Exactly. Couldn't agree more. Spyware stuff like this should be outlawed and prohibited and some smart European countries already did this with Microsoft and Google cloud in public institutions and schools. All software in use by governments and public instiutions that are financed by taxes should adhere to principle of Public Money, Public Code and use only libre and opensource software. Not to mention they should insist on using only free and open formats (like OpenDocument Format for office documents), protocols, and standards. Otherwise it is so easy to get trapped into vendor-lockin and then held hostage of these BigTech/GAFAM surveillance corporations that are only getting worse as time goes by.

FYI: an interesting video on How KDE Plasma 6 Was Made

That was like loooong 20 years ago, Things have definitely changed since then and these days KDE Plasma is quite light and extremely efficient.

Yes, Steam Deck does use KDE Plasma in the desktop mode of their Arch-based SteamOS operating system. And if only this increases th numbers of KDE Plasma users, well it goes to show how much we need to fight computers being sold with pre-installed Windows :) Or even better fight for use of only libre/opensource software in schools.

Yeah it basically just checks how old the release you are using is and if it is older than half a year it reminds you to check for a newer version to download. See this commit here.