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
I would expect thunderbird to have more users.
It’s quite a popular alternative to outlook in the business world. I’ve set it up at several offices and I’ve seen it in the wild at hospitals.
That would explain part of it. The video I watched said something about a viral crowd-funding campaign and a very active social media team.
Are KDE apps linux only?
No, you can run most KDE apps on other systems, including Windows and Mac. I use Kate as my text editor on my windows work machine.
I used to be a KDE dev. We were largely volunteers, unlike a lot of other FOSS projects that had hired coders. The KDE e.V. funding largely went to server maintenance and helping students attend the annual conference (travel expenses! I benefitted from this a few times). Not sure if it’s still like that. In my era, KDE could easily get by on less.
Probably a lot more stuff would get done in KDE with more money, no? Big things like moving away from Bugzilla, supporting more languages like Python and Rust for KDE app development, (way) better documentation, marketing, ads, fulltime employees (marketing, UX/UI designers, developers, sysadmins, devops, lawyers, etc.).
I’d love to work for KDE for example, but without having to first contribute to it for years, get recognised by some important community members, give talks, and then finally maybe see some money to work fullfime on a project. There are probably many, many developers who would rather write opensource code fulltime, remotely and be paid a livable wage instead of toiling away in some for-profit business writing proprietary code built on top of opensource and never contributing back to the greater good.
@parens @troyunrau Exactly, it took me 5 years from my first contribution to finally getting hired full time to work on some KDE and KDE related open source code. And I’m very prolific in term of contributions (https://invent.kde.org/carlschwan).
It’s quite an issue to get money, the current budget KDE e.V. has is around 200 000€ a year and that pays for a few part time employees. I’m lucky that I found a company interested in developing a commercial open source project based on KDE (gnupg/g10 code).
Would you have any idea where to find the financial statements? I could not find that information anywhere
@parens The last financial report for 2022 is available https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2022/#working-groups_
and for 2021 https://ev.kde.org/reports/ev-2021/#working-groups_
Is there any reason to move away from Bugzilla? Afaik the reason why they’re not using GitLab issues it’s missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has. Also afaict the language thing is more of a choice than anything. Qt already has excellent Python support, but having everything written in C++ and QML makes things easier. But yes, they definitely could use more money and more paid developers. KDE could really use more manpower.
And yeah, a ton of devs would much rather be working on open source software, but if it’s not directly profitable it’s not gonna generate a lot of jobs. 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.
Afaik the reason why they’re not using GitLab issues it’s missing some features they need, which Bugzilla has.
Yeah.
https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting/Why_not_GitLab_Issues
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.
You misunderstood. I’m aware KDE doesn’t support languages other than QML and C++. I’m saying this is probably a choice on their behalf to make things easier to maintain. Whether or not this choice is good is up for debate, but I don’t think it is the result of a lack of funding.
As for where your money goes, their donation page has a section on this which also links to annual reports. Some larger KDE projects do have their own donation buttons (like Kdenlive and Krita), but most don’t. A lot are just too small for it to be worth it, but this is still an area that can be improved. As for the “KDE Team”, that’s a pretty nebulous concept. I don’t think there is one, officially. KDE is a community of mostly volunteers working on KDE software. Most of the ones paid to work on KDE aren’t paid by donations, but are hired by third parties to work on KDE, like Blue Systems or Valve. Right now I believe most of the money is spent on infrastructure and events. Afaik, most of the people paid directly by donations are Krita and Kdenlive devs, since that’s what they raised their own funds for. KDE wants to start hiring more developers tho and I imagine their successful Plasma 6 fundraiser will allow them to do this.
Also, keep in mind the fact that Mozilla software including Thunderbird is just significantly more popular than pretty much anything KDE makes. Yes, KDE is infinitely larger in scope than Thunderbird is, but Thunderbird sees a lot more mainstream professional use than any piece of KDE software and that’s what gets you money.
Most KDE apps are Linux-only. More popular apps will often have some support for other operating systems, but that support is only good for the most popular apps, like Kate, Krita, Okular or Kdenlive.
There used to be (in the 4.x days) a general installer which allowed pretty much who whole KDE ecosystem to be installed on windows. Does that not exist anymore? I used to use Okteta on windows this way :)
@troyunrau @leopold We now create .exe and .appx for each app using Craft. The ultimate goal is to automatically submit the job artifact when releasing to the microsoft store https://blogs.kde.org/2023/12/20/gitlab-microsoft-store
We also do the same for some app for submitting to our own F-Droid repo on Android.
I’ve heard of this before, but as far as I know that no longer exists. Most of the KDE apps available on other operating systems can be found here: https://binary-factory.kde.org/. Okteta is indeed one of them, available on both macOS and Windows. There are definitely a fair amount, but many of these ports are in rough shape and this is still a small portion of total number of KDE apps available on Linux.
Are KDE apps linux only?
Not all, I’ve used kdenlive, krita and kde connect on windows
My go-to cross platform trio right there.
Nice!
They have KDE connect and some other tools but I’m not aware of how popular they are even for Linux users. A lot of it is duplication of other already popular tools available. And their bittorrent client sucks in my humble opinion.
I would expect for most users KDE is just another window manager for Linux. Secondly it’s not even the most popular. So I would expect its user numbers to be much smaller.
Krita has been downloaded in the millions. Kdenlive is getting there, as is KDE Connect since they now support Windows and macOS. GCompris is used by 10s of millions of kids in schools and homes all over the world.
Cool thanks for the info
@Toes @parens KDE has similar market share as Gnome and thats despite Gnome being the default.
I suspect it’s because Thunderbird appeals to the GNU crowd being GPLv2 and written in C. They are quite loud and active.
I think most people who use KDE aren’t as vocal or ardent in their free software beliefs
Yeah that’s a fair point. I’m currently using kubuntu and enjoy it more than other distros I’ve tried. But I’ve never felt a strong desire to adopt all the tools. It took me a long while to realize that the themes store is more or less dead and theme authors expect you to install a 3rd party tool (Kvantum) to get the real theme. I wish they would make that more obvious, cause when you’re browsing themes in KDE none of that is obvious and you left wondering why it didn’t do much.
@Toes I have the real reason!
I tried to donate and the recurring webpage won’t render in browser or desktop Firefox.
Also it is in Euro’s with no information on what that is in your local currency.
Lastly I haven’t heard of a single bank in the list of direct debit list.
Basically I think they’ve made it too hard for UK/USA/RoW to donate.
What’s wrong with KTorrent? Also KDE has a ton of apps (like 200 of them last time I counted). Many of them are certainly the most popular tool for what they do on Linux. On other operating systems, they’re usually not very popular, tho. Krita is probably the most popular of the bunch and might even be more popular than Plasma. It raises its own funds independently from the rest of KDE, tho. It’s also probably still nowhere near Thunderbird’s popularity.
It is difficult to get hard figures about these things, as KDE software is downloaded from many different sources, many of which don’t track details because of privacy concerns (we don’t track personal data of any kind either, by the way).
But we can infer indirectly what the most used (and probably most downloaded) package is and that would be GCompris by a very long way. We know this because
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we have the confirmation from the educational department of one of the most populated provinces in India (specifically Kerala) where GCompris used daily by approximately 4 million pupils. We also know it is used extensively in other areas of India.
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it is the software that pops up organically more often on non-FOSS social media platforms where teachers hang out (for example, Instagram). Through these interactions, we know it is used extensively in schools and by parents in most of the world.
Second in the list would be Krita, again by inferring from several sources, like the number of downloads from the Microsoft Store (most s Krita users are on Windows), Google Play Store, and familiarity with the software in design-themed social media groups.
Most people who use these apps are not aware that KDE exists and are not familiar with the concept of Open Source. For them it is just some software they found or was recommended that happens to be free.
Plasma is not at the top of the list, but usage is probably in the millions thanks to things like the Steam Deck and large installation in public institutions (including throughout NASA, CERN and again the computer labs of many schools).
But, then again, it makes sense that determined apps be used more than the desktop environment: installing and using an app for a specific purpose (to play educational activities or paint a pictures, for example) is much, much easier and familiar as a task for end users than installing a whole new OS and desktop environment on top.
This also explains the success of Thunderbird.
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it probably also helps that thunderbird supports more payment methods.
Thunderbird is probably one of the single most used OSSs out there. I didn’t even know any other mail client for Windows for a very looong time. Besides Outlook that is, which is quite expensive… Well and the Windows Mail app, which looked horrible to me before even logging in (and also came out after Thunderbird iirc)
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