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...

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.).

The donation pop-up has been explained in various places, such as here: 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?

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.

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

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?