KDE

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KDE is an international technology team creating user-friendly free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. KDE’s software runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other operating systems, including Windows.

Plasma 6 Bugs

If you encounter a bug, proceed to https://bugs.kde.org, check whether it has been reported.

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Is it true that Thunderbird collected more donations than KDE? (tube.kockatoo.org)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by parens@programming.dev to c/kde@lemmy.kde.social

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I can't find KDE's financial report, but in a video I watched it was claimed that Thunderbird collected more donations than KDE. It seems quite hard to believe, but in 2022 Thunderbird collected more than 6,4 million dollars.

KDE is an entire desktop environment, with a bunch of applications and even partnerships that have yielded a KDE laptop. Should Thunderbird have been able to collect more money than KDE itself, there might be something that KDE can learn from Thunderbird.

Edit: Added the link to the video that I watched

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[–] parens@programming.dev 0 points 10 months ago

Is there any reason to move away from Bugzilla?

UI and UX are terrible. Filing a bug against the right application is really difficult for me. Imagine how hard it is for the average user. Account creation is not easy (it sends you back and forth through multiple domains with multiple emails), finding the right project to file a report against takes a lot of clicks and guessing (is badly detected monitor a graphics problem, a desktop problem, a software screen configurator problem, a distro problem, or a linux kernel problem?), then it is not clear how to find or add logs, and I have never been able to get KDE's crash handler to send off a bug report.

Gitlab and Bugzilla are no the the only projects that exist for this. I don't have suggestions right now as I'm just describing my experience.

Also afaict the language thing is more of a choice than anything

It's a lack of choice. Qt's support is not the issue, it's KDE's support for Python that's the issue. Try writing a KDE widget or component in Python. Where is the KDE Python API documentation? https://github.com/KDE/pykde5 last commit is from 10 years ago. What is https://invent.kde.org/kdevelop/kdev-python ? The README just says "read installation instructions".

KDE Frameworks only has documentation for "C++ with Qt and QML". The API documentation does not have a single mention of Rust nor Python.

You need a lot of donations just to hire one developer full time. There’s always going to be a lot more jobs in closed source software than in open source.

What I'm saying is that KDE could learn from Thunderbird. Imagine a budget of 6.5 million dollars for KDE. The money is there, it's in people's pockets, but there's a reason they don't donate to KDE.

I donate periodically to KDE, but my major gripe is that I don't know where the money is going. They have no financial reports that can be easily found, individual projects don't have a donation button, there's no public tracking of their income or expenditure like on opencollective, and it's not easy to find KDE devs (aka who is actually on the KDE team) so that one could sponsor individual devs.

Although I trust KDE more than Mozilla (MZ pays their CEO 7 million/year and invests in anything but Firefox, their most known project), I would much much much rather prefer it to know where the money goes.