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.

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?

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 think the fact that a KDE dev dislikes a clean usable interface in favor of something inefficient, slow and noisy says a lot.

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

> 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.

Good one, saving the term :)

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.).