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KDE

KDE Developer: Why Plasma 6.2 Includes a Once-a-Year Popup for Donations (pointieststick.com) 46

Posted by EditorDavid from the Plasma's-popup dept.
"If you're plugged into KDE social media, you probably see a lot of requests for donations..." writes KDE developer Nate Graham on his personal blog. But "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..." 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... [W]e 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.
The blog post also answers the question: 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.
A reaction from GamingOnLinux: I think it is fair for KDE to expose that they need funding and asking that from inside the UI would not hurt for a software that delivered so much for free (as in freedom and as in "gratis").
Linux magazine points out that other new features for 6.2 "include the ability to block apps from inhibiting sleep mode, a new 'fill' mode for wallpaper, an overhauled System Settings Accessibility page, and the usual slew of bug fixes."

KDE Developer: Why Plasma 6.2 Includes a Once-a-Year Popup for Donations More | Reply

KDE Developer: Why Plasma 6.2 Includes a Once-a-Year Popup for Donations

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  • The multi screen functionality works most of the time (my workstations have 3 monitors). And the shade functionality on the application windows. If that gets broken, I guess I drop back to Xfce(2nd choice). I rarely use any of the K(apps).

    • Most of the apps don't really do much for me except for Okular. It's the fastest and best pdf viewer there is. Ever load a big pdf and have to wait for the scroll to catch up or even sip on some coffee while ctrl+f is running? Those days are long gone. I spend a lot of time reading datasheets and large pdf files and the difference is astounding.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Informed FP though not really responsive to the story. The angle I was looking for was more financial. As it relates to your FP, what happens if he doesn't get "enough" money from the request for donations and Plasma is no longer supported. How much would you be willing to trust orphan software?

      I'd still like to see a donation model linked to specific objectives. I might want a new feature, but it would only get the green light if enough people agreed with me about donating for it. I might hope some softwar

      • True! here you go. I don't have a problem with the idea of a donation mechanism. The operational details provided are fine with me.
        The one thing that does come to mind is my impression of Mozilla and money. It is my feeling is that Mozilla is a top heavy org with a high admin %. With some funds trickling down to the actual workers.
        Be transparent about where the money goes, keep the money focused on the actual workers and I'm fine with the proposal. I did not see anything about that in the info I have read r

        • I should change the Subject more radically, but I just want to catch that grammar glitch.

          Are you asking for an elevator version of the CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) idea? If so, I'll just address the transparency part a bit. Each project would have a budget and one of the major tasks of the CSB would be be make sure each budget is "transparent" about the real costs. On the other end, the CSB would be responsible for applying the "success criteria" to the actual results and should report to the donors and th

    • XFCE is my first choice, so I don't really care what KDE does. If they want to be paid by the people who actually like their software, more power to them.

  • When there is a Devuan release which includes the new version, I will give it another try. I last ran into a bug where 3d games running in Wine would only run while in the background which was definitely caused by some part of KDE. It doesn't happen in any other DE. That had me switching back to XFCE4 with Compiz, which honestly is nicer in a lot of ways anyway.

    I found XFCE+Compiz didn't work well with 30bpp X11 on Nvidia and I'd like to see if that works with KDE, but that is still experimental anyway so I

  • Or is this like Wikimedia, where they've got tons of money for their actual work but they use the reputation acquired doing the real work to obtain donations used for other mostly-unrelated things they want to do.

    • Re:Do they actually need donations? (Score:5, Informative)

      by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Sunday September 08, 2024 @01:31PM (#64772156)

      Wikimedia is located in San Francisco where apparently it is possible for a random non-profit to raise many millions through rich donors and grants from other foundations. KDE e.V. is located in Berlin, Germany, and isn't in this position. Their 2023 financial report shows 349 k€ in income, 457 k€ in expenses. https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-... [kde.org]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        Which is very little for what they provide. When I read it, I was surprised that they don't have millions in expenses (and possibly donations). Firefox collects more for a single browser and they build a whole desktop environment for less than half a million per year.

      • If KDE wanted money from its users, maybe it should have listened to its users. The switchover from KDE 2.0 to 3.0 was an unmitigated disaster that they still have not fully recovered from. They are getting exactly nothing from me and I will not use their software. They are barely more tolerable than Microsoft.

        (did they ever get rid of the unremovable 'ear' icon on the desktop that was always 'indexing' your files eating up memory and CPU time constantly and was so incredibly necessary that they made it imp

  • What if everybody did that? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheNameOfNick ( 7286618 ) on Sunday September 08, 2024 @12:24PM (#64772072)

    Take a look at the list of packages in your distro and tell me, would you tolerate it if every one of them bugged you even just once a year? I sincerely hope that every distribution removes these nags from the very start. It's open source.

    • I rather see an occasional nagscreen popup once in a bluemoon than an animated advertising banner every freakin time i open the app

    • Take a look at the list of packages in your distro and tell me, would you tolerate it if every one of them bugged you even just once a year? I sincerely hope that every distribution removes these nags from the very start. It's open source.

      I can tolerate once, when I install something.

      Maybe when it upgrades.

      • Maybe when it upgrades.

        "New update: We've listened to your feedback! The $RANDOM_BUTTON has been moved to $RANDOM_POSITION. Also please take a moment to consider our work and donate if it's valuable enough to you."

        TL;DR: Given how much shit updates these days are you sure about that?

    • Nobody said FOSS developers couldn't at least recoup something for their time and effort and not every project has corporate sponsorship.

      • I think it would be cool if some trusted FOSS entity (KDE, GNOME, Canonical, Mozilla, FSF, whichever) had a centralized donation service where we could elect to donate to specific projects, then have the service distribute the money to the selected projects. This would alleviate the need for people to search out each project's donation mechanism.

        It could show how much money has been donated to various projects, which would also serve as a way to see which critical service is in need of funding.

        It would have

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      It's open source.

      yeah it open source - free as in speech, not as in beer (or your time). so stop whining and compile it yourself without the nag, you cheap ass tool

    • It's open source.

      I hope that brings you comfort when development stops on your favourite GUI. I just looked up the definition of open source, it doesn't say that code magically appears at no cost.

  • and put a link in app menus in >Help>About KDE
  • If you don't want to see the message take it out of the code and recompile

  • December seems like the absolute worst month possible to do this. Everyone is going to have spent their money on Christmas gifts, decorations, trips to visit family, etc.

    I honestly don't think they could have picked a worse time to try and compete for people's money.

    • Unless you're using a distro that does rolling releases and stays on the bleeding edge, you won't see the upgrade in December but months later instead.

    • Probably because most people set aside $20 for the mailman in December, so it stands to reason that maybe they should set aside twenty more dollars for that other thing they use every day?

      And it's not like they close donations the other 11 months out of the year

    • A lot of people do their tax deductible donations in December so they have the receipts handy for their tax returns the following year.

      I've been told that it's a good way to reduce the amount of income tax due if you did much better than expected income-wise, not that I've really had a chance to experience that personally.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Samare ( 2779329 )

      In Germany and most of the EU, there's some form of end-of-year bonus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • I honestly don't think they could have picked a worse time to try and compete for people's money.

      You'd be wrong. December is as you said the time people spend money on gifts. It's the "season of giving" as the marketing goes.

      This isn't just KDE. It is widely understood that December is one of the most lucrative times of the year for any organisation to seek donations. It's also why I dread the endless interruptions of people asking for donations, or pamphlets and beg-mail being jammed through my letter box.

      Here's more information about "The fundraising season" https://donorbox.org/nonprofit... [donorbox.org]

  • They continually want to add cool features, bling, and making it look cool, but they don't want to fix all the shit they need to, to make it rock solid, remove clunky shit, and generally remove the need for people to have to manually tweak config files. Oh, and disable any snap or flatpack integration. I won't pay anyone who keeps forcing that bullshit on us. You'll hate this, but look at Windows. When you get things to work that seamlessly, then add new features.

    • look at Windows. When you get things to work that seamlessly

      You don't use Windows much, do you? It's frustrating, especially as initially configured. And then updates sometimes revert some of your settings.

      That said, KDE does seem to have long-standing bugs that they don't have plans for fixing, or at least not soon. That's been what I've found when I went looking for solutions to things last time, but who knows, maybe they got solutions since I looked. Like, did they get sensible drag and drop behavior in the file manager yet?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Samare ( 2779329 )

        Like, did they get sensible drag and drop behavior in the file manager yet?

        Nope, not yet: "Add option for alternative Drag&Drop behaviour" https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.... [kde.org]

        • Nope, not yet: "Add option for alternative Drag&Drop behaviour" https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug [kde.org]....

          Yeah, that's been pissing users off for years. And last I looked they blamed the problem on some library. OK, fix the damn library, then fix the damn drag and drop.

          Guess I won't bother to try this new release, because that pisses me off every time.

  • I'm open to donating, but they should bring back different backdrops per virtual desktop (no, I tried with activities, it doesn't work the same way, and activities seem to have been thought up by Windows users turned KDE programmers or so), and bring back the cube effect as well. The last couple of years, I feel something I've used and relied on for ages has been ripped out at every version upgrade...

    • Cube has been back since Plasma6 and you can have different backgrounds in virtual desktops too.

      Sounds like you need to upgrade to Plasma6.

      • Thank you, I'll have to check that.
      • I had a look and Plasma 6 is so new, practically none of the top 30 distros have it, except a few in development releases. I tried out a KDE Neo live image and installed Arch (first time, feels like the old days in a good way, hands on) and yes, the cube is back, but no, not like it was, at least not yet. And different backgrounds per virtual desktop is nowhere to be found on either. Perhaps I've got to look a bit further, but at the same time, you made it sound like it's been common since ages whereas it's

  • It could be a good idea to have integrated, universal donation centers in all distros. Donate to your favourite library or application. Have them all in one view. That would be great 30 years after dselect - the front end to debian's dpkg originating from spring 1995.

  • Plasma's worth checking out. Try it and you'll realize these devs deserve the dough.

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