January 3, 2026
Docs drama: glow-up vs pop-up blow-up
KDE onboarding is good now
KDE promises smooth entry; fans clap, purists rage at pop-ups
TLDR: KDE overhauled its developer onboarding docs under an official maintainer, aiming to make entry easier. Comments split between praise for better guides and anger over past donation pop-ups, crash complaints, and tough developer tools—important because smoother onboarding could grow KDE, if trust and stability improve.
KDE says onboarding is finally fixed, thanks to a docs glow‑up led by a longtime contributor who started in 2021 and is now an official documentation contractor in 2024. He’s a keyboard‑shortcut superfan—and, yes, a furry—bringing peak open‑source energy to the KDE developer welcome mat. But the crowd didn’t just bring confetti.
The loudest chorus? Pop‑up PTSD. One top commenter blasted the old “donation‑daemon” prompts as “Robin Hood style” shakedowns, tying it to Big Ad drama—cue greed accusations and side‑eye. Others were cautiously optimistic: a 17‑year Linux veteran who lives in Cinnamon (another desktop on the old X11 display system) admitted they “value good documentation” and might give KDE another spin.
Then came the stability scares. A longtime user claimed “Plasma crashes 2–3 times a day,” invoking the ghost of KDE4 while calling GNOME the “least worst.” Devs chimed in with a different gripe: yes, the docs and IRC help are solid, but the real boss fight is the stack—C++ plus Qt QML—which one described as pure “callback hell.”
There was humor, too: someone bookmarked the cheeky term “LLM sloperators,” and fans celebrated the neat keyboard shortcut philosophy. Verdict: the docs glow‑up has hype, but memory of pop‑ups, crash stories, and steep dev hurdles keep the comments spicy. If KDE sticks the landing, newcomers might finally feel welcome.
Key Points
- •The author became the effective maintainer of KDE Developer Platform documentation, with the largest number of commits.
- •They began contributing to KDE docs in 2021, applied as a KDE documentation contractor in late 2023, and started official onboarding docs work in 2024.
- •They discovered KDE via Krita in 2015, moved to Linux in 2016, and adopted KDE Plasma 5 in 2017.
- •They moderated r/KDE on Reddit, contributed to KDE Promo, improved KDE wikis, and became a trusted KDE translator with merge rights in late 2019 (through mid-2020).
- •They developed a consistent keyboard shortcut scheme in Plasma, mapping Meta to moving, Ctrl to switching, and Shift to transferring windows across desktops and screens.