Dear KDE Team,
I would like to report a critical issue that severely impacts the user experience for users in Mainland China. When accessing the KDE Store (including store.kde.org) directly from China, the page often fails to load completely or times out.
After investigation, the main cause appears to be the embedding of Google’s reCAPTCHA service and Google Fonts/APIs resources on the KDE Store pages. These services are currently not stably accessible in Mainland China. Furthermore, the page code seems to load these resources in a synchronous blocking mode. The browser waits for these resources to load until a timeout occurs before rendering the page, rendering the store nearly unusable.
It is important to clarify that this is not an issue with the Chinese network itself. For comparison, the WineHQ website (winehq.org) also uses an SSL certificate from Google Trust Services, but users in China can access it instantly. This is because its resources are loaded asynchronously, and failures do not block the main page content. Even when using a mobile hotspot, the KDE Store loads significantly slower than the WineHQ website.
Therefore, I suggest the KDE team consider the following improvements:
- **Replace or implement a fallback for the verification service:** Replace Google reCAPTCHA with an alternative accessible in China, such as hCaptcha, or add a graceful degradation mechanism (e.g., automatically switching to a simple text CAPTCHA when reCAPTCHA fails to load).
- **Asynchronous resource loading:** Change all external resources (fonts, scripts, etc.) on the page to load asynchronously, preventing a single resource failure from blocking the entire page render.
- **Add CDN nodes:** If possible, add CDN acceleration nodes in the Asia-Pacific region, or consider using a CDN service like Cloudflare that offers relatively better routing to Chinese networks.
Implementing these improvements would greatly enhance the KDE experience for users in Mainland China. The Linux user base here is not small and is still growing. Thank you for taking the time to read this feedback.
Additionally, I would like to suggest improving the translation of KDE applications. Some software still uses English names for their descriptions. For example, “Driver Manager” with the description “Select drivers for this system” is not translated into Chinese. There are other KDE applications I won’t list here, but if you consider improving the translations, thank you.