Comment by sho_hn
5 days ago
KDE's income from individual donations has doubled recently, and many of the comments we get with donations are from recent Windows switchers.
As I wrote on HN just yesterday, I've been working on the Linux desktop for 20 years and the momentum has never been higher. 2026 will be fun.
Thank you for reminding me that I should set up some recurring donations to the teams powering my Linux experience
Thank you very much in advance!
That increase in donations may also be due to more prominent prompting for them. Got me to donate, at least. But I would be pretty sad if the prompting were to get any more in-your-face than it currently already is.
It's a difficult balance, though I think most open source projects are too modest in asking for donations, which, fair enough is pretty uncomfortable at first. You can definitely be too in-your-face, like Jimbo Wales is the sad-eyed picture of taking this too far sometimes.
Thing is that explicitly asking for money works, it gets results. If you can get people to pay money to watch you screaming at video games on Twitch, you can definitely get people to pay money for working on useful software.