Comment 2 for bug 268167

I think this is not a duplicate of bug 53845.

A regular KDE application needs to set up a complex runtime environment. For instance in bug 53845 we see that a simple text editor needs to start kdeinit, kded, knotify, kio_uiserver and maybe others. All these expect a fully set up environment and likely write state information in ~/.kde thus forcing its creation at some point.

However kde-config does not fork and exec any of these servers. Also a look at an strace shows no justification for creating ~/.kde. So it should be possible to fix kde-config to not create ~/.kde completely independently from whether 'sudo kate' can be made to behave sensibly or not.