first time where I think the overall experience is vastly better than running Windows on the same machine.
Yeah, I've been running Plasma as a daily driver (and without a fallback OS) for around 8 years now without this kind of trouble. I routinely run for months between reboots, and when a reboot happens, it's usually because I did a dumb.
I helped someone else earlier today with an unstable Linux laptop, it turned out there was an amd/gpu/drm issue that was crashing Wayland in the background.
My first bet would be that you've got something similar going on -- a hardware or device driver problem. You've crawled through journalctl and the like, I assume?
????
I have using KDE plasma as mainly driver for years.
I remember having big issues in the KDE 4 era.
KDE 5 ran smooth and KDE 6 + Wayland it's amazing. I don't had any issues or problems like you described.
> 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.
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:
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.).
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?
I personally like the popup. At once a year it is far from intrusive and it gave me the nudge I needed to finally contribute to them this year. KDE is great and deserved my support.
I should have looked for it myself but every time it happened I was busy doing something else and then I forgot (yay ADHD).
And thanks to you for making KDE. I really don't like this time where computers are becoming more locked-in and opinionated (e.g. I can't configure it the way I want). KDE is a breath of fresh air. I have extensively reconfigured it and I haven't even needed to use a single plugin. So I've donated for years now because I really appreciate the work.
Even more specifically, the full menu chain is System Settings -> Notifications -> Application Settings, which then includes a search bar where you can enter "Donation" or "Request for Donation". (Mentioning it since entering that term in the main search bar doesn't bring up any results)
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.
Quality open source work does not materialize out of existence for free. If you don't want to drive your project through a corporate sponsor that will want to steer it, this is the only way.
And as you can see in the post, this is not just code, it's also people being hired to do docs, planning, conferences, community, design work, web dev, things that are rarely done well in open source because they are hard and people can get paid for them elsewhere.
It's not going anywhere without funding, unless you believe early KDE 5 circus UI is somehow the best thing ever. And as the others mentioned the nagging popup is once per year.
Both GNOME and KDE are at the state where unmaintained core apps exist the last time I checked. KDE basing itself on Qt offloaded the largest chunk of behind the scenes development from them which is their biggest advantage compared to GNOME.
Wish Pantheon can have more attention, but I digress.
From the outside, as a user, this last year has been incredible for KDE Plasma, in terms of new features and stability. So whatever they're doing internally is absolutely working from my perspective.
I've not used KDE for a very long time, are you saying that they now have shareware-style nag dialogs in KDE itself? Or is this just something on the KDE website, like Wikipedia does?
It's a desktop notification that fires once toward the end of the year. It can be disabled by the user, and distributions can also pre-disable it (some do).
> Or is this just something on the KDE website, like Wikipedia does?
In Wikipedia's case the website is the product, so I'd say it's about the same.
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.
> QML is absolutely not JavaScript. It's a markup language to describe user interfaces, spiced with JS for certain interactions. All heavy lifting behind the scenes is done in C++ - the QML runtime as well as the application logic and data models.
How's QML useless? It's incredible language for UI. I described how I developed my Block Editor (like Notion) in Qt QML and C++: https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor
You can.
Qt + KDE libraries are really nice.
You used to be able to with QtWidgets but a modern KDE app cannot be written with QtWidgets. And QtWidgets are in life support.
You are free to write one, and it works. I have a few internal tools that do not touch QML or the XML ui system, and it still builds just fine with then latest libraries on Arch.
Of course an upstream KDE application might not be written that way, if that's what you are complaining about.
Edit: just browsed some of the docs for current KDE libs and I see a lot of QWidget-derived custom widgets in there. I don't see how this stuff couldn't be used in a pure C++ codebase.
What I wish is that I could write KDE stuff using Python (PyQt or PySide).
What does this even mean? This is not 1980 or whatever, even a device the price of a coffee (RPi Zero ~$10) can handle a LOT, like an entire OS. I'm not saying resources don't matter but for most people doing normal computing (so not weather simulation, 4K video editing of 4hrs long content, 3D modelling of high res models...) pretty much anything in any language is equivalent.
Perhaps try building a KDE app and see how far you get.
It's not at all like you're writing JS apps a la React or jQuery, JS syntax is used for expression eval at minimum, but you don't have to use it beyond some single handlers, formatting/convenience functions, or whatever.
I'm looking at a smaller app, with 5k lines of QML and 10k of Python. It's got 250 lines of JS according to tokei, and quickly poking at the QML for JS leads to an additional 200 lines, so let's double to 500 lines. That's like 3% JavaScript.
That said, modern KDE is centered around QML, UI frameworks like Kirigami are built using it, but it lacks comprehensive QML, Python, Rust, etc bindings for KDE frameworks.
At minimum, you will at some point be reading C++ docs and to use your bindings. If you get in the weeds with it, you will be writing your own bindings or wrappers eventually. If you want to avoid that, you will likely be writing C++ for more complicated applications.
It's complex, but I figured with QML Plasmoids they were going for a QML-first approach to future development, but that's been walked back in favor of compiled Plasmoids in recent releases.
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?
And I thank them for it. Microsoft has zero regards for the FOSS community, and forcing people to use FOSS tooling made by the FOSS ecosystem to develop FOSS makes a lot of sense to me, at the very least for the dog-feeding argument, but also because it wouldn't make sense to use tooling from a for-profit company that tried time and time to eradicate your community. I understand the avoidance by developers who been around the space for two decades or more, because we remember what Microsoft has done.
Sometimes you have to bite the sour apple in order to actually stand for your ideals, and this particular choice seems like a no brainer, at least to me.
For sure those are important but what actually drivers a project are accepted COMMITS and GOVERNANCE. If Microsoft puts the right license sure anybody can fork it if somehow the project goes in the wrong direction... but if most contributors are Microsoft employees doing those commits, or refusing others, what will happen? The license or how "better" the project is won't help. If KDE does not trust Microsoft (one of the largest corporations who is selling proprietary software since its inception and still do this day) then even if the "better" solution is from Microsoft then strategically KDE is right to avoid it.
Without that deal, KDE would be at Qt's behest as they changed licensing, pricing, etc over time.
Getting into that situation again with Microsoft as a non-profit would be foolish.
My point was maybe not articulated well: it wouldn't have to be vcpkg. Could be Conan or something else, as long as it's not making you waste your free time and actually help producing reproducible builds and distributables on each platform supported (Linux, BSD, Mac, Windows).
People do regularly object to hosting things on GitHub, doubly so for community FOSS projects.
> You have plenty of GNU projects hosted there.
What GNU projects are hosted on GitHub? (Hosted, not mirrored)
> code.gnucash.org is the server that hosts the canonical git repository
and
> Our public repositories are mirrored on GitHub.
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.
And have you ever had to work on different version of libraries for development and LTS branches of software? Because it doesn't sound like you had? Lastly, KDE maintains their own Qt fork for packaging purposes.
This is why nobody can rely on distro managers. Not to mention FlatPaks and so on.
Lastly, KDE maintains their own Qt fork for packaging purposes.
And then add to that the complexities of build systems and cross platform, cross complication headaches...
That being said, for most of kde end user applications, fixing quick little bugs is usually just installing the devel packages from your distro, git cloning the application, a couple of compile debug cycles and then sending the patch on their gitlab..
That's why a lot of open source c++ devs / applications had to publish build instructions for half a dozen Linux distros.
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.
I hope KDE can have more design people working on it. Things like toolbars are often overlooked despite their importance.
all these machines run debian trixie with KDE and i think i only ever seen glitches once, or twice in only one of them. I think the macbook. Granted, all devices run from the internal GPU, intel or AMD.
The only time i saw kde "krash" a lot was when i was demoing arch in a VM, to see what the fuss is all about that distro. But i don't know if it was virtualbox, or arch.
This is not normal. Do a RAM test to see if you have a hardware issue.
This was apparently fixed in version 590 of the driver which was released only recently: https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/fd-leak-with-explicit-...
I've been running plasma for over a year, there was like 1 crash during the 5->6 transition, it's otherwise been perfectly fine.
Even things as basic as handling the wallpapers was crashing users' desktops up until recently: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Plasma-6.5-Crash-Fixes
Literally any piece of complex software. See LLVM for example. LLVM is the backbone of most compiler work in the world right now.
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/issues
Does KDE use RAM differently than every other software?
It has become reasonable graceful in giving it back when you you need it nowadays.
It's kinda infamous for that, and had held up Linux adoption for a decade or so.
But you sort of missed the point, I think. The comment chain was about speculating why KDE could possibly crash if there was faulty RAM while other software would be fine. And the kernel absolutely crashes when there's faulty ram.
You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
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.
That said I'm running a shader as my desktop wall paper on Nvidia drivers so I don't feel like any of my complaints are all that justified. :D
I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too.
That said, it's a single command and not a big deal, and it's a great DE, so thanks for your work.
(rust analyzer and java eat all my ram)
I have crashes on a monthly basis but I'm also pushing it pretty hard with 4 Activities, 5 Workspaces, and 3 Screens. That's 60 desktops for it to manage (granted, only about 10-15 in total actually have anything on them) with my tiling window management scripts on top of that. Plasmashell and Kwin take up 20% of my CPU on average which is unfortunate but that's the cost for my setup I guess.
I used to daily drive KDE up until shortly after the 4 switch, when I moved to Mac. I've moved back to Linux starting in 2018 but went with i3. I installed KDE around Christmas to try it, and while I'm mostly impressed with the general polish (except that firefox doesn't react the same way as other windows to clicking on the frame), I have a hard time figuring out what activities are and how they're different from multiple workspaces.
Speaking of workspaces, is there no way to only have it show a small rectangle per space in the taskbar instead of a big wide one (I'm using multiple screens)? That's just a useless waste of space.
I use workspaces to group apps/tasks/programs functionally (eg. "Active Projects", background stuff like music or a long running terminal task, no tiling).
Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.
Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them.
I missed this one. Yeah, I have the same problem and couldn't fix it but I use a tiling window manager so I didn't need that space for anything else. I've come to appreciate the overview actually and you can drag-and-drop windows between workspaces without having to jump around.
I think the best way to describe Activities is that they filter "what" is available whereas Workspaces filter/select "where" it goes. Spotify automatically chooses my "Background Tasks" Workspace when it opens and it is available on all my Activities. My task manager always shows up in my main workspace but not in my "Gaming" activity. It's a really powerful feature once you understand how it works (eg. notifications from other activities can be muted; separate file and folder views; email accounts hidden in Thunderbird, etc.)
Edit: You could probably get total isolation by using the other TTYs! A fully separate user and different desktop environment even. You just need to use Alt+F{1..9} to cycle between them. For a specialized workstation this could actually be a clean way to handle it.
Each activity has 9 virtual desktops because that's what I use in the main profile.
And yeah Firefox is a bit different, however you can select an option to get the regular KDE menu bar back! I've done this.
And I configured my workspaces in a 3x3 grid, that way it doesn't take so much space (and also it's much easier to navigate them than 9 in a row!). This grid function is really one of the big things that annoys me in macOS (it used to have grids but they killed it when mission control came out), windows and Gnome. I need a grid, especially because I switch with hardware keys.
[1] Might be https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5984
[2] https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil/issues/556
I believe this is a very good point!
Linux as an OS is so fragmented that the number of paths are basically innumerable. Many of them are "happy" but they can be hard to find and also change from year to year.
I have a machine that has run Debian 11 and 12 with no issues but 13 hung before launching the UI. Fixable from the terminal but still, super un-happy path!
KDE on SUSE vs on Debian vs on Kinoite and with various sound demons, file systems, file browsers etc will surely differ in ways that are beyond the direct control of the kDE devs too.
So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong.
My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled.
It's possible it's just KDE, but it's also possible KDE is triggering hardware issues.
RAM is also always one to check, especially on an older machine.
Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-Segv-Response should get you started. People made special software packages to trigger the hardware problem in a minute or so.
There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.)
And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too.
I concur on the driver issues. To my understanding the Vega driver situation is actually better on Linux than on Windows (or at least it used to be), but it's never been well-supported hardware.
I think you are.
As an experiment, try a fresh VM of your distro and see if it still crashes.
Rolling distros are not an exact science. They can can get stuck in weird inconsistent states because of some local modification or stagnant dotfile or configuration that is not forward compatible. That sort of thing is more likely with complex software, it's usually not a bug unless upgradeability is a seriously supported thing.
I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM?
More annoying is that gwenview often hangs my entire system somehow.
In fact the same happens on Windows a lot when explorer.exe crashes. People often don't even notice it.
Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.
I helped someone else earlier today with an unstable Linux laptop, it turned out there was an amd/gpu/drm issue that was crashing Wayland in the background.
My first bet would be that you've got something similar going on -- a hardware or device driver problem. You've crawled through journalctl and the like, I assume?
Good one, saving the term :)
> 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.
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...
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.).
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?
To turn off the popup, head to System Settings -> Notifications, search for "Donation Request" and turn it off.
I should have looked for it myself but every time it happened I was busy doing something else and then I forgot (yay ADHD).
And thanks to you for making KDE. I really don't like this time where computers are becoming more locked-in and opinionated (e.g. I can't configure it the way I want). KDE is a breath of fresh air. I have extensively reconfigured it and I haven't even needed to use a single plugin. So I've donated for years now because I really appreciate the work.
And as you can see in the post, this is not just code, it's also people being hired to do docs, planning, conferences, community, design work, web dev, things that are rarely done well in open source because they are hard and people can get paid for them elsewhere.
That's exactly how the vast majority of the existing body of open source software has materialized.
Both GNOME and KDE are at the state where unmaintained core apps exist the last time I checked. KDE basing itself on Qt offloaded the largest chunk of behind the scenes development from them which is their biggest advantage compared to GNOME.
Wish Pantheon can have more attention, but I digress.
> 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
> Or is this just something on the KDE website, like Wikipedia does?
In Wikipedia's case the website is the product, so I'd say it's about the same.
Never thought I'd see the day when FOSS defends advertising embedded in a desktop environment.