I just can not take KDE seriously anymore ever since the donation-daemon waylaying users Robin Hood …

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.

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

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 h…

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?

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.