> There are more official break-downs of what donations are used for

If you have any further questions on this, I'm KDE e.V.'s treasurer and happy to answer. :-)

Someone asked if there's a way to earmark donations toward specific purposes. They deleted their comment while I was replying, but I saved it:

At the moment we don't do this generally, but we've been dipping our toes into it somewhat in recent years.

One form this takes is that we now allow sub-project teams to do their own fundraising and "keep the money" while KDE e.V. takes an admin fee, turning us sort of into a financial service provider for KDE projects that is cheaper than places like Open Collective. Our pilot team making use of this is Kdenlive, who spend the money e.g. on contracting dev work on the app.

Another is that we once got a large donation earmarked for and on behalf of Calligra from the Handshake folks. That one to some extent highlights the reasons for our reluctance to do this more generally though - with the Calligra community fairly inactive, finding mechanisms to actually use this money has proven quite difficult so far.

Finally, and this one is probably most interesting to you: The KDE community runs a regular election for community-wide goals; during a past election, there was e.g. one elected for UI/UX consistency. At KDE e.V. we take this election as one of the best signals we have on where we are expected to allocate resources, e.g. funding related dev sprints, or contractor hours. So one of the best ways to effectively earmark money toward thematic/larger stuff, such as the UX consistency you mentioned, is to engage there with goal propsals, discussion, offering support, etc.

What is this "KDE OS" you want to fund? And why do you think it's a good idea?

That's the blog author's idea, not KDE e.V.'s:

> This is a question the KDE e.V. board of directors as a whole would need to answer, and any decision on it will be made collectively.

> But as one of the five members on that board, I can tell you my personal answer

I personally don't know that much about this idea yet, but there's a talk coming up at our annual conference (eventually video also hits the web) that should be interesting:

https://conf.kde.org/event/6/contributions/202/

Will I get a certificate of donation for tax purposes? Do you fill the corresponding forms?

Yes, we do.

(Additionally, if you're in Germany, a few years ago the laws changed and donations below a certain sum annually don't require an individualized form; for this purpose we have a standard one in the docs section of our website authorities will accept.)

> I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS

I think it's a good idea, although I don't know if this is what Nate is thinking of:

Almost every distro which ships KDE right now ships it with out of the box defaults, which are (frankly) bland because they aim to be common-denominator and unopinionated. I think that even includes neon. KDE as a platform advocates choice & customizability, so that's a legitimate choice.

Additionally, some of the distros make poor decisions and/or don't have many resources to fix their own bugs. I know the KDE team aren't super thrilled by Kubuntu, for example.

There's definitely room for a distro which takes KDE as a base and then tunes the hell out of it. Imagine trying to pull off what Elementary did, except using KDE as a base. There's a large userbase out there who want "just works" and "looks nice", which very few distros are providing well right now.

I agree that this is a great idea. I use KDE Neon on many of my machines, but it's a subpar experience. People ask the same question on the webforums all the time: what is the best KDE distro? Having a flagship KDE distribution where KDE developers would be in full control is something that has been hurting the project for a while. One can think about Apple who is in control of its entire ecosystem all the way down to designing their own CPUs.

I overlooked the part about 'a next generation KDE OS'... what do they really think they'll achieve here they haven't with Neon? Wrong direction in this regard, IMO.

Better off focusing on the DE/applications. Their skill-set isn't distribution work, tangential only to their software. That's why I feel Neon based on Ubuntu made some sense. This makes less!

More fragmentation, advertising, and competition for limited resources in the space? Joy.

Can't wait until this, the downstream distribution packaging KDE, and N other applications are competing with Microsoft for worst user experience. Oh, wait.

> I want us to fund the creation of a next-generation KDE OS we can offer directly to institutions looking to switch to Linux, and a hardware certification program to go along with it. I want us to to extend our promotional activities and outreach to other major distros and vendors and pitch our software to them directly. I want to see Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop ship Plasma by default. I want us to use this money to take over the world — with freedom, empowerment, and kindness.

He's talking about his dreams and personal advocacy if they get Wikimedia-like money.

I see, thanks for sharing. Definitely commendable! I don't like that my last message seemed overly negative, so I want to say I support that dream.

To be realistic, though, I don't think a special distribution is the path. The places they want to be default do have derivatives/children/spins on offer, just not enough mind-share. Making another distribution confounds that further

I hope the intent is to really improve Neon, make it the best KDE Ubuntu that Canonical/others have to follow. Distribution work itself is so unrewarding

Yes, hopefully the board that makes the decision will understand that. Or maybe improving Neon is what is meant there. There are certainly plenty of abandoned Linux distributions to demonstrate the folly of such thinking.