KDE developer Herz published a detailed look at the immense amount of work they’ve done cleaning up the developer onboarding documentation for KDE.
All that just to say that I’m finally content with the state of beginner onboarding docs in our KDE Developer Platform. That is to say, all the beginner docs fixes I wanted to add to Develop are either already there or have merge requests ready or almost ready.
↫ Herz at rabbitictranslator.com
Judging by the article, KDE’s developer documentation really were in need of major work, and it’s great to see that thankless task being done. One of the areas where KDE lags behind GNOME is that the latter has a more vibrant application ecosystem, with tons of great GNOME applications under active development. Now, I’m not saying it’s the state of KDE’s documentation is the sole reason for this, but I’m sure it wasn’t helping either.
Improving documentation is not a particularly glamorous task, but it’s vitally important nonetheless.
@Thom you should really get involved in this effort and help Translate the docs.
So much documentation in open source is effectively monolingual. And the sad truth is that if people like yourself don’t contribute the projects will eventually turn to AI for it. Further embedding AI over professional translation.
The KDE Developmentsystem and Docs is still in a terrible state. Last year I tried to write a simple application and it took me a week to setup a build environment. Then I was so exhausted I lost interest. Last time I built something for KDE was in KDE2 times, yes I’m old. But then I just installed KDevelop and everything worked with the templates it brought.
(And on a somewhat related topic but not KDEs fault: why the heck can’t Visual Studio Code use my normal system shell, where everything is setup the way I like.)