Why do we ask for donations so often? Because it’s important! As KDE becomes more successful and an increasing number of people use our software, our costs grow as well:
- Web and server hosting
- Organizing and hosting larger Akademy events
- Funding more and larger sprints
- Paying people to work on stuff the volunteer community doesn’t focus on, and retaining them over time
And so on. If we don’t raise more money while our software becomes more popular, we risk “dying of success,” so to speak. Remember, we give all this stuff away for free, no strings attached! Nobody has to pay a cent if they don’t want to or can’t afford to.
Accordingly, if you’re plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations. I end every one of my “This Week in KDE” posts with one, and many others do for their own blog posts as well. KDE’s official social media channels blast it out constantly, and we also do yearly fundraisers that are widely promoted online. If you’re reading this, you may get the impression that we’re always begging for cash!
But if you’re not plugged into these communications channels, you might not have ever seen a donation request at all. We know that the fraction of people who subscribe to these channels is small, so there’s a huge number of people who may not even know they can donate to KDE, let alone that donations are critically important to its continued existence.
Starting in Plasma 6.2, that changes, and I’d like to introduce what it will look like! From 6.2 onwards, Plasma itself will show a system notification asking for a donation once per year, in December:
The idea here is to get the message that KDE really does need your financial help in front of more eyeballs — especially eyeballs not currently looking at KDE’s public-facing promotion efforts.
Now, I know that messages like this can be controversial! The change was carefully considered, and we tried our best to minimize the annoying-ness factor: It’s small and unobtrusive, and no matter what you do with it (click any button, close it, etc) it’ll go away until next year. It’s implemented as a KDE Daemon (KDED) module, which allows users and distributors to permanently disable it if they like. You can also disable just the popup on System Settings’ Notifications page, accessible from the configure button in the notification’s header.
Ultimately the decision to do this came down to the following factors:
- We looked at FOSS peers like Thunderbird and Wikipedia which have similar things (and in Wikipedia’s case, the message is vastly more intrusive and naggy). In both cases, it didn’t drive everyone away and instead instead resulted in a massive increase in donations that the projects have been able to use to employ lots of people.
- KDE really needs something like this to help our finances grow sustainably in line with our userbase and adoption by vendors and distributors.
So now let me address what I anticipate will be some common concerns:
I think you’re wrong; people hate pop-ups and this is going to turn them off!
Like I said, peer organizations didn’t see that happen, and some were even more in-your-face about it. I do suspect a small but vocal crowd of people will spread doom and gloom about it on social media anyway, of course. This also happened when we implemented off-by-default telemetry — which by the way, was implemented so conservatively that it barely collects any information of value at all. It’s a cautionary tale about the danger of being too timid and ending up with the worst of both worlds.
The worst-case scenario is that we don’t get more donations from this after a couple of years, and end up removing it. That’s always an option. But I think it’s worth venturing out there and being a bit bold! With risk comes opportunity.
KDE shouldn’t need to pay people directly; employment should come from vendors and distributors shipping our software!
To a certain extent this already does happen: by far the largest contributor of paid work is Blue Systems — mostly funded by Valve Corporation, which ships KDE software on the Steam Deck. There are also trickles and spurts of sponsored work from distros, KDAB, and enterprising folks who get funded via grants.
Ultimately a healthy economic ecosystem around KDE includes people employed by many parties, including KDE itself, in my opinion. This is how KDE can help control its own destiny. And that costs money! Money that needs to come from somewhere.
Why does it have to be a notification pop-up? Put this in Welcome Center or something!
We had a request for donations in Welcome center for several years, and it didn’t make a difference, because right after you’ve installed the system wasn’t the right time to ask. At that point, you don’t know if you like Plasma yet, so asking for money is premature.
If KDE is as successful as Thunderbird and Wikipedia have been, what are you going to do with all that money?
This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively.
But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer and the one that as your representative, I’d advocate for. It’s basically the platform I ran on two years ago: extend an offer of full-time employment to our current people, and hire even more! I want us to end up with paid QA people and distro developers, and even more software engineers. I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness.
These have been dreams for a long time, and throughout KDE we’ve been slowly moving towards them over the years. With a lot more money, we can turbocharge the pace! If that stuff sounds good, you can start with a donation today. 🙂
I know talking about money can be awkward. But failure to plan is planning to fail; money is something we can’t ignore and just hope things work out — and we don’t. Raising more money is a part of that plan, and this new yearly donation notification is a part of raising money. It’s my expectation and hope that asking our users for donations will result in more donations, and that we can use these to accelerate KDE’s reach and the quality of our software!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
Good.
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Very nice!
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Just made a donation (again), come on, fellow KDE users, follow suit 🙂
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This is a no-brainer: Windows has its start menu full of Ads since years. Us showing such a popup is definitely correct!
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And most (non-tech) people dismiss popup even before reading them. As for nerds like most of us, if we really find them annoying, we can hide them in less then 10 seconds.
Now, most people don’t really get the idea of paying for software if they’re not constantly reminded to do so. Since main OSes are bounded to the computers people bought, they think them as a whole, and won’t pay again for the piece of software attached to the hardware they’ve paid for.
Now, one of the advantage of main FOSS players is that they get as much as 50% functionalities of commercial ones, but have been built and still being maintained with less than 1% of the commercial budget. I’m not saying that should continue like that, but FOSS communities are not going to replace trillion-dollars companies soon.
Also, as long as FOSS projects work on low budget (I mean not enough to get 100 engineers working full-time), it’s pretty much a guarantee that the project will focus on the actual working products, and not only on marketing, buzzwords and unrelated products that will cost Bahamas’ GDP and will be abandoned in two years.
So yes, I think that the popup is fine (and, as everybody stated, is certainly not enough) but maybe the donation page in the welcome/introduction guide (right after installing the OS) could be removed, asking for money right before people started using the OS may not be the right time. As for “Help > Donate”, I guess it has nearly no effect since most people rarely consult help, and may not be familiar with donations.
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that can do implementing at the Welcome-Screen and at the Announce-Systray, where is possible for show disbling or how it can write that.., then it is at the to show in the Systray config as enable or disable, but… this way it remains clearly visible in the systray settings and in your head 😉
The Info should include IBAN&BIC and some text like “The Reason should you write ‘Donation for KDE.org’ ” or something
best regards
Blacky
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What about changing “Donate” to “More info”/” Read more”, to avoid scaring people from clicking that button (some of the less-savvy may think that clicking this button will immediatly trigger a payment, or get you on the hook for something).
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We should do an A/B study about this 🙂
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It’s an interesting idea. This came up during the review as well. The issue there is that “learn more” or “read more” or something like that didn’t feel actionable enough. Like, if I do want to donate, I don’t want to learn more, I want to donate!
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I agree that a blunt “Donate” might look scary, but I also think everybody is familiar with the ecommerce world where there is always a cart step prior to the payment step. So at the end I think everyone takes for granted that pressing the button lands them on a page that explains everything before actually donate.
Maybe a tooltip could be implemented which reads something like “Read more and donate!”.
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Thinking more about this, there could also be a third “other ways to contribute”, option, though that might end up being more confusing and redundant with the welcome screen. I’ll let the pros decide 😉
And just to be clear: having this pop up does not bother me at all.
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It should at least say “Donate…”, so at least the tech-savvy will understand that it does not trigger an immediate action. (The non-tech-savvy will not get it either way.)
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I’m not sure this is the way to think about it. While it doesn’t drive me away (Wikipedia is an extremely useful resource), the yearly donation popup does annoy me. Same with KDE, of course I will keep using it and keep my recurring donation. However, I will have this yearly small annoyance while I specifically chose free software to avoid any type of advertising or annoyances. As I say this, I do realise it is only a very minor inconvenience. Adding this popup will still probably be a positive change for KDE.
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I will attempt to put it in better words: I see free software as software that should do what’s best for the user, and proprietary software that annoys users where it benefits business but just not enough to drive users away.
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“I will have this”
But you don’t have to, you can disable it. Being a recurring donor seems like THE case scenario for disabling it.
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Arguably, that’s what this is. Sure, the popup might be mildly annoying for some, but I think Nate has explained the bigger picture very well: more funds means better infrastructure, more people employed to maintain and improve Plasma and KDE, bigger/better Akademy and sprints etc. I think most people would agree that all of this is in the users interest.
I wouldn’t say this is anywhere near the point of annoying enough to drive users away…
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I think this really needs a “Do not show this message again” checkbox. Why should people who want to disable this have to dig up the kded service somewhere in System Settings? Sounds like a really undiscoverable dark pattern to me.
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I think that while it is a good idea, be aware that donators might get upset because of ‘their’ feature or bug is not treated accordingly, despite having spent some money.
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Hmm, this isn’t something we currently see among our more than 1500 recurring donors. Not sure that’s a real issue. When you donate, you’re not buying development time (or else you’d have to spend like 5k or more).
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No matter how “small and unobtrusive” it is, there MUST be an option to disable it. No means no, not “ask me again.”
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There is. In fact there are two, as I wrote in the post.
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“I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it”
Please, please for the love of god don’t. Get distros to consider KDE more. Strengthen certification that helps linux as a whole. Don’t start competing with the distros, please. This will lead to that XKCD nightmare scenario all over again.
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It’s not about competing with other distros, it’s about having a coherent story when an institution approaches KDE wanting to adopt our software. Which is something that happens somewhat frequently.
If we don’t have our own distro, then our answer is something unsatisfying like, “well, we don’t actually distribute our own software, so please create your own distro or else look at some of our partners here in Canonical, SUSE, KFocus, or Tuxedo; they have distros you might be able to use if you talk to them. And here are these community distros that are quite good too.”
But if we say that, then this institution isn’t really partnering with us anymore, they’re partnering with someone else, and we lose the opportunity to have a direct relationship with them.
In addition, that ship has already sailed. We already have Neon as “the KDE distro” since 2016. The problem is that it’s, well, not very good unfortunately. Its development model is fundamentally flawed since it’s based on LTS Ubuntu versions, which means it gets unstable towards the end of each two year LTS-rebasing cycle due to the need to patch the base more and more to get the latest Plasma and KWin to even compile at all. As a result I don’t feel comfortable recommending it to potential KDE-adopting organizations, and may never reach that point — hence my call for a more technologically advanced successor.
Doing this will not “take business away” from our partners because they’ll still be able to offer what we can’t: professional paid support. We actually are legally unable to offer this in KDE e.V. due to our nonprofit status, since that would constitute a discrete product offered for money. So the story becomes quite coherent, IMO:
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Has it really sailed? Why not discontinue “KDE Neon” if it’s not recommendable after all and move on to e.g. Fedora for instance, which also many Plasma devs themselves?
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Thank you Aleks, my reaction exactly – how has it sailed, if Neon sucks? It sailed but it’s stranded, maybe call it back home? I don’t feel comfortable recommending it to anyone but potential KDE developers or something.
Nate, I disagree because I feel like this is one of those situations where you’re so focused on the end result that you miss the point that the end result should simply be a consequence of a good process
If getting solid KDE software is so difficult that companies would have to communicate to KDE about adopting their software – I mean, your scenario is weird; they would have done research before. So… You’re telling me there’s no good recommendation that you can make right now? Isn’t that a problem between KDE and the distros, or with distros not getting the KDE experience right? Shouldn’t that be fixed? Wouldn’t creating a (good) distro of your own further isolate you from other distros, like a Google Pixel situation except Android was already the biggest global player but KDE isn’t? Wouldn’t that – both making and mostly maintaining a distro and communicating with companies directly – create a needless, enormous overhead just to try and excuse the community out of finding a solution to the actual problem?
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hmmm… @Nate,
already looked on KaOS ? https://kaosx.us/ but it is an American Distro, like i see (.us)
ooor maybe M4 Linux as Headsystem under the bonnet , because M4 is really small OS and really loved under the geeks because, a minimal system where the KDE system could be set up and everything could be controlled graphically and you also have the option of using QT/Gui to influence the system and not just use the tools from a basic distribution (because I’ve gotten lazy 😉 ), but then tools like KUser and other GUI tools would have to be maintained again in order to provide the most basic things like user AND group management and so on.
best regards
Blacky
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(Bla bla bla, didn’t read the whole thing!)
But all in all, i think it’s a great idea! Even if you did it twice a year would not be too much! It’s just a small popup!
Beside, donating to KDE ain’t like donating to “ZOMe others”…
the money do end up inside KDE and for KDE related “things” and not outside in some non-KDE-related ends, it ain’t going to some high-paid CEO either and we can all see you really do actually use it for improving KDE software and related needs
that makes all the difference!!!
(If i ever get the big ones on EuroMillions you can be sure you’ll get part of it… until then… you get what i can XP ahahaha)
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https://discuss.kde.org/c/development/sponsored-work/31
I’m really sad the sponsored work has no effect at all. I wish some visual bugs could be fixed with my donation, but no one is interested.
My wishlist of small enhancements:
https://discuss.kde.org/t/trivial-fix-in-multi-row-mode-windows-group-by-column-even-when-theres-lots-of-horizontal-space/19915
https://discuss.kde.org/t/427214-add-ability-to-paste-klippers-clipboard-contents-on-selection/16234
The major issue for KDE is the “remember windows place and size on Wayland”.
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This is also a small enhancement that would be very handy!
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IMO the catch is that sponsored work in that form – small amounts for piecemeal work – just doesn’t work as a practical income stream for developers. Occasional bits and pieces might get done, but it’s not going to attract the interest that more full-time dedicated work will.
However long it would take to read up on the request, figure out how to do it, do it, get it reviewed and merged, communicated back, etc. would almost assuredly take up more time than what they could get paid 25€ for elsewhere.
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Exactly. Those of us in FOSS generally do this not for money but for love of the product, community, and mission (otherwise we’d be making waaaaaaay more money selling our souls building AI or missile guidance systems). If you want to tempt any of us to work on what *you* want worked on, pizza money doesn’t cut it. Hiring real developers to do real work on a normal consultancy basis typically costs thousands of dollars or euros. Frankly I think it’s a small miracle anyone signs up to do sponsored work for a hundred or less at all. This is why I believe a better model consists of KDE e.V. hiring people directly to do that work.
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John and Nate are correct, but I want to add my personal take – I often help people and NGOs with volunteer tech work (support, admin or development) and I often get offers for minor payment – and my replay is always: “please don’t”. If I do this for myself – because the task is fun, because I enjoy helping people or because I support the cause – that’s one thing, but if you get money involved – I have to consider if the money is worth my time, and it never is: my actual “work” work fees are several times what you can pay and with my free time I prefer to do something I enjoy, not “discount work”.
I sometimes work on KDE features – that are important for me or I enjoy the task – but it isn’t the features that are important for you and you can’t entice me to have less fun by offering me a half-an-hour pay for work that will likely take a day. Sorry, but this is how economics work.
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please mention in the message that the users are only going to see this message once a year and explicitly mention that they can disable this message. That in my opinion, builds trust.
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Perfectly logical and reasonable way to do it – was there any debate around whether to do it at a consistent point of the year vs. whether to do it at a certain number of days since install? (Just thinking to your point that the Welcome Center mention of donations comes up, for many, too early before they really know if they want to contribute.)
BTW Nate, for the love of all that is holy, charge your cat – it’s at 5.8% battery! (Kidding, I don’t know what that widget is but that’s what it looked like at first!)
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Yes, being in December was deliberate. There’s evidence that people feel more generous in December, and donations for nonprofits typically rise in that month. It’s for this reason that we do our annual fundraisers in December. So showing the donation request notification in the same month allows us to direct people to the fundraiser, too.
There’s one case where we delay showing it, though: if you just installed your system in December! In this case we wait for two weeks and then show it, so you don’t get nagged to donate right after installing the system.
The cat is the adorable CatWalk widget, which shows my system’s CPU usage!
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I feel like the “people are more generous in December” could be heavily biased by our christian/western experiences. I don’t know about the adoption/share of KDE users in other regions of the world, but I believe their cultural and/or religious events throughout the year including their “time of generosity” could heavily differ from “ours”. But doing this is a quite difficult thing… Based on the selected calendar system? What then for those adhering to the gregorian calender, but without the “western christian traditions”? I believe simply sticking to December by default (while potentially making it configurable for OEMs/distros) makes sense for now without adding too much complexity.
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Have you considered to add a drop-down with “Remind me in 1 week”, “1 month”, “3 months”, “6 months”?
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Or maybe a calendar to select a day to remember.
In muy case, i donate the day of my birthday, because is when i get more money
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You forgot the “Never” option.
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What happened to the plan to add a progress bar of the number of donators / members on the donate website? 🙂 I think this has worked quiet pleasantly for the fund raiser.
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It’s still on https://kde.org/fundraisers/plasma6member/; no one ever moved it over. Not sure what the status of that is. Maybe you can open a bug report about it at https://bugs.kde.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=www.kde.org so web folks get a reminder?
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Agreed, the progress bar is very motivating visual effect, strange it was not added to https://kde.org/donate/
I have opened a bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492372
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Fired over $30, don’t use KDE yet but looking to move away from Windows on my next refresh, keep up the good work.
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Before you do this you need to set things straight on the website (kde.org). When I click on the blue ‘Donate’ button at top right I get a page in Taiwanese language. The other button with the heart next to it in the topbar presents it in English, which is better but it is still not the language of the country I live in.
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Fixed now!
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Is it possible to donate to specific features. For example I would love to have tabs for windows like Cosmic has and Windows has “Groupy” from Stardock.
I have already donated in general, but was just curious if I could throw in for that feature specifically.
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Don’t mind the reminder, but I just made sure I won’t need it and set up a yearly donation to KDE. Some feedback on that: it would be nice if the default box for recurring donations on https://kde.org/de/donate/ let you input a custom amount. Not everyone is going to read the text and click the link if the presented amounts are too high for them
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hear me out:
if you donate you get a golden Monaco in your about settings page
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Thanks autocorrect for correcting Konqi to Monaco
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From a corporate environment standpoint it is easy to buy a license for your company (even costing high 5 digits numbers annually) but difficult to justify a donation to a non-profit. Is there any scheme under which one as a manager may purchase a support contract for KDE or some of its components?
I am also asking in the context of the Cyber Resilience Act coming into forces where it just appears more reasonable to make/justify that expenditure to reduce risks with sourced components?
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Been happily donating to KDE with a recurring monthly donation for almost two years now.
It is a bit confusing though, or maybe I’m just silly. But I am donating to the “Donate to KDE” campaign(?), although I also see a “KDE: Become a Member!” campaign. What is the difference?
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Please change the presented recurring donation amounts on the page to something more reasonable. 100 EUR / year is way too much, it should maybe be the highest option, not the lowest. But 25 / 50 / 100 would be more reasonable. You can present slightly higher values in a monthly option if you add one.
For comparison, people buy perpetual Windows licenses for $120-200, and a “desktop environment” is only a part of that. Asking for donations close to that range yearly, and for a large, but just one component of an operating system from the smallest donors drives people away. The average donation to Thunderbird in 2022 was about $21 / user, and that’s for the full year in most cases.
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I disagree with this comment. Here are some thoughts.
People can get “perpetual” Windows licenses for a few bucks, not 120-200$. There are always discounts to get legitimate license keys. But let’s not enter into comparisons with proprietary software. You can also get many other proprietary software for free (because probably in their business model you are their product).
Going back to KDE. 100€/year is definitely not a lot (for a lot of people). It’s less than 0.30€ per day. That is less than the cost of a good cup of coffee. If you are not in a position where you can afford that, you should not even think of donating at all, and should keep using KDE software for free and increasing your income until (hopefully soon) 0.30€ per day is a rounding error in your budget.
Having said that, any person with a stable and decent job (even with minimum wage in many European countries) can afford to donate 100€/year without any issues. It’s a matter of priorities. I started donating 50€/year to KDE years ago as a student and now I donate 30€/month, and I will keep increasing every year if I keep using KDE and I like how they use the money they receive.
Of course in other parts of the world, 100€/year is probably a lot! And then they should donate something proportional to their income (or nothing at all!). When you read the average of Wikimedia, Thunderbird and other projects, most of the times the average is a really bad measure. Probably there are many people that do a one-time-only donation of a few bucks (great, any donation counts!) and people that donate monthly a fixed amount.
What is nice about the new (well, not that new anymore) donation page of KDE is that you can choose the exact amount you want to donate 🙂
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For comparison, the German “Kuketz Blog”, a popular website about security and privacy, run by Mike Kuketz, only runs by donations [1]. Roughly >~ 700 people donate monthly, whereby 5€ / month is the most popular amount.
Given that this blog and Forum likely reaches far less people than KDE, I could imagine that offering a lower value, which lowers the barrier to donate, could help, to attract more users and in total increase the income. People who are already willing to spent more, would probably still do so even if they could donate less, I guess.
[1] https://www.kuketz-blog.de/kuketz-blog-aktuelle-spendeninfos-monat-juli-2024/
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I think that amount is required by the statutes of KDE e.V. It’s not just a recurring donation, but an associated membership in KDE e.V. – it’s a special category in German law, and people who sign up for that have certain privileges (e.g. using “Member of KDE e.V.” on their website or participate but not vote in the yearly General Assembly), see https://ev.kde.org/getinvolved/supporting-members/ and https://ev.kde.org/corporate/statutes/.
The website should probably make this clearer, and make the small recurring donations option more prominent – it’s already possible through the “custom monthly amounts” link in the right-hand sidebar to donate custom amounts (with a minimum of €3).
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I second that. I was looking at donating to KDE several times in the last few years, but I can never justify a 25€/quarter in my donations budget (that I have to clear with my spouse, so it can’t be a spontaneous decision). I think you should add “monthly” option of 5€ or even add the option for people to enter their own.
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I don’t mind the donation ask at all, but I do mind pretty much everything else KDE is doing (or not doing)
I’ve written this before, but If you want thunderbird level of funding success, you better start reporting your finances clearly like thunderbird does. KDE finance reports are the most obscure mess I’ve ever read. Total money you take in every year and where it is going is not reported. Not to mention there’s still no 2023 report.
Also I remember KDE’s goal of having 1000 supporting members, it’s over 1500 now. What do they get for it? A total duration of a playlist get’s a weekly highlight as a feature meanwhile the pure basics like laggy mouse movement (not to mention animations) is not even working correctly.
Why would anyone donate?
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https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2023/#working-groups_
Income and expenses are shown with specific numbers.
If you’re experiencing issues with our software, the first step is to submit bug reports so the developers are made aware and have a chance to fix it.
Laggy mouse movement is so critically bad that obviously this is not a widespread issue or else nobody would use Plasma. Which means it’s probably being caused by a very specific combination of hardware, software, drivers, settings, etc. If you don’t report this in the form of a bug report, it will probably never even have a chance of being fixed except maybe by accident, so I’d strongly recommend doing so.
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The fact is low awareness about how to being a good community member. For some people, they only want to use the software.
For commercial software, we buy the product only to use it. But for community, we have extra privileges, that we can proud to be involved in the development of our favorite software.
I think what KDE does is right.
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It is time to move KDE Neon to Fedora KDE, and make the KDE OS based on Fedora Kinoite, for a future OS.
Ubuntu is going to push snaps more and more and I worry this might eventually impact Neon.
And Fedora (and RH) are much more friendly with upstream than Canonical ever has been.
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Well, for me it was a last straw. Using such a great software for years without a donations it’s not an option anymore.
Take some cash, guys, you made a solid and awesome desktop. You rock!
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Once a year is too rarely, make it two pop-ups per year.
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Hey Nate,
in case you’d like to point out to a German version of this artice:
https://www.s3nnet.de/nate-graham-spendenaufrufe-fuer-plasma-and-world-domination/
Btw, how’s your German doing?
Cheers, Christian
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Gut genug um diesen Artikel zu verstehen, aber war es einfacher weil Ich der ursprüngliche Autor war! Danke für die Übersetzung!
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Totally acceptable to ask for donations. To ask others to value this great engineering effort is healthy for everyone.
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1 yr 1 time is good.
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There are some comments here raising the potential concern of competition with distros. What I have seen, especially among more non tech people who just want their computer to get work done, the interface and the softwares matter more than the underlying technologies, package manager and release cycle. They simply do not care about distro.
Sure we here at KDE have views on how (free) softwares should work and behave and interact with humans. Software is inherently political. So what I suggest is that if an OS is going to happen, then we better account for the difference in views with generic distros and make a very opinionated one which focuses on the interface and interaction with all the softwares present, not only KDE ones. That means we need our infrastructure as well to build/pull from suitable distros and deploy all the software from base in our very own opinionated manner.
This can be our response that “if you like this interface (plasma desktop), download this and go”. Similarly It must appeal vendors who should in theory contribute to this OS more. This is all about integration, because of which in propitiatory land apple softwares feel so polished to people.
And this is a very ambitious goal. If we can we should fix incompatibilities with KDE spins of current big distros.
PS: Ffs KDE neon needs to go away. You’re correct, it becomes a mess after initial LTS base gets outdated soon. Long ago I suggested somewhere to use SUSE tumbleweed as base for neon but that didn’t catch up and my attempts was also went away due to lack of further motivation.
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I think it is really not nice of KDE to become nagware this way. But I have posted some suggestions on how to at least make this UI less annoying, see my other comments.
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Please check https://kde.org/donate/ page. “One-Time Donations” sections leads to https://kde.org/community/donations/others which is 404.
I hope there are ways to donate that does not involve interactions with banks.
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Hi Nate,
here’s a translated comment from my site:
Hi, I think that we as a society as a whole should talk about money much more often. Is there a Librapay account from KDE e.V.? I’ve been looking but haven’t found one. I find Librapay really convenient for private individuals, as I can regularly transfer small amounts to institutions. The institution can plan and I have a nice overview of my donations.
Best wishes and good luck Thoys
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This is a bit late to continue the comments but… since the anual report came out and that you (KDE) ended up on the “negative” land i’ll throw another “2cent” at this…
i was thinking that (if it’s not already on the welcome screen / inicial configs that popup when we start plasma for the first time)
it would be good to have KDE asking for donations on the initial run. Naturally it’s not for the users that are testing Plasma for the first time, but for those that are reinstalling.
(also… i continue to think that twice a year it’s not too much, specially since you can disable it permanently)
you do amazing work, KDE deserves it! I think no one would oppose this!
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You have a bit of an echo chamber here, clearly. I dislike this new feature enough that I’m trying to figure out how to disable it without ever seeing the donation notification in the first place. Adding features that make the user experience worse is never a good sign.
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The setting is in System Settings -> Notifications -> Application Settings -> Request for Donation. The service itself will stay available just in case you want to turn it back on.
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Im sorry this is wrong way to do it, this is opensource software and what you are trying to do
is make it something it is not, if you want ppl to donate they will do so if they like the software they wont do it becouse of forced popups (Like WIndows) donation prompt only in youre heads this is a good idea, its like begging and no one likes begging from anyone, and pay ppl to do what should not be a payed job then you have totally miss understand what the linux community is about, to donate for a great product thats another thing but to tell us you doing it to pay ppl to work on it then this has become a beast im not touching anymore its slowly going to a point where you trying to profit from opensource software and make it commercialy…
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