Tech Over Tea - KDE Plasma Absolutely Smashed Its Donation Goal | Nate Graham

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

In December KDE Plasma rolled out a Christmas donation notification and since then we've seen the results of that and even to me it's completely surprising how well this has gone. ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== KDE Website: https://kde.org/ Previous Donations: https://kde.org/community/donations/previousdonations/ Blog: https://pointieststick.com/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. Welcome back to the show. So today, once again, we have Nate Graham on, and the reason why I want to talk to him is, I'm sure you guys have seen it by now, but that by itself has massively increased just what we can see with the PayPal donations, and there are separate donation streams as well. So, yeah, for anyone who doesn't know who you are, I guess just introduce yourself and then we can get right into that. All right. Well, thank you for having me on your show again. It's always a pleasure. My name is Nate Graham. I do various things for KDE. pleasure. My name is Nate Graham. I do various things for KDE. Most recently, I have been involved in some fundraising efforts, and I think that's what we're going to be talking about today in other parts of my world, other hats that I wear. I'm also on the KDE EV board of directors. I'm a QA manager for Blue Systems, where I do QA stuff for KDE projects and I volunteer on lots of other KDE things because I think KDE is fantastic and needs to be used by everybody on planet earth

so I guess before we get into any of the like details of how well it works yeah let's start with that before we get into the details of how well it works how many maybe other ideas that could be done. Let's just get into what specifically was done that caused the increase. Cause every time I post about like, Hey, Katie, you passed 50,000 Katie passed 70,000 every single time. Even though I've talked about it so many times, there's someone in the replies like, Oh, what prompted this? So if I can just have a clip to direct people to that would be lovely. It's the obvious question right? What changed? Well the thing that changed

is that we started showing a very small and unintrusive notification in Plasma itself starting on the 1st of December. That notification appears once and then anytime you interact with it, it goes away for a year. The notification says, hey, KDE is a nonprofit. If you love it, we would love your donation so that it can stay sustainable. And so far, we've had a pretty great reaction to this. We were a little bit worried that it would be perceived as naggy, as spammy. We were worried that ads in Windows have habituated people to the idea that pop-ups asking for money are like an evil thing. And so there were a lot of internal questions about this, about whether it was even a good idea.

There was a very robust internal debate. But in the end, we decided to do it almost, if anything, as an experiment to see how it went. Because anything that's done can be undone, right? And so far, not only has the monetary response been great, but from what I've seen, the social media response has been great, too. Honestly, I was really surprised by how few people complained about this. In the days after the donation pop-up started appearing, I did like more trolling through social media than usual, trying to find people complaining about it. This might be surprising. I literally only found one person complaining on discuss.kde.org, I could honestly not find a single person on Reddit complaining about it. Now, maybe the mods had just deleted all those posts beforehand. I don't know. Maybe

that's possible. It was surprising. It didn't seem like we were getting a negative reaction to this. And on the contrary, there were a lot of positive reactions that said oh this seems reasonable it's small and non-intrusive and that's fine yeah i kicked a few bucks their way yeah and enough people did it that we're now uh yeah over 100k right there right i do remember there what being one comment on the um on the merge request as well um and so the inshittification of kde begins as someone who's donated to KDE in the past, this is how to ensure you never see another cent from me. That was after everything had already been merged.

Yep. But before it had appeared. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, you can't please everybody, but it seems like it worked. On the KDE Discuss, do you remember the complaint that someone had? Was it basically just like they don't like there being prompts or was there something different they maybe had an issue with? So it was almost barely a complaint.

The person said, oh, I didn't expect this. This thing popped up. Have I been hacked? Is there malware on my computer? And then somebody said, no, this is normal. This is an intentional thing. It's actually legit KDE. You don't have some crypto miner on your machine.

And then they said, oh, okay. All right, that's fine. After the launch, was it, what was the update that enabled cursor magnification by default? Was it 6.1? Good question. I think it was 6.1 but it might have even been 6.0 zero or one but after that update if you assume that anything that pops up on your screen is katie going wrong like that's the update where i've seen so many people confused like i know i saw here like why does this happen every time

people have to explain like you can just go into your what i think is really funny is that it's a meme at this point so somebody says oh my god why is my cursor huge what's going on and people pile on and they say you just discovered the best hidden feature of kve what are you complaining about so i i like that this is a thing right this has been very enthusiastically adopted as a little easter egg of sorts i think the reason why this is maybe not had the negative reception you might have expected is kind of a twofold thing one is the frequency of the notifications because you'll see a lot of people i've seen a lot of people kind of turning it's still positive it's still doing really well for the project but i've see a lot of people i've seen a lot of people kind of turning it's still positive it's still doing really well for the project but i've seen a lot of people

having a lot more negative reception for the thunderbird approach because now it's every update it's appearing and people are starting to get kind of like you know at a point you start getting like worn out by it now that doesn't mean it's not successful if you look at the thunderbird metrics it's still it's doing better than it was before it's through the roof yeah but in the same token then you have wikipedia where people know how much money wikipedia has they know they have giant corporate sponsors and every time the notification appears they make it sound like they're going to go out of business tomorrow so people are like like i i know that you need the money and it's like a it's a non-profit but the frequency and the way that you're going about it and i'm sure it still works really well don't get me wrong like this is the other thing even if there's a lot of people complaining about it the numbers don't lie

but then you have the other side of that which i also think is why it's gone so well and that's because kd has a lot of goodwill that has developed over the years it's you know bugs have been addressed the project's gotten better people remember like you'll still people hear people talk about kd being really buggy and that's because KDE 4, and it's improved a lot since then, but obviously that, like, that idea is still there, but if you actually go and try it, you realize, yeah, of course, every piece of software has bugs, but for the most part, it's a rock-solid experience, and it feels like if you bring up issues, they actually can be addressed. And it's just the idea that because the project's in such a good state and people are happy with where it's going, they're happy with a little bit of friction as well.

Yeah, I agree with you on the subject of goodwill. I agree that we've built up a lot of it. And that was a primary motivation was that we don't want to squander that goodwill. We don't want to damage it. And ideally we don't even want to be, so to speak, making a withdrawal, right? Like if we ask for money and that request for money amounts to, you know, a 5% withdrawal, so to speak, of goodwill. Technically, that's still a lot of goodwill, but that's also a damaging thing

because you don't want to be taking out goodwill. Right, it's a lot easier to cash it out than it is to build it back up. Exactly, especially once you've started the process of cashing it out. And that's why we wanted to be pretty darn subtle with this like it's one tiny thing it goes away anytime you touch it in any way it doesn't show up again for a full calendar year um you know i think you brought up uh thunderbird and wikipedia those were

some things that we looked at as well uh we all like the amount of money that those bring in, of course, but I think all of us kind of had that experience of having the giant red full page Wikipedia thing say, Oh, we're going out of business. It's all going to be, you know, shut down tomorrow. And you start to wonder really like, is that actually true? Thunderbird I think has, has done it a little bit better. And it's not quite as intrusive as that, but we wanted ours to be less intrusive still. And maybe the consequence of that is that we've made less money from it, but we've been starting out from such a low position compared to them that what we have made from this is already, it's just an enormous difference, right?

from this is already, it's just an enormous difference, right? Like KDEV, our budget is public. You can find it online. The amount of money that we, you know, take in and spend every year is like nowhere even near 1 million euros. It's like tiny compared to what you- I think, wasn't it last year like 450 spent? Yeah, it's less than half. Like the income was less than that.

And we deliberately spent more because we're trying to spend down a large reserve at the moment. There were, you know, large one-time donations a couple of years ago. We're required to spend those down. But we had been thinking about, you know, we're going to need to balance that budget at some point because we don't want to go down to zero right um and this has been very helpful i think well on that topic there obviously the numbers we see on the the donations thing are the paypal donations um i assume the same effect has happened with the other revenue streams? So it's interesting. In the very beginning of December when it first started popping up, it was like 90%

PayPal. And then as time went on, the fraction of people who were using DonorBox instead started to rise. And now that we're close to two-thirds done with December, it's maybe about 50-50 now. And of course, it's dropped off a lot because most people who were going to see it at some point in December have already seen it. So there's that. But there's also still the ongoing promotional efforts by our promo team for the actual formal fundraiser, which we have a page on. And that one is you know almost up to almost 50k now so to a certain extent the numbers are kind of co-mangled like

this the number of just paypal donations includes all the paypal donations made for that fundraiser specifically um so you can't just add the two together, right? But I think if you say, you know, 100% of the PayPal one, and then, I don't know, back of napkin mouth, 50% of the value of the other fundraiser, it's still over 100K, which is crazy. And that is in which currency? Euros. It's in Euros.

Okay, okay. That's a lot. It's a lot It's a lot Yeah It depends, right? Like, it's a lot if you compare it to the November number Which, now that I'm looking at it, was 13,000 Right, now, we were saying this beforehand Like, if you look at 2023 December

That was 9,500 on PayPal Yeah, so it's a bit more than that. Yeah, that's one way to say it. It's kind of crazy. But relative to, say, Thunderbird, Thunderbird got like 7 million one year. So, okay, we're not at Thunderbird money level, but that's okay.

I don't know if we would know what to do with Thunderbird money, Frank. If it just came in suddenly, I don't think you would, like, it would be one thing if that was built up, like, because Thunderbird they grow over the years, I think at the start of the graph they show in the blog post they still had a lot, it was like 700,000

but it took them like 4 or 5 years to get to that point and if that happened, like, yeah then you could expand your efforts, but if one year it was just like oh here's an extra two million like that's almost a problem right especially for a non-profit and that's the situation kdev found itself in we got these large one-time donations from you know the crypto pineapple fund and handshake fund and stuff and all of a sudden the organization said

oh we have to actually spend this money. We have thus far not spent an amount of money anywhere near this. What do we do? You know, if you're a for-profit business, okay, it's one thing. But if you're a nonprofit and you're legally required not to be stockpiling money, it kind of becomes an urgent issue to deal with. And all of this was a little bit before my time on the board. So I'm, I kind of know what's going on from the outsider perspective there. But I know that it's been sort of an ongoing, it's been an ongoing challenge to spend all that money. And it's what you have to do, you know, when you fundraise and you're successful at fundraising, you got to spend it

on the project. Well, that's actually leads me into something really important. So KDEV is a German non-profit. And when people talk about non-profit, a lot of people might understand it from, say, the Gnome perspective, which is in California, if I've heard it correctly? I don't actually know which state it is, but it's somewhere in the USA. I know it's in the US. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's California. Okay. With it being a German non-profit,

are there any weird specifics there because it's in Germany that make it different to handle? Yeah, I mean, the legal structures are both the same and different, right? Like, if you look throughout the world, most of the sort of Western, you know, Euro-American world has largely settled on similar legal structures for all these things. You've got companies, you've got corporations, you've got nonprofits, you've got this, you've got that. But the details are very slightly different in the case of everyone. In the case of the German nonprofit, there is a much stronger need to not stockpile

money compared to American nonprofits. That's one of the small differences that I'm aware of. I know the Gnome Foundation has their own quirks and challenges due to the exact legal regime that they operate under. That's something I'm not very familiar with. I think you'd probably have to ask one of them, but I suspect they would give you a similar answer and say, yeah, there's just like these weird tiny little things that affect how it works. So like in general, yes, nonprofits are all the same, but specifically you kind of have to know the like exact tiny little thing that matters. There is one very important difference though that I do want to touch on because again, this is another one that people always bring up.

I'm sure you've seen this a bunch of times. Why don't you accept crypto donations? I know it's in the FAQ, but a lot of people just refuse to read the FAQ. It's right there. This is a German law thing. So if you hold crypto donations, you are considered to be speculating and you're not allowed to do that as a German nonprofit. So we literally can't take a crypto donation, immediately convert it to euros, and then have that money. It's just not something that

those who have looked at the law said that we can do. KDEEV does have lawyers. We have a legal firm that we contract with, and I believe this guidance does come from them. So speaking personally, despite being on the board, I regret to inform you that I'm not an expert in German law, but I do have faith in those who are paid to do that. So my understanding is that it's just a legal risk thing. It's not something we can do. And I know it's annoying to people.

Just, you know, every week or month or so, we occasionally get a direct email saying, hey, why no crypto? What's your deal? Why do you hate crypto? And we always have to say, I'm very sorry, but we just can't. Sorry sorry it's just the way it is if you really want to donate through crypto find a developer that you like and then if see if they take crypto directly yeah that's that's a good answer because a lot of developers out there are willing to be uh sponsored and many are even crypto enthusiasts themselves so yeah that's a good option well in that way also if if you have a specific piece of work you want to fund and you want to fund the specific developer the money's more likely to go to the thing that you want if it goes to the ev

you know it's going to go to academy it's going to go to funding this project and that project and maybe that's what you want to do with the donation. That's why you're going to the EV. But if you have... This gets to an interesting topic though, which is how much money do you actually need to sponsor a feature? And I also want to address this because I often get the sense

that people don't have an accurate assessment here. And that's completely understandable because many people work on open source on a volunteer basis. And so when you see people doing work either essentially for free or actually for free, it can be easy to think, oh, if people are willing to do work for free, then clearly they must be willing to do work for slightly more than free, right? But no, it's not the case. Because when you do work for free, you're working on what you want. It's a hobby. It's not a job. The moment money comes in, it becomes a job. And you have job

related annoyances, like dealing with the client, getting an accurate spec from the client, working on something maybe you don't want to do. Now there are deadlines. You have to figure out your tax situation. If you're not already set up as a freelancer or a small business, you're going to have to do that. Like all of a sudden, it is not a fun hobby anymore. It's a job. And if you want to motivate somebody to work on something on an it's a job basis, pizza money is not going to do it, right? Because it's not worth it. If somebody says, hey, I'll give you 20 bucks to work on this feature you'll say okay no thanks because it's going to take me so many hours to like do all the associated things but if somebody says hey i'll give you 2 000 bucks to work on this feature then you start to think

okay maybe maybe that's reasonable maybe maybe i can do that. So this is, I think, the real challenge is it's very difficult for people who are not wealthy to fund individual features. And I know crowdfunding often gets brought up. Frankly, I think it is probably something we are more in need of in our space because a person who says you know i have 30 euros i'm willing to put into this it's nothing on its own but if combined with many other people who have the same amount of money it could be something but then of course if you're talking about crowdfunding now you need a crap funding platform you need somebody to do it you need somebody to hold funds in escrow you need policies about this what's the tax situation look like what if the feature never gets developed what

if the feature gets developed but then is later reverted? What does that look like? Uh-oh, this is suddenly very, very, very complicated. So it's just really important to understand that whenever money gets involved, the level of complexity doesn't increase linearly. It increases exponentially. So the world of developers stretching their own itch and having fun is just a super different world from paying developers to work on the features that you actually want. You have to like,

you have to think about it in a totally different way. I think people really underestimate the value of wanting to fix a problem that you personally have. And if you have an issue with, like, say there's some issue you have with, I don't know, plasma, what's a random, you have an issue with the way the tiling editor works. And it's like, even if it's some giant issue

that might take like a month of work. If you personally have that issue, like, you can, like that that's a very motivating thing to go and fix but if it's then a feature that you don't have but it's somebody else wants you to do it it's like yeah yeah i think a lot of people um go on this is actually a great introduction to a topic that i think we often don't talk about enough, which is the cost of options. Before we get into that, I do want to, there's one last thing I want to talk about when it

comes to the value of approaching. I think I know why people are really weird about how much things cost. We operate in a global economy of developers. We operate in a global economy of developers. So even if you live somewhere like, I don't know, India or Venezuela, that has a much lower cost of living, you are operating in the same market as a German developer. And if you're someone that has the talent to operate at the same level, you should be asking for those same kinds of prices.

However, there are platforms like Fiverr where people will charge local developer rates for that same kind of work. It may not be the same quality. Maybe it is. I don't know the specific developers, but you have this world

where you have these two extremes where people that have the skills to work at that level and then people who are willing to work for whatever they can possibly make. And it really confuses the value of work. It's a fantastic point. And I think that is not brought up enough. And you're absolutely right. Like, it's tempting to think, oh, we should just hire five Indian developers for the price of one German developer.

But it's exactly right. An Indian developer who's as good as a German developer could get remote work in Germany and make, you know, a German developer salary or maybe a little bit less and live like a king. So you are competing with that for sure like and any developer you might hire in India who can't compete with that is maybe not the greatest developer to do that right like and it's the same thing anywhere you know if you if you get a developer for really really really cheap in any country in the end you get what you pay for right if you If you want to hire the best, you're going to need to pay for it.

And it's even like, we're doing this on easy mode in the open source world because in the commercial world, a good developer will ask for like $150,000, right? A huge amount of money. That's just base salary and then benefits as well. And in the open source world, the kinds of people who are paid to work on this stuff are still largely doing it on passion.

Like any of us who make money on open source, I suspect most of us could quit our jobs and then get new jobs making way more money working on, I don't know, missile guidance systems or something. But then we'd have to live with making missile guidance systems or AI restaurant order taking systems. And there's a reason why we work on what we work on, right? We love this work and we passionately think this is what the world actually needs. This is not what's going to make some pointy haired boss a buck. This is what we think people need. And this is what we're comfortable building to give away for free. And one of the costs of that often is that we work for less money than we could make in the industry. And it's a personal choice, right? I

respect anybody who doesn't want to make that choice, but I also really respect anybody who does want to make that choice. Ultimately, it's what we can afford and what helps us sleep at night, right? Yeah, yeah. At the end of the day, in the open source space, even if you have a passion for a specific project, you might still have a passion for open source. So that allows that price to come down a little bit. But at the end of the day, people, you know, they have bills to pay, right?

You've got to pay people something to get the work done yep i mean the tough thing is because we give this stuff away for free it's always difficult to have a revenue stream you know we we're not charging exorbitant exploitative subscription rates that have a you know 300 profit margin on it there's that's just not what we do we don't think that's the right way to do things. And so there's always like this inherent challenge of how do you actually make money? Because the world runs on money. Money is actually how people eat and pay the rent and so on and so forth. And I think that's one of the great things about KDEEV, making more of this money. I've been fairly vocal in the past about wanting KDE EV to take a more active role in hiring.

I ran on that platform and we have done quite a bit of hiring both before I was on the board and while I have been on the board, that remains my personal perspective on it. And I think it's really important that we in KDE take a leading role in allowing people who work on the project to make a living. I think it's important. Right, because for anyone who doesn't know, there are companies that do fund work on KDE.

Obviously Valve being the most notable one, but there are companies like Blue Systems as well and there are a couple others as well. But I think it does make sense for the organization that is supposed to be managing KDE to be the one that is also hiring people to work on KDE. I think there's room for everybody, right? I don't actually see us as being in competition. Oh, sure. Yeah, that's what I meant. But you definitely should be...

Yeah, I think it's a healthy system. in competition. Oh sure, yeah that's what I meant, but like you definitely should be... People are paid by multiple different actors with different roles in the community. I think that leads to a very healthy and vibrant environment which doesn't have the systemic risk of one company or institution blowing up and then killing the project, right? That's no good. or institution blowing up and then killing the project, right? That's no good. Yeah. I think the best example of this is the Linux kernel, right? Where if you look at the list of companies that contribute to the Linux kernel, there are companies on that list that you probably wouldn't expect to be there,

like Microsoft and Apple and like Amazon. Google. Yeah. It's companies you've all heard of. Yeah. They all do that. And then there's the usual suspects like, you know, Intel and AMD and NVIDIA. But yeah, it's lots of big companies.

And that's one of the things that makes the kernel eternal is because it's so useful to everybody that they all want and to some extent need to contribute to it. all want and to some extent need to contribute to it because yeah they could all manage their own individual projects but they've realized that it makes a lot more sense to collaborate on the things that everybody needs in their systems like you don't need every single individual to write their own memory management system where it's gonna be the exact same across most of these devices. Yeah, exactly. And I know that Meta did a lot of the engineering work on ButterFS, which is widely used at this point outside of Meta. So, you know, in the end, we all benefit when this work is made public and not locked behind closed doors. And that's kind of the greatest lesson here is that all these companies,

many of which are actually competitors with each other, are sort of forced to put their work out in the open so that everybody benefits from it. Like they just, they don't have any other option. There's no other game in town. It's the Linux kernel or bust pretty much. And it shows how, even though a lot of these companies might be competing with each other in the market,

their engineers have to work together on the back end and deliver value that everybody else then gets for free. It's kind of an amazing magical thing if you think about it. And I'm really happy that it exists. And ultimately, that's kind of what I want KDE to be. And I think we're well on our way to being there too. So with a bunch of extra money now in the kdev obviously you can't say you know this is exactly what it's going to be used for you're not the only person on the board you know you don't control everything but what sort of projects would that money be used for like what what does having extra money in the KDEV actually help fund? It's a good question. Again, to repeat what you said, I am not

and should not be the king of KDE making all decisions. This is a collective decision by the board. I am currently a member, but only one member. And any such decisions will be made collectively. But that said, I've been pretty public about what I think the money should be used for. On top of that, there are other things that KDEV has done as well that we would just be doing more of, right? So one is balancing the budget. We want to eventually do that. We have been public about wanting to do that. And this definitely helps take us in that direction.

public about wanting to do that and this definitely helps take us in that direction. Another topic that frequently comes up is what we should do about having our own OS. We have Neon right now and then there's KDE Linux which is in heavy development right now and it's been something that we've talked a lot about, how we want to have our own distribution channels. And you've seen this in a couple of cases, not only with an OS, but we also have the Windows Store. KDEV funded the pipeline to upload apps to the Windows Store so that developers could make their apps available to Windows users. And they could charge a fee for it so that we could make a revenue stream out of that. And of course, the binaries will be available for free publicly if you don't want to do that, and they still are. But that's something that

KDE EV put money into because we thought that it was important to control our own distribution. So the Windows Store is one example, and our own OS is another example. You see how important this is to partners already. Slimbook and Tuxedo both use some variant of Neon in their shipping software. And so it's important that we who do have a relationship with them are being good stewards of this, right? So that's one one option we could do that um there's also the option of paying more people employing more people working on more projects um there's general maintenance of the software stack uh fixing targeted bugs implementing targeted features uh time limited projects to help spin up things that are strategically important,

but that aren't going on right now. I know there have been other people who have asked us to help fund activities that are currently outside of KDE so that we would sort of become a player in the larger ecosystem. That's another thing that people have brought up. I can't comment on any of these specific things as to whether we'll do them or not. Again, these are internal discussions, but I think the point is that it's a good problem to have. When you have a lot of money and many good options for what to spend it on, you're not in a bad situation. Right. And one of my goals is to help us remain in this not a bad situation. Right. Maybe the regulators have an issue of you having too much money, you need to spend more of

it, but that's much better than being in a position where you don't have enough and you're like, okay, what do we have to get rid of this year? No, that's a bad situation to be in. Very bad situation. And even if it's understandable, because you just don't have the money, it still sucks to have to cut back and pull back and that sort of thing, right? Not a good thing. So we want to avoid that. As it currently stands, how many developers are actually paid for by KDEV?

Let me think. Three? I believe three. Are those like contract workers full time? Yes. They're all contract workers at this point. And not just developers. We also have documentation. And then we have promotion. And then we have internal office assistant, which is important for us to do this. We have some project managers and organizers for various things like KDE Eco and the Goals

initiative. But yeah, at the moment, it's just a couple of developers. And personally, I would like to see those ranks grow. I think that's something I have been pretty vocal about in the past. So this is not new here, but that's something that I think is important. So, okay, let's get back to the prompt for a bit. I've seen some, I guess, kind of confusion about how it specifically will and will not appear. So my understanding is there is there is a requirement that your system, the KDE hasn't been installing your system within the last two weeks for it to show up, something like that?

So the code is only in 6.2. So if you're running anything older, you won't see it. So no Debian users and no Kubuntu users have seen this yet. At the moment, it's all Arch and Tumbleweed and Fedora and other similarly relatively up-to-date distros. The conditions are that it has to be December and you can't have seen it already in the year, and your system has to have been installed at least two weeks ago so that we're not bugging you if you happen to install your system on december 5th right you don't want to immediately get asked for a donation before you've gotten a chance to even make an impression if they do install it during december say

you know december 5th would they then see a notification on the 19th? Yes. That's right. And if somebody never changed to, like if we wanted to change that from two weeks to, I don't know, four weeks, it's literally one line in a piece of code. So it's very easy to change, but so far, I don't think we've seen a lot of reason to. And let me tell you, the feedback on this was scrutinized very closely.

We really wanted to make sure that we weren't burning Goodwill. And so far, it doesn't seem like we've had. So there isn't a lot of push to change it. Why mess with a good thing, right? If a user or a distro, there's the whole... I don't know if you've seen it. I don't know if you go and max it on a bunch, but there's like a whole drama over there about some donation button being removed

by an open SUSE patch. That whole separate story. But if a distro, for whatever reason, wanted to remove or a user wanted to remove it, is that a thing they can do? They can do that. There are two ways to do it. The sort of more sysadmin-y way is to go into the background services page, which is no longer listed in system settings. But if you search for background services, you'll find it.

And then you just uncheck the checkbox next to donation notification. Then boom, it's gone forever the other option is to simply suppress its notification in the notifications page in system settings and that one is more exposed to users because we allow basically every aspect of kde's notifications to be customized but if you're a distro, probably the best thing to do is just to disable the KDE module in background services. And yeah, this was expected and planned for, so there's an explicit way to do this

if you don't want to do that, right? Right, because it could get a little bit odd if, say, you're Valve, for example, with the Steam Deck, where you have a prompt there to fund the project but you know people might be confused is it funding valves or funding kde like or they might know what kde is at that point right like if you've installed a community distro you probably know what kde is if you bought a product on a shelf, maybe the desktop is just the thing, right? And you've never heard of KDE.

So it's perfectly acceptable and normal for anybody selling hardware to think, maybe this isn't for us. And I would never be upset if they turned it off, right? That's perfectly within their rights to do. Now, my hope is when we're talking about like, my hope is when it comes to Ubuntu and Kubuntu, they just leave it on. That'll be nice. That'll be very nice. Yeah, that would be nice. I would count them as the community distros, yes.

But we'll see. I mean, that's their choice. Ultimately, as distros, they get to choose what they want to keep, what they want to patch out. It's their right. And one of the reasons why I think we in KDE want to have our own distro is so that we can express those preferences too. Because just as it's legitimate for somebody else to say, okay, this KDE thing isn't for us, let's get rid of it. We want to be able to say, okay, this is how we think the system should be put together in our ideal world. And you now have that option too, if you don't want a different set of opinions to guide your setup.

Is that ideal world going to go back to a single click to open files? Oh, now we're really wading into it. I think we talked about this one of the last times you were on, maybe the first time. It's just got to be the topic every time, right? For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, it's been changed for so long now, I feel like there's a lot of people who just don't even remember it.

There was a while where in the upstream project, single click to open files was the default, but most downstreams were changing it to double click. So a lot of people didn't even realize that was the default anyway. Yeah. It's interesting because I feel like I become a lightning rod for discussion on this topic

because I'm the person who's doing it, but I still use single click myself. The reason why I wanted to make this change was not because I personally prefer double click, but because it was just a source of very consistent negative feedback. Like even if single click is better and it's awesome and everybody should get used to it,

distros didn't agree. They got feedback from their users that said, what is this single click nonsense? Why doesn't it work the way Mac OS and Windows does? And that's legitimate feedback. And I think it was important for them to listen to that feedback. And ultimately, it was important for us to listen to that feedback too. Because when you have multiple distros patching out something, it's a warning sign right even if we think it's better and maybe it is better if the public at large doesn't agree the customer is always right that's the world we live in right there's only so much you can say no you're wrong

this is better it really is better get used to it like you'll be shouting that until you're blue in the face and then you'll be so exhausted you won't be able to do anything else that's useful. In the end, we had to listen to public opinion on this. And maybe public opinion shifts. Maybe in 10 years, all the kids who have grown up with smartphones will say, what is this double click nonsense? How come I have to click twice to open something?

Of course I want to open it. And then all the people in KDE who are still around from that era will say aha you fools we were right all along single click let's do it and maybe that's what happens but that's not where we are right now you know you might be onto something there I've heard indie devs talk about this issue where if they put kids in front of a keyboard and mouse a lot of them have no idea how to play a game if but if if you have them in front of a controller or a touch screen especially a touch screen um yeah like you you'll sometimes see kids play an indie game at like one

of these cons and they'll try to touch the screen as if that's how you play the game so you might be onto something um so for what it's worth i have two kids um my kids of course are very familiar with touch screens but we have lots of computers in the house so they're very familiar with computers when my kids were young the very first thing they tried to do was single click things to open them they didn't understand double click because it's not very intuitive. And then there was that moment where it's like, oh my gosh, wow, maybe this really is the thing. But then I said, okay,

to actually open this thing, you double click. And I showed them how to do that. And within 10 seconds, they'd mastered it. So I think that's really the thing. Yes, if you're talking about children and new computer users, single click probably is more intuitive. But we have to admit, most of our users are not children and new computer users. They are people who were taught double click at one point. Yeah, I've seen my YouTube analytics.

Picked it up and it's a non-issue. Yeah, I've seen my YouTube analytics. I'm well aware that most people here are not 10 years old. Yes. And that's the thing. In the abstract, sure, if once KDE achieves world domination and every child

in every school is using a KDE book instead of a Chromebook, maybe it's time for single click again. But until then then maybe not yeah um when we're talking about the distro's not shipping the donation stuff yet when uh when eventually gonna have a new version i think kubuntu has 6.2 but they had like a slightly older version of it if i recall correctly they have 6.1.5 right now. I could have sworn they... Whatever, it doesn't matter.

They don't have the version. That's the point that I'm getting at. And Debian definitely doesn't. Maybe, I don't know if it's in SID. SID... Debian SID does have it. That one is 6.2. Okay.

The reason I know this is mostly bug reports, when we get Kubuntu bug reports, they're all on 6.1.5. And when we get Debian bug reports, they're all on 5.27.5 or else 6.2.4. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah, that makes sense. Quite a big gap there. Yeah.

But what I was going to get at is it's kind of hard to really say what the popularity of the donation is going to be because this year it's not just that the donation exists. It's that people are being told about the donation. People are talking about the donation. So without seeing what it's going to look like with next year's numbers, which is going to be all the distros having it, and then a year after that, so you have a couple of years worth of data, we can't really know how successful it's going to be. Right now, it's pretty much an enthusiast base. And these are the people who I think we might have expected to already be plugged into our social media and aware that you can donate and that we do December fundraisers. But what this has shown

is that there are a lot of people who sort of use enthusiast distros who still aren't very plugged into our communication. And that's totally fine, right? Nobody can afford to pay attention to everything. We live in an attention economy and there's only so much that you can put into different things. But I will agree that once the more, for lack of, normal people, not as into the sort of tech for tech sake, not as interested in always having the latest and greatest. So we'll see. We'll see what the effect is. Well, this year, what I was getting at there was, it's not just the prompt appears, it's people are talking about the prompt appearing. So even if you weren't going to donate from the prompt, it's people are talking about the prompt appearing so even if you

weren't going to donate from the prompt you might be donating from people talking about the fact that they are donating because of the prompt so it's this this like double up effect it's a possibility and that's kind of what i attribute the rise in donor box based um uh donations to because when you get to the page, there's a PayPal box and there's a donor box box. And the PayPal box is just for a one time. And the donor box thing on that page is only for recurring donations. So there's kind of a higher bar there. And that's why I think we saw such a huge amount of PayPal early on. But then later over time, I think more people, as you've said, have gotten to that page sort of through word of mouth and their own social media.

And maybe some of them have been more interested in setting up recurring donations. I know it's, if it wasn't as successful, maybe this wouldn't have been a great question you ask, If it wasn't as successful, maybe this wouldn't have been a great question to ask, but now that it is, beforehand, what were your expectations for the prompt? How much of an effect did you think it was going to have? Like a 10, 50%, 100%? Because right now it's 10x. So whatever you say is going to be less than that. So whatever you say is going to be less than that. I had no monetary expectations. I had no clue what it could possibly be. I thought that the range would be somewhere between, I don't know, 50% more and Thunderbird money, which is a hundred times more, a thousand times more. So I deliberately went in without any expectations.

My expectations were all on the communication side. I had honestly expected more complaining. And I'm quite pleased by how little complaining there is about it. So in that sense, my expectations have been exceeded. So one of the things I had to bring up before we started recording is the idea of, I've heard other people mention this to me as well, doing more than a single prompt. So obviously December is, actually before that, why December? Because a lot of people are kind of confused about December specifically as well. So there are a couple of reasons.

The biggest reason is that we typically do our fundraising campaign in December already. And originally, the idea was that this would be a formal part of the fundraising campaign. We'd have our promo people talking about it on social media, we'd have the web page, we'd have the little slider that says how much it is, and it would all be tied together. And so with that in mind mind it made sense to have the prompt in the same month that we were doing the fundraiser this year we decided to do it slightly differently and technically make them separate so that we could measure the performance of just the notification separately from the performance of just the fundraiser um we wanted to see which one was driving more donations

and so far it looks like probably the donation pop-up uh other than that i think there's kind of the general fundraising idea that like people are feeling generous in december therefore that's when you should ask for money this is what our promo people tell me at least. I don't know what's behind that or not, but it seems plausible enough. Sure. Although one thing I find interesting was that the conventional wisdom was that people are stingy in late summer for various reasons.

And when I first developed and merged the donation notification, I wrote a blog post about it. I wanted to pre-announce it just so people were less likely to be surprised. And the result of that blog post that I wrote was lots of donations in August, in exactly the time that supposedly people are feeling most stingy and don't want to donate. And I had specific conversations with people who said you know i wasn't expecting that there would be a bunch of donations in this particular month because usually there's like almost nothing so it's possible that that conventional wisdom is only partially true or it's only part of the story

uh we don't know you know i think it speaks to the value of experimentation a little bit because it's easy to say oh well this is the it is. This is the way we've always done it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But sometimes you don't know unless you change things up a little bit and are willing to take a risk and make something that's a little bit different and be willing to backtrack if it doesn't work, of course. Have you said August X? My brain was like trying to remember what is late summer? Because late summer is like right now. Oh my gosh. I forgot you're on the upside down part of the world. Yes. I guess it's early summer right now. But yeah.

Yeah. So I was like, wait. Yeah. Middle of the year. That makes sense. Yeah. And that sort of leads into what I was going to mention. The idea of doing, you know how there's that,

there's the idea of like Christmas in July and all that, obviously big corporate spend money, you know, whatever. But like, it's an idea that people are trying to push. But you already mentioned there that surprisingly people were willing to donate around that time of the year as well.

Obviously doing a prompt every single month that could get to a point where, you know, if people where, you know, people start, you know, you burn through that goodwill relatively quickly. Yeah, I don't know about that. But the addition of a second prompt in the middle of the year, I want to get your thoughts on that. To be honest, I'm not a fan right now. I would like to play it a little bit more conservatively.

I think it's really important that, number one, we don't burn through that goodwill. But number two, we aren't seen to be escalating our nagginess. We said, we communicated once in December, just once, once in December. And if we then say, well, this was so successful, we've decided to stop doing it just once in December. We're now going to do it twice a year. I think that will establish a pattern in people's minds. They'll say, oh, does that mean- The initiation of KDE.

Uh-oh, does that mean we can't trust KDE? Because they said once a year, not intrusive. And now they're going back on that promise. I don't think we want to be in that situation. Now, this is my opinion, right? This is just me. I don't make all those decisions, but I would personally be wary about increasing the frequency, even if it would work, even if it would get us more money because maybe it would I don't want to burn through that Goodwill I think that's more important than money frankly you know because money money comes and goes especially in an

institution institutions deal with huge amounts of money you've got 50,000 euros coming in. You've got 48,000 euros going out. The sums are very large, right? Money is like, it's a form of energy, but goodwill is something that it takes years and years and years to build up. And once you've gotten rid of it, it takes even longer to get back. It's like interpersonal trust. you know? When somebody violates your trust, how long is it going to be before you trust them again? Somewhere between a very long time and never, depending on who you are. And I don't want to risk that, personally. That's my opinion on the matter. A good similar comparison with Goodwill there is I play a lot of Path of Exile. And Grinding Gear Games, they have made this game for the past 15 years or something.

12 years, whatever the number is. And it's been progressively getting better and better and better. And PeeWee 2 came out and it doubled their player base for an early a paid early access of a free game so peewee one's free the early access for the new game is like 30 us dollars and it doubles their player base and that's because they have spent all those years listening to player feedback listening to what users want and even though the game is in like a really rough state when it came out like item drop rates were really bad a lot of fights were super over tuned classes were really under balanced even with all that it's basically like flatline the player base

for the past couple of weeks at like 500 000 people for a game that normally has you know maybe on the highest of high leagues like 150 200 000 people and like that that's that's the power of goodwill there it is it truly is and we have a lot of this in kde right now and we built it up by being responsive and responsible and we're seen as good stewards of the software. We're seen as in touch with the user base. We're seen as not being money-grubbing and exploitative. And I mean, why would you squander that, right? For something as worthless as money, money comes and money goes, right? I mean, it's important. sure of course i talk about this all the time but like like i said money is money is like an energy it's it's a thing that powers organizations it's

something that you can get more of so much more easily than you can in goodwill um it's just not worth it to squander that i think now i have my ideas about this but i do want to hear your thoughts why do you think the prompt did so much better than every single other fundraising campaign that kd has done before i think it's very simple it's because only a very small fraction of our user base is plugged into social media and actually seeing that we're doing a fundraiser. I mean, to use in my own family, for example, people have KDE computers, of course. My wife does not pay any attention to KDE social media. My kids do not pay any attention to social media. All of them saw the donation prompt.

Now, my kids aren't going to be donating to KDE, right? But I think when we look at like social media numbers and we say, oh my gosh, wow, this is great. We have 100,000 followers. Maybe that significantly understates the number of actual users that we have. You know, maybe that means we have a million users or 10 million users or 100 million users. And all of those people are not going to see the social media thing about the fundraiser, but they will see a tiny little unobtrusive pop up in the corner once per year. So what is it you think that can, what do you think can be done better with the KD fundraisers to get the message out to more people?

Because I don't think the fundraisers themselves are bad. The fundraisers seem fine. It's just people don't know they are happening. Well, and if you look at the fundraiser, the fundraiser has actually raised about half as much money as the donation prompt, right? So it's not like one is just leaving the other in the dust in this this year it's kind of special though because you do have people talking about donating to kd so it's it's a bit of a weird case as well because if you donate to that and you know the difference so if you go to the web fundraiser website and you donate using that

box over there it shows up differently right it says this is a different campaign internally compared to the other thing um uh as for how to make the fundraiser itself better it's a good question uh I think that's probably a better question for the people formerly running the fundraiser but um because then any ideas I have are probably ideas I should tell to them. One thing that worked well in a previous fundraiser that we didn't replicate this time was having donation matching. We had, we had somebody say, I'm going to match all donations up to a certain amount. And there was just like a huge, crazy response to that. This surprised me because I thought it was well known that in

political donations, most of the time when somebody says, donate in the next three days and your donation will be matched 5x, it's just a lie. It's not happening. It's literally an outright lie. So I thought people were really jaded to this, but I guess maybe, maybe not, right? Or maybe they trust us to not just be lying to your face about there being somebody matching donations. So I think, I think doing a donation match could probably help if we got like a company in Katie's orbit or like a wealthy individual or something, somebody like a person or an entity you could actually know about i think that would uh that would be really helpful um and then we would we would be able to

do that yes now i'm good um you mentioned people knowing the 5x you donate now thing is nonsense but i have maybe it's just that australia has sensible campaign laws but i've never heard that thing in a political game oh my gosh well you're talking to somebody who lives in a country that does not have sensible campaign laws i don't know maybe this is regulated and illegal but uh you know during the the election that just ended recently me and everybody i know we're all getting bombarded with mailers, with emails that say, click here to donate and your donation will be matched 2x, 4x, 5x, 10x, 20x. Woo! It's a money machine. Yeah. And it's like, it just gets implausible,

right? Who's matching donations 20x? Like it almost selfukes right right it's a silly thing to even imagine who's doing this nobody's doing this right uh so i'm i'm happy to hear that you live in a country where such slimy tactics are for whatever reason not commonly encountered i think that's a good thing i i would love to be able to say that about where I live, but it is what it is. We have our own separate problems. Our third parties are only allowed to accept a certain amount of money, which basically means they're not allowed to exist. So we have different issues.

Yeah, your system's perfect, right? Yeah. But getting back to people knowing about the donation this is something i've i've mentioned a number of times now and i i'm really glad that certain organizations do it the idea of actually reaching out to people that have audiences so i've brought up this quite frequently but every time that system 76 has a new product launch whether it's their new updated pangolin that just came out uh whether it was the launch of cosmic whether it was uh the the thirty thousand dollar workstation machine they have that has like a 256 core uh arm cpu um yeah uh but it was they reached out to people who had audiences to let them know it was happening it wasn't like a giant hey here's

like some crazy email but it was something that was already going to be posted publicly it was basically just reaching out to those people to say hey we're doing this thing if you want to talk about it promote it do all that stuff i think they did that ahead of time and not in advance of the launch day right yeah yeah so um it for the the ampere ultra machine and cosmic they did like a a press call as well but like that's, like, a whole extra deal. That's, like, a lot of, like, arranging to do that. But, um... Klabra as well. Klabra, when they have some... Like, with the recent, um... drop of Vulcan...

1.4 conformance. Um... They reached out to me and a bunch of other people to say, hey, this is a thing that's just happened. Now you know it's happened. Promote it. do whatever you want to do with it i think just letting people know that have audiences that something like that is even happening i think just that by itself can get a a lot more uh word out there because i didn't even know that like the blue friday thing was happening until I looked at the donations. I didn't reach out to you

about the fundraiser ahead of time. I think that's a very legitimate thing and a super valid data point for us to improve on. Because yeah, I think it's definitely a good idea to be telling more people. I think in our promotion, maybe something that we suffer from is that we have

this idea of like people coming to us, you know, I've got my blog, people read my blog, KDE has its official social media channels, people read our official social media channels. And we kind of rely on people coming to where we're putting information. And maybe we don't think enough about pushing information into other media outside of ones that we directly control. Maybe that's something we can do a little bit more. I think that might be a valuable thing. So yeah, good idea. No, I understand the perspective of like controlling

the message you want to put out there. That makes a lot of sense. And I think it's a good idea to have official social media channels for the project, rather than just letting everything be like, you know, whatever people happen to find. But the issue is then you need people to be very plugged into the project to know about those channels even existing, let alone the campaigns going on on those channels. And that's exactly what we saw, is that the people who were plugged in were the people who had the opportunity to donate and a lot of other people weren't. I think maybe that's a notable thing about the media landscape today is that we don't

live in a world where everybody's paying attention to the same sources, right? People have their own personal private little thing that they look at And that's the most important source of information for them. And we've got to be in all those places so that we can see all those eyeballs and thereby be contributing to the problem of attention overload and people everything all over the place. But I don't know, that's the world we live in. Yeah. Well, look, you can try to find it personally, but you're not gonna find it on a large scale. I mean, they say it's an attention economy, right?

That like everybody is competing, not so much for your money, but for your attention too. And we're doing the same thing in KDE. When we put information out there, we want you to take 30 seconds or a minute or two out of your day to read and consume that information and have some kind of reaction to it. And those are seconds or minutes that you cannot spend doing something else. So, yep, we're guilty. Everybody's guilty.

Now, what do you think about... How would I say it? It's maybe not the greatest of fundraising in terms of raw income, but I feel like it would have a lot more goodwill, and that's like the idea of merchandise. I've seen prompt- I've seen like ideas for like a um a plushie of the the mascot. I'm quite a fan of that one. Um you know people talk about things like shirts and things like that obviously these have a relatively low profit margin if you're selling them at a point where people can legitimately afford them but i think people like the idea of i have a physical thing and it's like, it's just cool to have, you know, people will talk about,

you know, how Red Hat employees can buy Red Hats, for example. I think I sold it at a discount. The answer to this, which is, did you know we already do this? Probably not. No, I didn't. What, what, where can I find it? What do you have? We have like a press website that's set up for kde oh gosh where is it uh yeah cafe i'll i'll find it for you um is there a link on the case yeah it works super hit like the fact that you don't know about it and i can like not even find it is definitely a symptom of the problem here. But we do technically have a KDE press where you can buy KDE branded merchandise. And clearly we need to do a much better job of announcing this and surfacing it in public because I agree with you. People love stuff. public because I agree with you. People love stuff. Something that we do is we often will buy like a stack of t-shirts and bring them to an event that we're attending with a formal KDE booth.

And every single time we've done this, we sell out of t-shirts like immediately. Every time we do this, we try to like increase the number of t-shirts that we bring. And so far we've never had, I believe, bring any back so so yeah like very very very good very important i think just a basic change that can be done on the donate page there's already that like meta store page just put a link to that on the donate page i think just that by itself would be a giant improvement oh my gosh yeah so i'm gonna like go do that right after we get off of here but yeah it's the cafe press.com slash shop slash kde right there we should totally do that that's like the obvious thing so clearly there's low-hanging fruit sure we talked about the donation notification

being low-hanging fruit i still think that was low hanging fruit. This is another example of low hanging fruit. So we're like so bad about asking for money. We're just kind of dipping our toes, I think, psychologically into the idea that what we do has economic value and needs to be sustained through money to make it economically sustainable and that we should not be timid about expressing that right like this is kind of a new thing where i think none of us in the free software movement are terribly motivated by money or else we would be making missile guidance systems right um instead and so we kind of have to get used to this we have to get used to the idea that it's okay to use the m word and talk about money and sell things and ask for donations and things like that so yeah definitely we'll put the merch link somewhere else a lot of this stuff is

like super out of date too we could make we could make better use of this i see there's like old logos we should totally have a conky plushie we should have a bunch of conky plushies yeah i okay thank you you're someone okay that agrees with me here here's the link that i'm talking about this was who doesn't want conky plushies i've heard people say it's not going to be a great it's like, you know, it's not a great venue for making money. There's not going to be that much profit to it. Like, yeah, sure. Absolutely. But, like,

that would be so cool to have though. And it's been a thing that has been done in the past, apparently. Yeah, I agree that probably any it wouldn't even call it profit margin because KDEV is a nonprofit. We do not make it profit. Revenue stream, whatever you want to call it.

The way this would have to work is we would partner with a third party company and they would have to agree to donate some percentage of sales to us so that it technically is a donation and not a profit gathering thing. But I think the value of this sort of thing is sort of beyond the economics of it. Because if you're getting more KDE swag out there, more people get exposed to it. And they see what is this weird K thing? What is this strange green dragon? What is this weird white clock that says community design on it? I feel like I'm seeing this everywhere. What's going on? And then that can lead them to experiencing KDE as an organization and our software. And so it's the sort of thing that pays dividends over time. You don't measure it in terms of this made us 12 million euros today, right? It's not what it's going to be. You measure it in terms of exposure and goodwill over time. Right. Community excitement,

uh exposure and goodwill over time right community excitement getting getting more people you can't connect a to b you can't say oh the cocky plushie is the thing that because we did this five years ago has led to this big success that we had today like nobody can measure that you have to just kind of have faith yeah right you and being able to buy merch notes like this being able to like see like sure it's a cool- sure but like I don't know, I'm personally a fan of plushies and um You know, it's something we can just say Oh, I have this thing and you kind of like feel more invested in the project and maybe you're not going to be like You know top contributor in the project. Maybe you want to talk more about KDE

Maybe you are more invested in, you know, if you find a bug, you'll report it because you've got this thing where you're like, oh, it's, it's, I feel like I'm a part of it. I have this thing that like reminds me of the project. Yeah, I agree. And people love having that kind of stuff in their house, right? People buy branded mugs and t-shirts and plushies of like their favorite tv shows their favorite video games or favorite sports team everybody loves this stuff it becomes a part of your identity yeah no i completely agree i completely agree um like this i think you make a good point about free software and like, you know, a lot of people being kind of weird about money. You'll occasionally see this idea and it's not from developers, which

makes sense because you know, the developers are actually the ones writing stuff, but you'll see this idea sometimes where he'll get confused about the idea of free software. They're like, why would I pay for free software it's free software um like i i mentioned that i i think the term free software is just a bad term and we should it should have been libre software from the very start yeah we would have had this issue english right like we have the word free and it is a highly overloaded term. Most other languages, like in French, you have libre and gratuit. And they have different concepts. German has the same thing.

In English, we're stuck with free. And libre is like this awkward term that most people don't know. But I think the awkwardness is sort of understandable, though. Because if you're giving away the code for free, it's really easy for anybody to compile that into a binary and then give that away for free, thereby undercutting anybody who wants to sell it. So there's kind of an inherent pressure towards zero there. Like in mobile games, it's the same thing. Like in mobile games, it's the same thing. I remember when the iOS App Store came out and people started experimenting with selling apps for like $10, $5.

And within a couple of years, the competitive pressure has driven everything down to being zero and ad-supported. And in free software, I think it's the same way because if some huckster says, hey, I'm compiling the software and I'm going to sell it, anybody else can say, well, I'm going to undercut you and sell it for less. I'm going to give it away for free because I'm morally offended by you attempting to

monetize other people's work and so on and so forth. So it's not that weird, in my opinion, that people don't want to pay for it. I think that's a big advantage is that you don't have to pay for it from the user perspective is that you get this for free. I think the challenge there is understanding what you are doing, because if your attitude is I'm getting this for free, therefore I'm getting one over on the idiot who buys his software. You're kind of not having the right attitude because let's face it when you get open source software for free you do have to put up with a certain amount of slowness and development speed you have to put up with being the qa person on occasion if you have a bug you have to report it and you may need

to talk to crotchety bug triagers and developers and not people who get electrocuted by their pointy-haired boss if they're not chipper enough when they talk in your your support ticket right like you have to pay to a certain extent with your time um and if if you don't if you wind up in a piece of open source software that's like so amazing that it's better, then you found like the Garden of Eden. And I personally think that KDE is pretty darn close to this. And we have software that is so good and it's free and it's very stable and it's not problematic. I think it's one of the things that drives people to us. But in general, in open source, I think you have to be emotionally prepared to deal with something, right? If you're not paying, and you're not the customer, because we're not exploiting you with ads and telemetry,

like what's the catch, right? We like to say there's no catch, you know, but sometimes there is a catch and sometimes the catch is it might be buggy. It might take longer for new features to be developed. You know, the UI might look a little bit like it was made by programmers in 1990. Or have four different UI frameworks for the same project. Yeah. And I know that this is something that KDE has been accused of in the past, but we've made a huge difference to make our UIs look like they at least came from 2002. Well, they look consistent, but it's just what has had to be done behind the scenes

to make them consistent. And the fact that there are multiple approaches to designing uis that are all used at the same time well and katie is very anarchic too so it's it's almost impossible to get people to agree on everything so you know we've got our breeze q style and that themes certain things and then we've got kirigami which we work very hard to look like breeze and then we have like another project that's sort of an offshoot of Kirigami. It's called Kirigami Add-ons, which has a lot of really great UI components for use in building apps. But they kind of look a little bit different. They don't look bad, but they look different.

And that's because the people involved in that project think this is the way a UI should be made. I see people criticizing Microsoft a lot for a lack of UI consistency. And they say, oh my gosh, it's like they're 10 different teams designing things in different ways. Well, you know, in a big organization without a top-down leader to beat people with a stick, I think it's kind of impossible not to have that. And so in KDE, you know, we have different people and different teams who have different UI philosophies. And what if none of them are wrong?

What if all of these are good in a certain way, in a certain context, and there's just kind of a messy internal process of getting people on board and convincing people that one is better and that one is better maybe we want to move on to this one and that one and that's what happens when you have a bunch of highly intelligent and capable free software hackers who have different ideas about what ui style is best right that's why you open dolphin settings window and it looks one

way and you open neo chat settings window and it's got like cards in it, right? Which one's better? Is one better? I mean, it's a source of inconsistency, but I struggle to really say that one is better. And we just don't have like 100% consensus on going all in with one or going all in with the other one yet. It's just one of those things that I think reveals that it's a community and not a company. There's no boss that says, make it look like this or you're fired. Instead, there are people who said, well, I think this looks better. Other people said people said well i think the status quo works better and we're just gonna have to figure out something on a mutual basis if we want that to be 100 consistent and maybe even in this state we're already better than apple and microsoft and google well i was gonna bring up that at least you don't have interfaces in kd6 that are like that look like they're from

like kd2 because there are there are things that are shipping in windows 11 today that i don't think they've updated the ui since xp probably not because why touch it it works right yeah i think we don't have that many things that look that old yeah we're a little bit better than that. And we try. We try to modernize stuff as much as we can. But sometimes it's just tough to achieve consensus, especially when you have like two good options. When nothing is like obviously really bad, then how can you achieve consensus there? A lot of wine and cake. I think it's the issue you get into when you're dealing with the more artistic side of software development, because when we're talking about code, yes, there are different ways that you can write it, but there are measurable things

that you can look at to say, is solution better or not like how long does it take to run what is the ram usage like things of that nature you can actually quantify what bit of code is better but it's a lot harder to do when we're dealing with ux design especially in cases where it's so similar right because you can you can look at two very extreme designs and say, okay, maybe we shouldn't have a pink button on a yellow background. But when we're like, okay, what is better? Should the button be five pixels to the left or five pixels to the right? At that point, it's...

You can't really argue it. Always visible status bar that has always visible useful information on it at the cost of taking up a little bit of space in the view. Or should we have an on demand status bar that only appears when you're hovering over something or have selected something at the cost of not showing the always visible part? Or should we have no status bar because that's not modern? And then you have to find that information in a different way. Well, these are very subjective questions. How valuable is the information? Do you need to see it all the time? Is it always

relevant to that context? Is it always relevant to that context for every person? People are different too. So this is one of the things I love. I love UI design because you have to start thinking psychologically. You have to start thinking about it from other people's perspective and getting outside of your personal mental box where you're saying, well, this is my use case. And you have to start wondering how other people might use it as well. You know, we in the KDE visual design group, we have people show up sometimes and they say, well, I want to help make KDE software modern. And we'll say, well, what does modern look like? Every person gives a different answer.

It looks totally different. Some people say I want it flat. Some people say I want it not flat. Some people say I want it blurry with transparency. Some people say I want it flat. Some people say I want it not flat. Some people say I want it blurry with transparency. Some people say I want it to have sharp corners. Some people say everything under the sun. Modern is like, it could mean whatever you want it to mean. So it's tough. It is tough for sure. It's tough in a different way from code, right? Because as you were saying with code, things are measurable. is fast this is slow

this crashes this doesn't the challenge there is being able to understand it and do it in the first place the challenge with the more ui design and artistic stuff is less about being able to do it but having confidence that your mental model of the user and the software is accurate. Right. And is accurate, not only in general, but in this particular place and time with this particular group of people. That's really tough. That's really tough, especially because we don't really do telemetry.

Like technically we have a telemetry system, but it's opt-in and it doesn't capture information that's very useful, frankly. Right, yeah, if you want to go and enable, I think, where is it even in Nate? It's in user feedback, system settings. It's a top level category, but it's off by default. And it tells you what it will actually collect. And it's just basic stuff like OpenGL version information,

you know, screen resolution we're in no way are we asking questions like what do people do when they click on this and then that and then that like we don't have any of the decision chain information so to a large extent we're still kind of flying blind and guessing at how people actually use our software um blind and guessing at how people actually use our software, which is tough, right? It's really difficult. We don't have that information. We don't have the ability of a large corporation to say, here's exactly how we know all of our software is used by all of our users. We, at the moment, deliberately keep that information from ourselves in the name of privacy, because we think that's important. And it makes our jobs very difficult sometimes. It means that sometimes people have

to bear with us when we make the wrong decision, because it's inherently based on less information, because we keep your privacy secure. I think when it comes to the... privacy secure. I think when it comes to the... Wait, sorry, just completely blanked what I was saying. Give me one second. I completely forgot what I was saying. Talking about telemetry and... Okay. Well, in that case... Yeah, go on, sorry. I'll come back to it. I was going to say earlier to an earlier thread of our conversation, when I was going to be, I was going to talk about options and developers. You mentioned earlier that when a developer encounters an issue on their system, they may be highly incentivized to go out and fix it.

One of the challenges to a highly configurable system is that you get fewer developer eyeballs on every feature. Yeah, this is a serious problem that Placer has had for a long time. Of a developer noticing your issue and fixing it. Now, this is not an argument in favor of no settings, right? That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that it's an inherently more challenging situation to find yourself in because we have a reputation as the customizable environment, right? And we did this on purpose. But the more customizable it is, the fewer developer eyeballs you have on every specific feature. And it makes it more likely that issues in non-default settings

are just going to get missed. And the only real solution to that is, frankly, to get more developers using non-default settings. So if you have a non-default setting that you really like and are very opinionated about, please step up to maintain it so that you can notice when it stops behaving in the way that you expect. Because I guarantee you, most other people are not going to notice it.

And it's only going to get found when somebody reports a bug. And if nobody's reporting a bug, it will never be found. Yeah. My favorite example of this is... My favorite example of this is a friend of mine, he uses the magnifier in his desktop. He needs to use it. He cannot function on a computer without it. He zooms into his screen, basically the point where you can see one or two words. Otherwise, he can't read the screen.

And I think he uses like a tv as a monitor as well um yeah like but he's like a developer game programmer as well like very impressed that he does it uh yeah but he uses recently right uh well back yeah yeah um eye opening about accessibility uh but he uses the uses the push mode of the mouse tracking, not proportional. And when he had the monitors, so the way he has the monitors lined up, he also has them off-center,

so they are aligned in real life. And if you went to the top of a monitor with push mode, there was like a part of the monitor you couldn't access at the time. The problem's been fixed now, but like there was just a part you could not access because the monitors were like misaligned in the layout. And for some reason that cut off the top of it.

It's just going to go test that right now. It looks like indeed that works yeah yeah wonders everything works properly now phew good like that's such a specific condition like a multi-monitor hyper zoom off-center layout like the monitors aren't aligned in the in like the monitor settings they're like slightly off and that's just not the way most people configure things so it's very easy for things to be missed like that or um one thing that i i um i ran into over on the cosmic side is you couldn't take screenshots of a vertical monitor because for some reason there was a bug with their um with their portal and you know how when you take a screenshot like usually your screenshot tool will like take a frame of the screen and pause that while the screenshot tool is open

for some reason it took the the frame but it was rotated horizontally but also half the monitor was blacked out whoops yeah and then you just don't know how you test yeah yeah or users test which gets me back to what I was saying before, which is that especially if you're like an enthusiast and you use lots of non-default settings, you have to accept the fact that you're a part of the QA team. It's just the way it is. You're the QA team.

If you're an Arch user, if you're a Fedora KDE user or a Tumbleweed user, congratulations. You're on the KDE QA team. That's the cost because you have to pay for it. And we love it. We love the fact that people do this. I saw something on social media a while back about how there was like a game dev who published his game and got like a thousand times more bug reports from Linux users.

Yeah, that's other than a number of times. You know what I'm talking about, right? Because Linux users and open source people in general just kind of have a culture of report the bug. Instead of like bitch about it on social media or suffer in silence. And that is so huge and it's so important. It's incredible. Like companies pay millions of dollars for QA teams that do the work of our volunteers. So I think to a certain extent, people kind of already get this social contract. And sometimes

it needs to be stated explicitly, but people get it for the most part, especially enthusiasts, I think. I think the difference on Windows and on Mac OS is if something goes wrong in an application, usually what you see is something went wrong. Do you want to report the crash report? And that's the extent of the transaction you get. Whereas on Linux, it's normal.

You have a bug. Maybe there will be, hey, something went wrong. But also, you know that things happen on GitHub or GitLab, or maybe there'll be like a bugzilla. And maybe not everyone's going to do it. Sure, everyone's definitely not going to do it. But a lot of people might go to that tracker and report the issue. And, you know, it's just a normal thing to do.

You get the sense that there's a person on the other side, which is so difficult with so many big corporations today, where you feel like you're talking to a machine. Sometimes you are talking to a machine. These days, you usually are talking to a machine. And in open source, there's a person behind it. And maybe that person is grumpy because you have a bad bug report. But it's a person. It's a literal person you're you have a bad bug report but it's a person it's

a literal person you can have a real human interaction like people used to in ye olden days of like 2016 i don't know i remember what i was gonna say before about it just this world is that it's still people like we don't we haven't and hopefully never will develop to the point where we've got like ai intermediaries and we've got everything super duper corporate and separated off like you have to preserve the human touch otherwise i think you lose a little bit of your own humanity i remember remember what I was going to say before about design. There are a lot of people who have convinced themselves that certain design styles and design philosophies are right.

And you'll see this quite often when it comes to the current trend. Whatever the current trend is, whether that was skeuomorphism, whether that is now with the flat modern design, you'll see a lot of people who are convinced that because that is the thing that everyone else is doing, therefore that is the only thing that is right to be doing. And it is an argument you'll see with KDE where people are like well it doesn't look modern where you're saying like what is what does that mean because I look at the settings and I'm like okay this like this

is what I would expect it doesn't look you know you compare it to KDE 2 it's not KDE 2 if you want to see something that's not modern yeah like there's some there's some design I don't think there were choices back then. There were some ideas back then.

No, I agree. And it's so subjective. But here's the thing is that chasing whatever is current is a trap. Big companies love changing the style because they need to be seen as fresh and they know that the tech press will skewer them if everything is too old and shareholders expect things to be new and so the company doesn't look like it's dying. pressures in the open source world. And I think that's really important. But moreover, we don't have the resources to chase those trends. Right now, today, we're in the process of remaking our icons. KDE visual designer Andy Betts has been posting publicly about this. He's got his dev logs where he shows long videos about what the new icons look like. He's been doing this for like a year and a half.

And it's him and a couple other people. But this is such an enormous amount of work. And it's just an icon theme, right? This is just one part of the visual identity of the system. It's even, frankly, the easy part because you can take the icon theme and you can apply it to everything. You don't need to port 50 apps to use the new style. And so when people say, oh, KDE has to look more modern, we've got to do this, to a certain extent, we kind of can't because we don't have the resources to.

If we change something, we have to change it because it's legitimately better. Not because it's what everybody else is doing. Because we can't. We'll be behind. If we today say, okay, it's finally time for us to get on board with making all of our apps blurry and translucent. Well, that's old already. By the time we actually do it, the trend has passed. If we say, okay, new icons, we're going to make like new morphic icons the way it is today. What does that mean?

I've not heard this term before. New morphic, yeah. Who knows? It's a thing for sure. It is commonly identified by a soft and light look with elements that appear to protrude from or dent into the background rather than float on top of it. It is sometimes considered a medium between skeuomorphism and flat design.

Yeah, it's like super shadows everywhere. Giant blobby shadows. So let's say we do this, right? By the time we got done implementing this, it would look stale and old. And people would be saying, oh, that new morphism thing is so old. Move on to the next thing. So it's a trap. We can't do this. We don't have the resources. We have to recognize that it is a waste of our very valuable time and resources to be chasing trends. just can't do it and if the cost is people

saying that we look old who cares i'm looking at an example of new morphism right now and i'm just i'm just thinking like ios 3 we actually have just gone backwards in time so people say like right it's like fashion if you don't throw out your clothes eventually they come back into fashion and that's kind of my philosophy about ui styling not design but styling is that like with baggy pants or skinny jeans if you just keep them, eventually they come back into style and you should just wear what you like, what looks good on you. Similarly, we should make the UI look good.

We should make it look like how we want it to look like and not care what Microsoft or Apple or Google are doing because they have $10 billion art teams that are capable of making a new style every six months. And we can't do that and we don't want to do that it's exhausting and it's awful users don't even want that normal people don't like it when their ui changes too much they want for things to maybe get better but mostly be stable but like it's such a you know tech press thing to be saying oh it looks old you better change it I

think this is not actually what most people really want which is fortunate because it's not what we can actually provide and I'm gonna be honest about that and frankly I wish more people in the industry were as well clothing trends are a really good example because i remember like maybe a year or two ago maybe a bit longer than that everywhere i would go people were wearing puffer jackets you know those jacks that look like their life vests um yeah and i also remember um there were a bunch of kids that started growing out mullets again even though you know that was the thing that like the 40 year old footballers had so like it came back as like another thing and the same things happening with this

stupid new morphin this is this is shut up with this being new morphins this is this is iOS 3 design. Let's stop pretending. It's like that. You know, with clothes, you get baggy and loose, and then you get tight and minimal. I like baggy. Baggy tight, baggy tight. And with art, it's the same thing, right?

More ornamentation, more visual flourishing, more minimalism, hair down to basics, ornamentation, minimalism, ornamentation, minimalism, ornamentation, minimalism. If you spend all your resources lurching between those extremes, I think you don't end up getting anywhere. I think what you end up having is you have a...

Clothing fashion trends? I think what you end up having is you have this UI that ends up being really inconsistent. You have partial implementation of like three or four different styles and- Exactly. Yeah. Even the big companies can't consistently

roll out a new style universally. Like whenever they say, here's our new style, if you poke around a little bit, you're going to see vestiges of the old one everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. So if even they can't do it with 10,000 times the monetary resources that we have, just not even bother to try. It's a fool's errand, I think. I really feel very strongly that this is not a good use of our very limited resources. Yeah, it took Microsoft, I think, until, like, 11 to completely get rid of the control panel. Like, yeah. 11 to completely get rid of the control panel. Like... Yeah.

No, I completely agree. Like, this is... I think what matters is dealing with pain points. And that I think is a lot more important than dealing with, hey, are we the latest design trend? Like, is there something that we have that is

causing issues for our user? And sometimes that is the UI design. And sometimes it's the UI styling. Like sometimes something is just really old looking, or sometimes something looks in a way that doesn't suggest its appearance. An example I can think of is the URL navigator in Dolphin, the thing on the top. So it doesn't really look like what it is most of the time. If you click on it, it will either transform into a text field if you click on part of it, or it will transport you to a different part of the path that you're on if you click on a different element of it.

It's just not visually suggestive of what it will actually do. So like I would categorize that as a visual issue. That's not a styling issue. It's a usability issue. And that's the thing I really think we should be focusing our attention on first is fixing the actual usability issues. And then later, later we can see if something looks old and old and if maybe it needs an update in a way that isn't going to feel stale in two years, because that's worth it.

Well, there are areas where things legitimately can be like way too old. Like if you're dealing with areas where you have like raster icons, for example, and you know, that's an area where there legitimately is issues or um a trend that i don't know when this started picking up but the idea of our recoloring icons where they will take whatever your accent color is and add that into the icon like that's a relatively recent thing that i started seeing like maybe like past four or so years yeah and we have a bunch of icons that do that now it's actually super easy to implement technically. Dolphin does that. I'm actually looking at a recolored dolphin right now.

System settings has little sliders that do that. This is a nice visual flourish that's very easy to add. So that's also another funny thing, which is like, unless you know, it's very difficult to predict how difficult something is. So you could say, oh, we should have our icons recolor according to the accent color. That's relatively trivial. But if you say, oh, all of our icons

should have two pixel stroke weights instead of one, oh my gosh, that's a three-year project. I think there's an XKCD about this somewhere. The developer is talking about how long different projects takes and one is like a five minute job one is like a two decade job something like that that's really the thing it's very difficult to know how long something will actually take yeah and especially for users who might look at something and it it like you can you can visualize in your head like, oh, well, that's how that would work But unless you have that experience working with the codebase knowing how certain things are tied together

Knowing whether there is even this infrastructure in the first place to make certain things even possible Or you need to build this entire stack to just... like a great example This is anytime issues are brought up on the Wayland side right anytime it's like oh why is this accessibility thing not there or anything like that you're like okay well there's this very long protocol we have to deal with there's this idea of okay this was not part of the design from the start and if we're doing something accessibility wise you probably want it to be something that's across the desktop as well so you don't

have the accessibility tools having to implement specific desktop solutions. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Although, on that subject, I think we should be in a pretty good state accessibility-wise right now. To my knowledge, there are really only three remaining major issues. And we have this listed on our Wayland known significant issues page,

which was renamed from showstoppers page. Yeah, that one. And I'll just paste that in here for you real fast. This page is kept up to date. And this is basically our Wayland roadmap for the kinds of stuff that we have to do to get it 100% to feature parity with what the X11 session had, or even just what we want. Linked on that page, you'll see that we have an equivalent page for X11,

so that we can point people to that when they say, oh, everything is so much better on X11. We can say, just go to this page and you'll see everything missing because there's actually a lot oh my favorite one that people i i am so i'm sick of hearing people say this every time they're like oh x11 do this the first one that's listed if the x server crashes all the apps are killed yes this is because we will talk about the way that x11 worked back in like the 80s like oh well yeah or the late 90s it's like oh well yeah if the server crashes the apps stay up like yeah if we're running

the apps and the server on two different systems but just stop we're not doing this is not how it's not how we do this anymore yeah but yes this page is up to date and we do regularly work on these things and remove items from them once they are fixed and shipped. You see we have a fixed in an upcoming version section on the bottom where you can see all the stuff that's done but not released yet.

So this stuff is a big priority. We want to have Wayland support done and dusted. Personally, this is me, I'm looking forward to the day when this page is empty and we can get rid of the X11 session. And when we do, nobody will complain because there's literally no problem. Everything will work. There's no issue. I think that's really important because right now all the development effort is on Wayland. Most developers use Wayland.

At this point, most users use Wayland. We do have telemetry on this. We have about 80% of our user base, our Plasma 6 user base on Wayland. Wow. That's just the power of switching the default, honestly. We switched the default. Most people stayed with it. It was fine.

So 80% of Plasma 6 users on Wayland. And this creates a really big problem because, like I said, if a developer isn't using your setup, it's going to bit rot. And people who are still using X11, I've started to notice from bug reports, are starting to experience weird little issues here and there, strange issues. There's a bug report just yesterday I saw where somebody said, when I assign a keyboard shortcut to a panel, and then I hit that shortcut on X11, the panel gains an entry in the alt tab switcher.

Well, that's weird. I don't doubt it. But I'm also sure that nobody is testing that on X11. And that's why I think we have to have this done as soon as possible. So we can just say, there is no more Wayland on X11. This is just how you run Plasma. And it works perfectly. And if there are any bugs, we'll fix it. But we're not doing a claim support for this old thing that technically we support. But in point of fact,

nobody's really developing it. Because that's, I'm saying the quiet part out loud right now. If you're using X11, if you're using the X11 session you're essentially using abandoned software and if that is upsetting i'm very sorry but that's just the way it is nobody's developing x11 anymore it's just the truth sorry if you go to the um if you go to the xorg repo i think over the past year there's like i think 50 of the patches are one guy. You'll see a lot of Ex-Weyland. It's almost all Ex-Weyland stuff. No, I mean, besides the Ex-Weyland stuff.

The Ex-Weyland stuff, yes. I think like all of me and a couple of people do that. It's almost always that. But like the actual Ex-Org stuff, there's like one dude who's doing it. I'm not terribly surprised. Yeah. The writing has been on for a while and I totally understand the pain

points for people who say, this thing still doesn't work on Wayland the way I want. It's completely legitimate. I'm with you on that and I think we need to, personally, I think we need to address those use cases as fast as possible so that we can say not only is Wayland

good enough to be the default session, it's good enough to be the only session because it's the only session we're still developing right now. Let's be fair. Let's be honest about that. It really is. And they say, I'm very happy on one of the things that's fixing an upcoming version. The thing where you drag an image and it creates a sticky note. I'm so sick of seeing that issue. Yeah, I think that was a Qt issue. Yeah, Chromium, native Wayland, fixed in Qt, and 6.8.2, right? Because when I first saw it, I was like, what? Why?

It's one of those things that's like both minor and major at the same time. Because like, if this is broken, who cares? There are a million other ways to get an image out of it. On the other hand, if this is broken, you think, whoa, what else is broken if they missed that? Right, right. Yeah, it's... I don't see it every day. When I see it, I'm just like...

Okay. That one turned out not to be our fault it, I'm just like, oh, okay. It turned out not to be our fault. That was cute. Okay. Well, that's the thing, though. At the end of the day, when the user sees a problem, KDE is the problem. It's always our fault. They report bugs to us anyway.

Harold actually gave a great presentation about this at Academy when he was talking about KDE Linux and the distribution model and how in the old model, or maybe I should say the current model, the user downloads a distro that's not made by KDE, the user has a bug, the user reports it to KDE, the user does not report it to their distro, the user does not report it to Qt or GNOME or GTK or SDL or Electron, the user has no idea where the bug is. The user only knows that the thing they're interacting with is KDE, so they tell us. And that's really hard. It's very difficult to deal with that and basically give people a good experience, right? Because you can always just say, this is a cute bug, please report it upstream. And you can do that, that's totally legitimate,

but in the back of your mind, you're gonna know they're probably gonna ignore your bug report because it wasn't written by a developer who they know personally. So in the end, we kind of have to be the ones to take ownership of this. Like in an ideal world, it would be distros who take ownership of it.

They would say say we're the system integrators we're putting the pieces together we know exactly at which part of the stack every issue is occurring if you have a bug always report to us first never report to kde or gnome or even the app always report to us and i think that may have been how things started out in the past but that's just not how things are today. We just don't live in that world anymore. And we kind of have to acknowledge it. Yeah.

When Linux started and the only people using it were developers, you can have very different expectations for what people are going to know and what they're going to do. expectations for what people are going to know and what they're going to do but you know we're not at the point where you need to use another unix system to create a file system so you can then load the linux kernel onto it and you need to compile your your new tool chain from a minix system and copy the files over like that's not where we are anymore like everything changed when um the predecessor to debian came out um blanking on the name um um i forgot it was a little bit before my time sls sls linux um soft landing linux system um when that came out that was the first proper

Um, when that came out, that was the first proper distro. Then from there, you had Debian and Slackware fork off of that because that was kind of badly maintained because it was 1995 and nobody knew how to maintain a distro. Um, and then from there, like that, once those happened, that's when everything changed. The next major changing point was Ubuntu. Like, you still had a lot of developers using it up until that point but when ubuntu happens now you have a system where normal people can use it and and it started i think explicitly being pitched as an alternative to windows and mac os that normal people could use remember the netbook era i mean there was that brief time when normal people bought little mini

computers with linux on it my sister-in-law bought one when she went to the peace corps in ethiopia that's the one she brought with her it was a little tiny you know eight inch screen ubuntu linux thing it was really cool but uh maybe that time is is over now but that was the era, right, of excitement. Normal people could use this. And normal people could use it, but maybe it wasn't at a level where they could use it. But now we have, there's been a lot more progression now, and it's getting to a point where legitimately normal people can use it. Like, maybe it's not everything you need there, but most of the pieces are there. And I think, for me,

gaming was the big one. I didn't really have an interest in using Linux until gaming became a thing. And then when gaming, when Proton got better, Proton became good, yeah, you legitimately can do it now. That's right. It's pretty great. Well, you know, I'd love to talk

forever, but I think I actually have to go pretty soon. No, it's all good. We can wrap this up. I've got a stream to pop into after this as well anyway. So, let people know where they can find your stuff, where they can find KDE and all that.

Yeah, so KDE, of course, is at kde.org. We talked a lot about money and donations today, so I'm going to have to plug KDE.org slash donate. That's important. You can find my personal writings on pointieststick.com. And if you want to read my This Week in Plasma blog series that I maintain, that is now on KDE infrastructure, and you can find that on blogs.kde.org. That's featured there along with the This Week in Apps blog post series, which is done by Kyle Schwan and others. That's where all the This Week in stuff is.

Those are pretty much the good places to find me. So yeah, thank you for having me on, and I look forward to talking to you again sometime. Absolute pleasure. I'll do my outro then. So, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. I've got the gaming channel, Brody on Games. I've probably finished Blackbeard Blue Kong by the time you're seeing this, and Kingdom Hearts 3 will definitely be done. So, I don't know what you're playing. Check that out. I'll be something and if you listen to the audio version

this you find the video version on YouTube at Tech over tea. If you'd like to find the video version is on YouTube. So check the tea. Um, yeah, the with clips there as well. So if you don't like watching the entire episode watch the clips instead. Yeah, I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say?

I want to say thank you, everybody, for watching and thank you for using KDE software and engaging with us and helping to make KDE one of the most amazing open source communities and communities of any type in the world. It means the world to me and I know it means the world to a lot of other people. So thanks so much for being the wind in our sails. We do this for you and we love all the feedback that we get. So thanks so much. As always a great pleasure talking to you.

I'm more than happy to do these anytime something cool happens. Yeah, we can definitely chat some point in the future again. So I'll... Let's do it.