A few months ago, I blogged about a change for Plasma 6.2 to show a once-a-year system notification asking for a donation, starting on December 1st. Various reasons and justifications were given in that post, so I won’t repeat them here. Instead, since December 1st was yesterday in most of the world, it’s time to check in on the day 1 experience! So let’s get right into it:
Did it work?
Well, I woke up to an email inbox that looked like this:
And by the end of the day, the graph on https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations (which by the way only counts direct Paypal donations and still doesn’t include those made using Donorbox or direct bank transfer) wound up looking like this:
Yes that’s right, KDE e.V. received double the prior two months’ Paypal donations in a single day!!!
Do people hate us now?
So far, indications point to no! I scoured https://www.reddit.com/r/kde and https://discuss.kde.org all day yesterday and literally only found one non-positive comment about it, dwarfed by a large volume of mildly to highly positive ones. I wasn’t looking at Mastodon or other social media, but a colleague reported something similar.
In addition, a large number of the donations themselves were accompanied by positive messages from the donors. Here are some of my favorites:
KDE is more than just software, it’s a family. Least I can donate, but it’s coming from someone that pirates every other thing or uses the free alternative.
Thanks for all your incredible work over the years.
KDE Plasma is a big part of why I have grown to love Linux as my daily driver 💙
Thanks for all you have done for the linux desktop community
Thanks for Plasma! Couldn’t work without it! (Visually impaired user).
Thanks for your efforts to make the world a little more independent from Big Tech
Love the work, KDE is my daily driver and I’m glad I can help 🙂
Just got the Notification to donate in KDE and after thinking about it for a bit decided to donate for the first time, since I’ve been using Linux and specifically KDE for almost a year now. Thanks for your hard work!
Thanks for all of the work and effort put into making KDE the best DE ever!
So, yeah. On the contrary, it feels like our users really, really love us!
Is this repeatable?
It’s too early to say at this point, but I hope so. It will be interesting to see how fast the donations drop off. Will it be relatively fast because everyone who was going to donate after seeing to the notification already saw it yesterday? Or will the drop-off take a while because there are more notification-based potential donors who didn’t turn on their Plasma 6.2-using computer yet, or opened the donations page in a browser tab to action later? We don’t know; we’ll have to wait and see.
However it’s also worth mentioning that these donations are coming entirely from people using distros that include Plasma 6.2. Right now that’s pretty much limited to fast-paced distros like Arch, Fedora KDE, KDE Neon, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and their derivatives. Notably, it excludes traditional heavy hitters like Kubuntu and Debian. So there are reasons to expect the donation notification to reach even more eyeballs in 2025 than it has this year.
Now that you’re rich are you going to buy a bunch of leopard-print Porsche steering wheel covers and other KDE e.V. board junkets?
No board junkets. 🙂 It’s too early to make a projection based on the performance of single day, and especially if the donations drop off quickly, this isn’t “Thunderbird money” yet. But it does look quite possible that all these donations may push KDE e.V. into ending up with a balanced budget for the 2024 financial year. That would be pretty fantastic, as we weren’t predicting a balanced budget until 2025 or 2026, instead originally expecting a deficit of over €50k in 2024. And that was already an improvement over the 110k deficit in 2023.
Balancing the budget early is huge, and opens up opportunities. As you may know, German nonprofits like KDE e.V. are required to avoid stockpiling money (hence the intentional deficits), so moving into the realm of positive cashflow means we’ll need to increase our expenditures. Thankfully, KDE e.V. has become very good at spending money over the past few years, largely by expanding our hiring on personnel in technical roles: basically sponsoring community members to improve our products directly.
The easiest way to spend more money is to simply lean into that harder: hire another person, sponsor another project, stuff like that — pretty much what I mentioned in the original post. More money means more tech work financed by KDE itself, directly increasing our institutional ability to control our own destiny. It’s pretty great stuff if you ask me. But again, this is a collective board decision, not up to me alone. And if you disagree with me that this is the right use for KDE’s money, that’s fine too, and I’ll mention that I’m up for re-election on the board next year, so please do feel free to run or vote against me if you’re a KDE e.V. member! The organization works best with a board that reflects its membership’s preferences. I have zero desire to occupy that seat if I’m not representing people properly.
Anyway, it works. It appears to really work. My conclusion is that KDE has built up enough goodwill that our user community loves and trusts us, which made this outpouring of financial support possible. It’s humbling and kind of overwhelming. But it all strengthens my conviction that KDE is pointing in the right direction and amounts to a strong positive force for humanity!
Want to help out? In addition to donating your money which is what we’ve been talking about, an arguably more impactful approach is to donate your time directly, bypassing any institutional middleman that buys time with money! It’s not hard to get started, and there are loads of resources and mentorship opportunities. So help make the world a better place through KDE today!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
always glad to see my all-time favourite open source project thriving like this. Many thanks to everyone that donated, thanks for keeping this project afloat! Also thanks for your work Nate.
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Yep, this is fantastic news. Really glad it worked, I expected it to work.. but not this well!
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It worked here as well!
I think twice a year would also be acceptable 🙂
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Posted this already on reddit but probably has not been seen yet, so I repeat myself here because I think it’s important. Some people have left their full name incl. their address in the comment field, which is now shown publicly. Any chance to hide those comments manually by you or some KDE admin?
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That’s so cool and wholesome!
I am sad that I didn’t get that notification yesterday, I wonder why. But that doesn’t matter, I had already donated 💚🩵💜
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I donate a small amount monthly and I would definitely recommend it to everyone. Think of your subscriptions and how they don’t do nearly as much or close to as much good as KDE.
Smaller monthly donations give a more predictable income to KDE ev which makes it easier to have salary commitments for all the wonderful Devs and the excellent work they do.
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I wish there is a list of top priority bugs / missing features for KDE. Now I have moved back to Windows.
My personal TOP.
First priority:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=453661
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=486165
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=427214
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15329
Second priority:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=493841
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=488758
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Hello, its me, “where are the kde 1/2 VMs for the 25th Birthday of KDE?” Guy. Glad this worked so well for KDE!
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Hi Nate, besides being a monthly subscriber since last campaign, yesterday I have donated 50 euro + processing costs via PayPal, but I missed the step where I could adopt an app. What did I do wrong?
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I ran into the same issue! I thought we just needed to select the app at the end of the process, but it looks like we were supposed to check the box on the first part of the donation and to leave a comment and share our intention to adopt the app.
Right now, I’m not sure if there’s a way to contact someone about getting our app adoption set up. I couldn’t find an email contact for KDE anywhere.
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Maybe contact the KDE fundraising working group https://ev.kde.org/workinggroups/fundraisingwg/
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Yeah, it worked. It was not intrusive and provided an easy way to donate, so I did.
However, Brodie nas a point, that if there is some fundraiser or any event, KDE should sent emails to all influencers and media. It looks like marketing department at KDE is still not doing a good job or maybe there is no such department?
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Based on historical numbers and some inference, I estimate that KDE e.V. would’ve taken in anywhere from €16,000 and €22,000, without the donation notification being implemented – the last two months were already at/near record-breaking levels, and there is an unmistakable trend over the past several years of increasing donations during December, which alone accounts for 15-22% of the yearly total, in terms of funds.
But now, with nearly €56,000 raised for December 2024 as of the time of writing, and a somewhat reliable trend to go on (although these can be extremely unpredictable, and this is unprecedented after all), I estimate that by the end of the month, KDE e.V. will have raised about €127,000. (To account for general exponential decay.) Of course, with volatility and unpredictable trends, I could end up being way off. Hopefully, I’m well short of where the actual amount ends up.
Volume peaked on 1 Dec at approximately 10:00 UTC, though there was a noticeable spike at 4 Dec starting at approximately 20:15 UTC. One thing I’ve noticed is that the average donation amount drops slightly during periods of higher volume (closer to €25, as opposed to closer to €35)
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Here’s a link to the historical ledger of KDE e.V. donations; since its inception in 2002, KDE e.V. has raised at least €434,868.65 from at least 16,788 donations (€25.90 average, €16.00 median)
https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations.php
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This is a good move and there is nothing bad about asking for money. Some thoughts on improving this notification:
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Will be interested to see if anything major gets done. Supposedly everything under the hood was rewritten for plasma 6 which was obviously not true. Like the input system (whatever that is). Rewriting that is supposedly a ~50k project. Lets see.
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Input method, assuming this is what you are referring to, is essentially means for programs to enter text on the user’s behalf.
Originally devised to allow input of characters that the user’s keyboard does not support natively, e.g. typing Asian language characters on a European language keyboard.
Other common use cases are on-screen keyboards, speech-to-text input, or password entry for applications that can’t access the password manager directly.
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FWIW rewriting “everything” would be impossible, and I don’t think anyone ever promised that, because it would be a promise that’s not possible to keep. We did rewrite or substantially change many things that weren’t aging well, but it’s hardly anywhere near everything. The work was targeted to only what we thought would benefit from it.
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It’s really cool to see KDE thriving. One day I’ll have enough spare cash lying around to become a supporting member via recurring donation to help ensure that others who are then as broke as I am now will also have access to a state of the art desktop experience free of charge.
I recently looked into helping out by becoming a translator. Didn’t do that earlier because I assumed that KDE would already be fully translated into my native language. Found out it’s not 100% complete when I finally installed Linux on the family computer, which unlike my own I can’t set to English. So yeah, I looked into becoming a translator and tbh it looks unnecessarily complicated, I wish KDE used something like Crowdin or Weblate (see translate.codeberg.org for example).
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In my case, I’ve seen a very acute and positive change between plasma 5 and plasma 6. In my opinion, plasma 5 was bad. Really bad. Was in between this version when I was auto-convinced to try other DE, when I almost fall in love with cinnamon, but then plasma 6 began to grow up fastly, and unlike its predecesor, in a very stable manner, and was this point that it made my go back to plasma.
Recently I got back to Debian testing (just like 5 days ago) when it embraced plasma 6, and I decided it was now the day I’d start to give back to KDE what I had been using for free all these days, with a monthly donation.
I’ve seen a lot of improvements since plasma 6, and by far what I’ve noticed is an attitude. In my opinion, this is what will make plasma get another brilliant era. Many thanks to KDE team. Cheers.
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I’m glad you see it that way, and thanks for sharing the kind words! I’m with you on Plasma 6 being a pretty brilliant piece of kit.
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The donations are really taking off 🚀, I’ve created a chart for Dec 01 to Dec 14 just for PayPal:
https://i.imgur.com/Ca4dNQ8.png
We got 2789 donations in 14 days, which are roughly 200 a day!
The average donated 27,37€ and the median is 25€ (50% donated more than 25€ and 50% donated less).
Which donations does the end of the year fundraiser 2024 (https://kde.org/fundraisers/yearend2024/) include as those numbers are much lower than the PayPal December donations alone?
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As a long time Arch linux user and few years long KDE user I can tell this was definitely great idea and was super happy seeing that notification and being able to donate easily.
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How do I turn off this notification? I’d rather not deal with begging for donations, it reminds me too much of wikipedia’s almost monthly “we really need your money” UI.
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