Welcome to KDE
Welcome to the community of KDE, an international technology cooperative dedicated to producing the world's finest free software! For more information, see https://userbase.kde.org/What_is_KDE.
KDE community members and contributors use a lot of diverse systems and websites to conduct their business. When you're just getting started, it can be hard to know what resources are available and find them all. This page explains everything.
Follow What's Going On
There are many ways to get information about what's going on in the world of KDE!
- The kde-community mailing list is a low-traffic list used for announcements and generally useful information for KDE users and community members.
- https://kde.org/announcements has release announcements for new versions of KDE software.
- KDE's Promo team maintains KDE's social media presence with the following accounts:
- PeerTube: https://tube.kockatoo.org
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/KdeOrg
- Mastodon: https://floss.social/@kde
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/kdecommunity
- https://planet.kde.org is an aggregator of blogs by KDE community members where you can find out what people are doing.
Get Help & Support
User documentation
KDE apps include their own official documentation, available offline. You can access it using the "[application name] Handbook" menu item in KDE apps, or by pressing the F1 key. This documentation is also available online at https://docs.kde.org.
General information about KDE from a user perspective can be found at https://userbase.kde.org.
Forum
KDE operates a forum at https://forum.kde.org for user support and general discussions of KDE software. Most technical discussion between contributors takes place elsewhere.
Bug reports & feature requests
If you believe you have found a bug in KDE software, or you wish to request a new feature, first read Get Involved/Issue Reporting and then use https://bugs.kde.org. Note that this website does not use your Identity account; you will need to register a new KDE Bugzilla account to use it.
Sysadmin requests
If you have a technical problem with one of your KDE accounts (identity, email alias, chat, etc), open a sysadmin ticket about it at https://go.kde.org/u/systickets.
Developer documentation
The primary source for Developer documentation for KDE is https://develop.kde.org. Here you can find a tutorial for writing your first app using KDE technologies, API documentation for KDE's frameworks, the Human Interface Guidelines, a lot of general documentation, and more.
Get Involved
Want to start contributing to KDE? Fantastic! Check out the Get Involved page. Most activities will require a KDE Identity account, which will let you log onto many KDE websites and services. You can get one at https://identity.kde.org.
A lot of communication in KDE takes place over email, using mailing lists. At a minimum, you should subscribe to the kde-community mailing list, mentioned earlier. Those interested in software development are highly encouraged to also subscribe to kde-devel.
Other mailing lists can be found at https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo.
If you would like an email alias using the @kdemail.org domain, see Infrastructure/Email
Chat
A lot of other communication takes place on real-time chat, using the Matrix protocol. You can access a Matrix web client at https://webchat.kde.org/#/welcome, or use a Matrix desktop client. KDE has its own: NeoChat.
Video meetings
For video meetings and conferencing, KDE uses https://meet.kde.org, which is a self-hosted instance of the BigBlueButton software. You can create new meeting yourself there; to attend a meeting, you will typically be given a link to it.
Task tracking
- Most task tracking for teams of KDE contributors takes place on https://invent.kde.org, which is a self-hosted instance of the GitLab software. You can see what teams are available for you to join at https://invent.kde.org/groups/teams.
- Some task tracking is still done on https://phabricator.kde.org, which has been mostly replaced by invent.kde.org. Phabricator is still used by some teams like Promo, Sysadmins, Akademy organizers, and the KDE e.V. Board. Phabricator will be decommissioned in the near future and should not be used for new teams.
File storage
KDE teams that need a persistent location to store useful files use https://collaborate.kde.org for this purpose.
Organization
The KDE community is legally represented by a German nonprofit organization: the KDE e.V. (which stands for a "eingetragener Verein", meaning "registered association" in German). The KDE e.V. handles KDE's finances, contractors, trademarks, legal representation, and requests for reimbursement for costs incurred attending KDE events. For more information, see https://ev.kde.org.
- Information about development sprints can be found at Sprints.
- Requests for reimbursement can be submitted using https://reimbursements.kde.org.