Why do we ask for donations so often? Because it’s important! As KDE becomes more successful and an increasing number of people use our software, our costs grow as well: Web and server hostin…
KDE needs to copy what Thunderbird did. Thunderbird marketed the crap out of their product and were present on all social media, posted frequent updates, made videos about their new features, and are in general very loud about it. KDE has some random devs posting infrequent updates and aren't even recogniseable as belonging to the foundation.
I donate, but I can see how many people have no clue they are even using KDE nor how to donate to it.
We are talking about one single notification per year that serves as a notification for the hundreds of KDE programs that you normally install on a Plasma desktop.
So, yeah, it's pretty fair. And it's free software, so you can fork it and delete those lines of code anyway. It's KDE so they'll probably even let you disable it at some point in the settings.
How many packages make up what one would consider a bog-standard install of an OS that had all the basic features available to you?
300? 400? Enough for 1 popup every single day of the year; even if done yearly.
Thankfully, other developers aren't this rude or full of themselves. Don't get me wrong, they need funding, and I'm a donor - but advertising anything on the OS should be considered taboo. Just because Windows users tolerate it, doesn't mean we should.