Hello there!
While I understand that the linux community works pretty independently (as it is often with open source) I feel, that while the DE is really top notch modern and even user friendly! All software and websites used in order to keep the community of contributers and users together are way outdated and behind it's potential.

Disclaimer

It is not like I read a lot of posts of people saying: "We need a better contribution experience!". I know that a lot of people are totally fine with the current approach.
But personally, I think, if we had better tools and websites, we'd have not only more contributers but also more transparency. Right now it is very hard to have insights on what is happening. Other than reading the release notes and the bugs, we have no access to information what is planned or if there is a roadmap or something like that. There are these public events like "Bug days" or Meetings, but as typical developer/webuser I have no clear way of contributing without reading a ton of guides (even with knowledge to git and all the technology involved)

While community.kde.org does make great effort to keep the community together and to make the contributing process more approachable and coherent, I think we could have a lot better tools at our disposal.

Development

Reading a lot into the wiki, especially about development, the first hurdle is the webinterface of anongit. https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/ ... g_the_code
I know that KDE has been in development for more than a decade, but having a modern platform like Github or Bitbucket would help to greatly improve transparency, reviews, pull requests creating and managing.

Official Website
This is the point I disagree the most with.
While the community pages, especially the wiki and the forum are really great, the main hub - kde.org could do better in offering content that matters. Many screenshots are outdated (Plasma 4 instead of 5 - maybe they have their reasons, since Plasma 5 is still heavily in development).

Content

The only area on the website, that showcases how KDE might look like and work like in action is the WORKSPACES and Blog posts. While the Workspaces menu looks like KDE is selling laptops or desktops, rather than showcasing what it can do.
Generally speaking, the Wiki does a way better job designing and publishing content than the homepage does. All the awesome images used in the wiki do not even appear on the website like these on Get Involved. There is so much awesomeness hidden.

Navigation

DEVELOPER PLATFORM should contain everything that is required in order to get started with development, additionally to technology stack. I'd understand Developer Platform as something like anongit, or the review tool we have, or even a link to the bugs. While Github centralizes these tasks, such as pull requests, bugs and code and even releases, we, as users have to search for so many informations. To this date, I don't even know if there is something like a roadmap of features, other than the existing bugs: https://bugs.kde.org/

Conclusion

As webdeveloper, I'm willing to create more modern layouts that match the style and user-friendliness of KDE and reorganize the contents of the website, together with the menus to have a better onboarding experience for all kind of users (contributor, end-user, admin, tech-lead, etc). I know that we don't "sell" anything here, but having a professional appearence, but still keeping the values we promote, we could improve KDEs transparency, onboarding and approachability when exploring or contributing to KDE. That being said.

I hope to have your feedback on this. I'm pretty new to KDE development but not to development overall, but I don't want to change everything just because I'm not satisfied with the current approach. I'm aware that you guys I think a few small improvements like the website could already help a lot.

Thanks for your input.

Hi, thanks for your input!

mmuzatko wrote:Reading a lot into the wiki, especially about development, the first hurdle is the webinterface of anongit. https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/ ... g_the_code
I know that KDE has been in development for more than a decade, but having a modern platform like Github or Bitbucket would help to greatly improve transparency, reviews, pull requests creating and managing.

KDE does have a read-only mirror on github: https://github.com/KDE/
However, the main platform used by the community is Phabricator: https://phabricator.kde.org/
Though it's not yet 100% functional (many repo have not migrated yet).

About the main website (kde.org), there are plans to redesign it: viewtopic.php?f=292&t=127545
Have a look at neon.kde.org for a "preview" (kind of).