KDE onboarding is good now
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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.
Perhaps try building a KDE app and see how far you get.
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.
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.
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.
What I wish is that I could write KDE stuff using Python (PyQt or PySide).
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 it doesn’t sound like you had?” was unnecessary and you have no idea who I am.
I was merely stating that most distros have those headers, most distros care about being up to date with stable releases. Yes KDE releases software on Mac and windows, that has nothing to do with vcpkg. If anything, it’s more work.
I’m sick of the “mansplaining” in these comments like I was born yesterday. I wasn’t, and I know how to write C.
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.
That's why a lot of open source c++ devs / applications had to publish build instructions for half a dozen Linux distros.
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.
> The gnucash developers use github, therefore...
There's no therefore which changes this discussion. If you want to follow the lead of gnucash developers, none of us can stop you but you and they are still making a mistake. Microsoft is not to be trusted. It's only been what, a week or so since Microsoft shut down the ability to install Windows without a Microsoft account? Something Microsoft fanboys said they'd never do, even as all the evidence pointed towards Microsoft slow boiling that frog. If you still need to learn the hard way, have fun with that. Don't expect anybody else to cheer you on though, we've seen where this goes too many times.
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.
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).
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.
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..
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.
I use Opensuse tumbleweed and update compulsively so I should have the newest package versions with all of the latest fixes too.
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
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)
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.
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?
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 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.
My experience is on Bazzite with a Radeon 7800 XT and 9070 XT. I've had two amdgpu hangs playing The Finals which were a Mesa bug, this crashed kwin but kwin wasn't responsible in the stack trace. It's been fixed since.
That's really it since May 2024.
Until recently I used all three major OS almost every day for work, school, games, servers, etc. I’ve seen really bad bugs in all of them. Just spend some time looking around the Internet, Linux and KDE crash constantly. There’s also people regularly slobbering over Linux for a variety of reasons.
What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?
I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but no I don’t believe your shoes are made of gold just because you said so.
Also, you're trying to move the goalposts. The progression has been:
> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day
> I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.
> 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
> What’s more likely, this guy won the equivalent of the computer lottery and never experienced a single bug, or that he’s one of the many Linux fanboys infesting this site?
Nobody said they hadn't experienced a single bug until you tried to make a straw man. I've seen bugs on every desktop OS I've used for any length of time. I don't see crashes on KDE.
If KDE works for you, great. It crashes often for me. I find it exceedingly hard to believe it hasn’t crashed on you at least once when that’s such a common experience among me and my peers. I put more stock in my own experiences and the experiences of people I know than random internet commenters. I don’t know what else to tell you.
[1] Might be https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5984
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.
Unfortunate because the minimalism of XFCE is way more my style.
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.
systemctl --user restart plasma-plasmashell
This is not normal. Do a RAM test to see if you have a hardware issue.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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?
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.
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.).
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.