Thanks for your invitation, then I cordially and officially invite you accept the KDE Invent (Gitlab) access which I requested months and months ago.
A developer account, the kind of account that gives contributors full access to GitLab, gives the power to do a lot of damage too. In view of how malware has been injected into FLOSS projects in the past, you will understand why KDE's Invent instance is not an open, free-for-all affaire.
You have to go through a process, wherein one of the steps entails being sponsored by someone who is already a veteran contributor to KDE. This, in turn, entails contributing to KDE for a while, maybe in a non-development role, or by using the open services of invent. If you have not gone through that process, the sysadmin team will ignore your petition.
That said, properly submitted requests for developer accounts are approved all the time.
Notwithstanding, when it comes to bugs, which seems to be your main concern, there is a lot you can do without a developer account. Triaging, for example, wherein you confirm that a bug exists, check if it happens everywhere (i.e. across platforms and distros), and figure out what triggers it is an invaluable contribution that will save developers many hours of hunting and testing.
Why not start there? All you need is an account on https://bugs.kde.org and you will also revive bugs that may have flown under the radar and contribute to getting them sorted once and for all. Your help could be key to that.
For now all I could contribute is by donating money (check the records, it’s public).
Bugs are solved all the time. It is not a project for the community because the community already works on correcting bugs all the time. If the correction of bugs is not fast enough for you, we cordially and officially invite you to help out:
You are moving the goalpost once again. First to be light the DE (i.e. Plasma) had to be light; then the DE had to be light, but not Plasma (?), but your redefinition of DE as in Plasma, plus a random set of apps (Dolphin, Konsole and Kate -- none of which are distributed with Plasma, by the way).
As that also proved to be light, now you are basing your argument on (a) a poll (?) and (b) that there is at least one desktop that is lighter and that does not need swap.
I am perfectly willing to admit the latter, mainly because it is true: there ARE DEs lighter than Plasma. But it is a strawman argument, as admitting that does not invalidate the statement that "Plasma is light" and "KDE'S software is not bloated".
I wish you would stick to one thing and argue in good faith. You seem incapable of that so, I'm done.
No you are not. Or you weren't. Allow me to quote your own post:
I’m talking about the “DE” part of KDE in general;
As the DE is Plasma, that is the part I am addressing. Now you are moving the goalposts. That said, I do not know what you mean when you refer to "the KDE project", as KDE encompasses many projects.
In any case, I don’t doubt that KDE can’t run at all under the specs you mentioned
So you don't doubt it is light. Of course if we pile on a bunch of apps, like we could throw in Blender open 50 times rendering 4K animations and I'm sure it will make the laptop run slow. But that would be because of Blender, not the DE.
However, for the sake of argument, I did try the three examples you quoted, Dolphin, Konsole and Kate, and as you can see in the aforementioned video, they are all also very light and worked perfectly simultaneously on the 2008 machine. I do not have Konqueror installed on that machine, as it is not considered an essential part of Plasma anymore and is not widely used.
I'm afraid you are definitely out of the loop: Plasma is the DE. That is what it's called: Plasma, not KDE. KDE refers to the organisation, the community and all the software the community produces, which includes Plasma (the DE), but also all the apps, frameworks, widgets, etc.
I find it a bit ironic for KDE to be pushing this message, when it’s a heavy DE (relatively speaking)
You didn't seem to read my message. Allow me to repeat the gist here: Plasma (the DE) works fluidly on a machine bought in 2008 which comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.8GHz. This machine has an onboard Intel GMA X3100 GPU and 2GB Memory. I doubt a heavy/bloated environment like you are imagining would even be able to display the log in screen on that.
I would advise you stop repeating third-hand FUD, as it is not true, and you tried the software out for yourself. I am sure you will be surprised at how light Plasma (the DE) is.
I think that what you are calling "KDE" may be "Plasma", since you are comparing with another desktop environment.
To answer your question, yes, and the process started some years ago. It sounds like you may be a bit out of the loop, as Plasma now weighs more or less the same as XFCE, or thereabouts (these things are harder to measure than one may assume). I personally installed Plasma 6 on a Dell XPS PP25L from 2008 and it works flawlessly.
You are working with hypotheticals. We cannot judge what the reasoning is. We can only judge what it is. It may have been done with good intentions as you say. Given MS's track record, highly unlikely, but either way the fact is MS is telling its Windows users that anything that is not Edge and Bing is damaged or malicious. That is anticompetitive bullshit (intentional or not) and FUD.
There is. It is still WiP, but you can read about it at:
https://quantumproductions.info/articles/2023-08/remote-desktop-using-rdp-protocol-plasma-wayland