Hello KDE community. I'd like to share with you my experience as a motivated noob contributor to the KDE project and my frustration at getting started. A sticky thread here suggested KDE is having a hard time getting new active contributors, so maybe my story will help understand what it's like for casual coders to join the project.

2 years ago I made the switch from the defunct Crunchbang to Linux Mint 17 KDE. I've been using it ever since, and in the process have fallen in love with KDE. Despite what coworkers have been telling me about KDE's "heaviness", the OS worked like a charm on my 7 year old laptop.

Recently, I've made the decision to pay back the KDE project for being so freaking awesome and become an active contributor. I read about this new thing called KDE Frameworks 5, and how a new LTS Kubuntu is coming out with it along with newer packages and a lot more KDE.

So I installed the new Kubuntu 16.04 on release day (a few days ago), and installed the latest stable KDevelop and KDevPlatform through the package manager, and after reading KDE documentation for days, started working on running the code in this tutorial: https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/First_program

Right off the bat KDevelop recognizes none of the headers I included. So after reading a bit it seems like for development purposes, I'm actually still working KDE SC 4 and Qt4, instead of KF5 and Qt5. I could never get around this and install the KF5 development files. Not that anything failed, I just have no idea how to set up the environment and where to start. I read the KDE guide, the KF5 cookbook, these forums, the Kubuntu forums, stuff about something called the Neon project, super complicated stuff about compiling from source which I don't feel qualified to do, and some critical HOW-TO wiki pages referenced from everywhere but are left blank for some reason, as if someone simply deleted this information.

I'd really love to get to know how KDE works, gain experience, solve a few bugs and maybe not long from now develop some cool desktop app that starts with a K. But with all the problems I'm facing, the time I spent so far and how heavy and unstable the new Kubuntu feels compared to Linux Mint KDE, my motivation is starting to die out.

I feel like getting started should be so much simpler. At the very least, give the noobs the feeling that the most basic "your first program" tutorial is easy to write, build and run.

Thanks for reading,
Adir

Luckily, thanks to a search engine I stumbled upon this page:

https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_an ... rom_source

Hopefully everything will work now that I have a direction to go in. I still don't know how to reach this page from kde.org, so I think it'd be a really good idea to link to it from the beginning of the KF5 tutorial page, like "make sure you've gone over this first".