As @ahartmetz said:

> 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

> The entire experience would not be so bad if I could write my app entirely in Cpp.

You can.

Qt + KDE libraries are really nice.

> The entire experience would not be so bad if I could write my app entirely in Cpp.

What I wish is that I could write KDE stuff using Python (PyQt or PySide).

Outside of deeply integrated KDE apps, I'm shipping QML + Python apps and IMO it's a nice experience.

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.

Strange that so many of our customers at Qt use Qt Quick if it’s as useless as you say it is

> serious app will need C++

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.

You could combine it with Rust instead?

> KDE is still extremely anal about not touching anything remotely related to Microsoft [...] only because it's Microsoft's.

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.

> 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.

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.

I swear I've been through three or four cycles of this now, at least. Microsoft woos some noobs, who wonder why everybody is acting on edge around Microsoft. Become dependent on Microsoft, then get burned. Then new noobs come into the scene and the cycle repeats.

Can you give an example of a mainstream project that uses vcpkg? I've never run across it anywhere.

Who needs vcpkg when you already have a built in package manager?

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.

I mean that's C++ development in general.. even among package managers you had to deal with conan, vcpkg, hunter, and a dozen more ..

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..

vcpkg is generally indifferent to linux.

I don't know man, i have a bunch of computers, the oldest one is a 2012 macbook, then various laptops from different brands (hp, dell, lenovo), an intel nuc from 2016 and a minisforum using a ryzen 7 that i bought just before the ram craze (phew)

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.

This has not been my experience at all ... I run KDE + Fedora or Ubuntu on laptops for years as my daily driver doing professional work. Its an absolute joy to work with and stable. If there's a hickup then its because some unrelated process is consuming all memory or hogging all CPUs (Slack, Teams I'm looking at you) which would crash any desktop.

>Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day just doing regular things

This is not normal. Do a RAM test to see if you have a hardware issue.

> Plasma will crash on me 2-3 times per day

You are doing something really wrong, I haven't seen a plasma crash for years.

Hmm I get a crash once a week or so. No biggie because it restarts itself immediately.

More annoying is that gwenview often hangs my entire system somehow.

There's other desktop environments. XFCE has worked flawlessly for me for years, though its Wayland support is still experimental.

I use it as a daily driver. There are bugs, but nothing deal breaking lately.

This is my experience too. Tried again just this week. Zero issues with Gnome or Cosmic (so likely not hardware issues), but an-least-daily Plasma crashes.

FWIW Plasma 6 is running stable and fast for me (via vanilla Kubuntu on a somewhat recent Intel Meteor Lake laptop), best experience I had with desktop Linux all the way back to the late 90s, and especially on a laptop (the touchpad finally doesn't suck anymore compared to Macs). It's also the first time where I think the overall experience is vastly better than running Windows on the same machine.

???? I have using KDE plasma as mainly driver for years. I remember having big issues in the KDE 4 era. KDE 5 ran smooth and KDE 6 + Wayland it's amazing. I don't had any issues or problems like you described.

Yeah, I've been running Plasma as a daily driver (and without a fallback OS) for around 8 years now without this kind of trouble. I routinely run for months between reboots, and when a reboot happens, it's usually because I did a dumb.

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?

What distro, what distro version and what hardware (ie gpu, ram etc)?

People who actually are selfless don't talk about their selflessness - they just do the job.

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?