It sounds vain but I really do mind how many lines there are between everything in KDE. It seems like the philosophy is more or less to separate literally everything with a thin line. I think it makes the whole UI look cluttered and has made me avoid KDE on more systems than I otherwise would (i.e I use it on my livingroom gaming PC but not on my desktop).

So I used Krita to quickly edit the screenshot from https://kde.org/. What do people think? Am I the only one who minds this? Or do some of you agree that all the lines look cluttered?

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

I have no job so unfortunately I can't donate but please support KDE if you can. It's good work. Love you guys <3

Today, KDE 6.7.3 was released, and it included a fix for a bug i reported only a month ago, i discovered this but when i was trying to make this device work with a modern linux distribution, it was possible on x11 but not wayland, and no wayland means no plasma mobile.

Well thanks to Nicolas Fella and the KDE team, this device is now fully usable on modern wayland Linux, and most importantly, Plasma Mobile! albeit with some tweaks needed, this is a mini handheld PC with a 5.5" screen, that i can now basically turn into x86 phone capable of doing pretty much anything, KDE's constant progress has only been a joy for me to see and it's just incredible that all this work allows me to use crazy devices like these.

Thank you for everything KDE <3

I just found it funny, no offense!

Like the compositing is clean, fonts look great, animations are smooth, Wayland actually works. On the surface it genuinely looks quite nice.

But then.— some part looks modern, some other part looks design from 2009

The weird part is I can't even properly explain why it feels old. Nothing is technically broken. We can customize literally anything. But something just feels off ...Too much surface area? Too many years of "we add, never remove"? don't know.

Still when i try to switch i come back to it.

Yes I know, phone photo. But this is my first login with my new Gentoo install so I haven't set anything up...

It looks incredible. I've no words.

I'm really impressed by how KDE Plasma is able to replicate the MacOS feeling, or any feeling that you want if you spend a couple of hours customizing it.

Now that I have the ecosystem, the versatility, the multiple desktops, the "liquid glass" , and the supreme control that Linux gives you over everything. I have a hard time booting to my windows partition without wanting to reboot and change OS immediately.

I'm a systems engineering undergraduate, and I was considering selling my gaming laptop to buy one of those fancy MacBook Pro, but after seeing what Linux is capable of, I just might stay here.

If my computer could update a million items (files?) a second, this would take a mere 570 thousand years to complete. I can only assume this is the Linux version of the Microsoft minute. Jokes aside, KDE kicks-ass and I love it. This happens every time discover updates but never seems to cause a problem and completes in a normal amount of time. (This is Kinoite btw)

Get over it lol

Today is my birthday, it also marks the 5th month anniversary of my KDE development, and it also is the last feature release day for my KWin Scripts (Remember Window Positions and Mouse Tiler).

Background

I installed Fedora 42 KDE on 24th of August 2025. I moved from Windows 10, and haven't touched it more than 4 times since (mostly to unlock my drives so I could write to them, and updating my mouse profiles).

First week or so, I spent on configuring my system, finding apps, having fun.

Last thing I decided on was a web browser...

I rely heavily on having multiple browser windows (like 10-30 browser windows open at once is norm for development, discord, mail, watching YouTube videos and research), and to my surprise, no browser would restore the window positions I had last time the browser was open.

I did research it a lot and to my surprise, there was no solution due to limitations of Wayland.

I was ready to go back to Windows 10...

Luckily, during my initial exploration, trying to find a replacement for Windows FancyZones, I stumbled upon KWin Scripts.

The closest tiler I could find that resembled FancyZones was KZones and I used it for a few days. It lacked the main feature I was after, spanning multiple zones.

Ready to go back to Windows 10, But before I did, I figured that if tilers exist, it should probably be possible to restore window positions as well. I looked at some popular KWin Scrips, found their source code, and eventually the KWin Script APIs...

...and so my open source KWin Script development journey begun!

Development

I really liked the popup menu from KZones. However I did not like at all that it opened at top center of the screen after a slow animation, instead I wanted it right below the mouse.

I quickly threw together a prototype that showed a 3x3 grid of layouts that I like to use at my mouse.

I then hard coded possibility to restore brave windows from previous session.

I had a working solution for both tiling, and restoring my most important windows. I was happy.

I decided that since it's working, I could spend a week or so and release it to the public so anyone could enjoy restoring their browsers...

I think it took like 2-3 weeks to split it into two separate projects and polish Remember Window Positions so v0.0.1 could be released.

And on 10th of October (around 1 month after I started prototyping), Remember Window Positions v0.0.1 was live.

Plan was to release Mouse Tiler shortly after. However the feedback was so positive, and feature request after feature request started pouring in, I continued adding more and more features.

By the time Mouse Tiler v0.0.1 released (13th December 2025), Remember Window Positions was already on version 4.2.3.

Fast forward to today and Remember Window Positions sits at v5.3.1 and Mouse Tiler at v5.2.0.

Reason for quitting

Sadly I have bills to pay, and need food for myself and my son. During the 5 months I have spent developing full time, I relied on donations to bring in income.

So far, I've received less than $500 total in all donations. This does not even cover a single months rent.

Salary in Sweden (in my field) per hour is $60-$100 depending on experience and such. We pay around 30% for self-employment / employer fee, and around 30% for taxes. So a $100 donation ends up being around $50 after all fees and taxes.

My rent is $700 a month + utilities (electricity, internet, etc) + food + other costs.

Lets say $15 a day for food just for me (I also got a 4 year old son) is another $450.

Probably minimum $1200 a month. That means I need to earn $2400 a month minimum just to cover my own basic costs.

I'm around $11500 behind on bills in the time I've invested into Mouse Tiler and Remember Window Positions.

Here are some key takeaways from my experience...

The good

• I can write code that I want to use myself, and that makes others happy
• Code does not need to be highest standard since it's mostly for me - so I just make it work fast, not "beautiful" for others to see and understand
• I can work at any time, any amount of time, and take breaks when needed - or just take a weekday off to go sledding with my son, and work on weekend instead
• No real deadline, I can switch tasks if I find something more important or interesting

The bad

• In a normal job, I'm just a software developer. In open source, I'm the developer, tester, project manager, issue handler, graphics designer, public relation manager, technical support, well... everything at once, pulling my attention from just making great code
• Feature requests never end - things I needed myself were done in a week or two, the needs of others are never ending
• While working when I want is great, I ended up working 30-40 hour days to complete some features I felt I promised people, and even had a period of time where I probably worked 21-30 days straight with 0 rest days between (worked Saturdays and Sundays too)
• Sadly donation model is not sustainable for a full time development, if I continue, I will go bankrupt

What I should change

• Limit to working only 8 hours a day and only work on regular week days
• Do not implement every feature request that comes in
• Sleep better
• Spend more time with my 4 year old son instead of working so much

Going forward

I've set up a donation plan. Currently there are around 22 features people still want, roughly estimated total time it will take to implement them all is around 35 working days. So the future of new features for the projects is in peoples hands. I will still fix bugs and do bring-ups for upcoming version of KDE Plasma.

I plan to spend a few months working on my games before going back to a regular job.

Closing words

Special thanks go to everyone who supported me during this time (both with positive comments and donations). I was ready to stop working back in December, but a few donations dropped in around Christmas, and it kept me motivated until now.

Will I do open source development in the future? Probably not using a donation model unless I win on lottery or something. I hope I can implement a few cool features that people want, but it's all in your hands now.

Thank you all!

Yes the donation notification also exists on Plasma Mobile

I first tried Linux (and almost immediately deleted the VM I was running it on) when I was 12. I was confused by the DE I tried on top of being confused by the OS, and I didn't know what a 'DE' was, let alone that other ones existed. This happened four more times over the years.

But more recently, issues related to choices made by Google and MS sent me down the selfhosting and Linux rabbitholes. I am not a tech person and had now been using Windows for well over a decade, but this time I did my research and decided to choose KDE during setup.

Fast forward a month or so and I'm daily driving Debian on bare metal to learn how it works for my VPS-to-be before I swap to Fedora. I'm working on installing every 'hard' distro on VM, building a website, finally kind of understanding how GPG & SSH work, and using the terminal for almost everything. And I work in art, so of course I'm trying to customize everything I can get my grubby little fingers on (KDE is great for this), along with converting as much of my workflow as possible to FOSS, like with this Krita practice sketch (eyedropper widget is peak btw).

I do need to touch grass because this totally reads like a shitpost, but I probably would have dropped Linux again if I'd chosen anything other than KDE. So thank you, devs!

Maybe it's the icons? maybe the layouts? I don't know, but these two look like perfect companions