Clickbait. KDE has not said anything about adding ads and the article even acknowledges "it’s doubtful you’ll see ads in KDE’s core applications". They're conflating Qt adding support for displaying ads with applications (not necessarily open source) using it because it's more inflammatory. It's especially weird that they mention Calibre as potentially including ads and then admit that Kovid Goyal says he makes a decent living from donations.

It's an illogical leap, from "the Qt toolkit has functionality to facilitate ads", to "the KDE desktop environment, built on Qt, could enable ads".

This article is a clickbait piece based on nothing of substance. No KDE maintainer has so much as suggested the possibility of ads. No linux community would tolerate this, and there is no realistic threat of it happening.

Related HN discussion (from 2012):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049 ("Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed")

What a clickbait. There will be no ads in KDE. It's just Qt adding new feature.

Can't wait to immediately disable this in my configuration.nix