Happy Holidays and some ❤️ from our donors

[Lydia Pintscher]

Hey everyone :)

I wish you all happy holidays.
During our annual fundraiser we again received a lot of really lovely
messages from our donors. I went through over 2500 of them. The vast
majority of them are saying thank you and keep up the good work. I
picked out a few that show just how much people appreciate the work we
do every day. I hope they make your day just like they did mine:

* KDE is what i use for work and at home. I have seen it improve lots
since I started using it more than 5 years ago!
* One of the best open-source projects in history. My congratulations
and sincere thanks!
* In increasingly commercial times it is essential that your efforts
are being continued. I hope you can keep upholding a great alternative
to the tech giants. You are *all* doing great work. Thank you!
* I use KDE Plasma on multiple machines and have been trying to
develop my own applications in Kirigami. I believe KDE is one of the
best bastions of OSS and would love to support it.
* I ❤️ KDE
* I only felt confident enough to move into linux full time because
after testing kde on my laptop it gave me the confidence that maybe
linux desktops are finally stable enough to daily it
* Please continue your work.   It is important and highly appreciated!! :)
* I have used KDE for more than 15 years and it is always very useful to me.
* (☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)☞ You da bomb!
* Thanks for all your hard work; KDE is a fantastic software ecosystem!
* Keep being the GOAT.
* Big thanks to everyone for making such an amazing desktop
experience.  Keep up the great work :D
* Every year I, as an everyday Plasma user, feel humbled by all the
work the Plasma team has done in those 12 months. Thank you very, very
much indeed!
* I fondly remember my time interacting with KDE developers and
maintainers. Thank you for creating a technical community with a
culture of respect.
* KDE is my daily driver for personal computing. Its abundance of
features and the distraction-free experience is great. Keep it going!
I’ve been an on-and-off user since the KDE 1 Beta 3.
* Plasma 6.x has been the longest I've consistently daily driven a
single desktop environment, and has made KDE a very easy
recommendation for people now switching to Linux. Keep up the
excellent work!
* All these years such great work.   Thank you!
* KDE user since the early days of KDE 2.   Thank you for developing
such a great desktop environment for all these years! Cheers for many
more and happy holidays!
* Best DE out there, honestly. Flawless fractional scaling support,
and amazing customization without needing to bloat the system with
endless third-party extensions. Keep up the good work!
* KDE has felt like /home for 20 years now, and gets better every release!
* Happy Birthday! Thank you, the Plasma Desktop and the KDE family of
applications have made my life so much better. Keep up the good work
on the newly-minted KDE Linux.
* I am glad to support anything and everything open source in our
increasingly surveilled world.   Keep up the good work.
* Happy 29th birthday! KDE is better than ever and I can’t wait to see
what the next 29 years bring :)
* 💙
* As a new Linux user who switched from Windows - I love KDE!
* KDE is by far the best desktop environment ever created for Linux.
I truly appreciate the developers' hard work and the direction the
project is taking.   Keep up with the good work and I hope my small
donation could be helpful in some way.
* KDE is the only Software I use where my reaction somewhat frequently
is "Holy Shit this is AMAZING"
* Please continue on this path, you are getting to the usability of
Windows, an old user who returned to KDE after 10 years.
* I last used KDE in school around 2010, just decided to check it out
again, and I'm suuuuper impressed. You've come a damn long way!
* Happy Birthday! Thank you for being a cornerstone and guidepost for
all sorts of fun adventures over the years! You all are amazing.
* I am thoroughly impressed with the quality of the plasma desktop
environment and a lot of the kde apps(love KDENLive, Elisa, Okular,
Kcalc, Ktorrent and K3B I still rip CDs).   Currently running KDE Neon
and it is near perfection for me.   Thank you!!
* I switched my main PC to linux with KDE a few months ago.   I've
never used KDE full time beforehand, and I'm now a convert.   I'm so
impressed with the quality and user experience.   You guys rock, keep
up the good work! And happy holidays!
* Thank you for everything you do, the FOSS world is infinitely better
because of all of your efforts.   Please keep up the amazing work.
* Thanks for all you provide.   Truly is amazing what is given away
for free.   Cannot thank you all enough.
* Very much appreciate the work you all put in to make an exceptional
desktop experience.
* KDE was what helped get me over the line and fully migrate to Linux,
so of course I'd donate when the prompt came up!
* I think you guys do really good work. Even though things suck right
now, I'm glad at least one group cares about just regular average
people. I know it's not much, but I hope you can use it for some good.
* Plasma is a joy to use and i don't know of a better desktop
environment! Thanks for all your hard work.
* Hello! As a recent Linux user, your Plasma desktop environment and
apps have been huge in both convincing me to give this platform a try,
and really enjoy my time here. I truly hope for the best with your
software and for the lives and happiness of your contributors!
* I LOVE KDE, please keep up the hard work and know that people use
what you do everyday and are very grateful!
* In a tech world barreling toward dystopia, thanks for being a beacon
of hope and freedom.
* Best Desktop ever.   Weiter so!
* Cheers for a fantastic work and bless you all with a great future ❤️
* I love plasma and the KDE tools.   Your development efforts allow
people to re-gain control over their software while also benefiting
from a user-centric design, absent in most commercial offerings.
* KDE is THE power user desktop.   Can't believe I slept on it for
years.   Everytime there's a weird feature I think I might need, you
guys thought of it first and it's right there or easily searchable in
the settings menu.   Keep up the good work!
* Thanks for the good work, guys.   I never paid for Windows, but as
someone who got his mind blown in 2003 by KDE using a live Knoppix CD,
I will keep donating :)
* Having switched from windows recently, the transition has been very
easy thanks largely in part to KDE.   Thank you for being awesome and
keep doing what you're doing 3
* Thank you for making such a great product, giving us freedom and
privacy to use our computers the way we want to!
* Yall made a good desktop environment that really helped me get into
Linux as a former windows user.   Very good piece of software, thank
you for creating it and distributing it for free!
* Best ever desktop environment, thanks for your awesome work
* Over a year without Windows on any of my systems, now even at work.
 KDE is my go-to desktop.   Thanks for building a DE that’s
customizable enough to feel familiar, yet powerful enough to go as far
as needed.   Keep up the great work.
* I'd love to express my hearfelt gratitude to you all in the KDE
Community to make Linux pleasant to use; been a KDE user ever since I
began using Linux. It's easy the best desktop environment for Linux.
Thank you all.
* Big thank you for making the best desktop environment I know of (and
use daily), you guys rock!
* Every time I use something you guys made, it offers comfort to me
compared to many alternatives.
* I love you, KDE team <3 Keep being awesome, please!
* KDE is great. Ditched windows about a year ago and never looked
back. Ty for your work.
* Old Windows user trying KDE for the first time and already loving it
more. Thanks for your great work!
* KDE user since 8 years. You are killing it every year. Konqi is also cute c:
* I can't imagine choosing to work with (and play with!) a computer
which is not running KDE.  Plasma just goes on getting better. Thank
you.
* Been using KDE software since 2015, getting better every iteration.
* KDE is my daily driver and I am thankful for the user focus and
quality. Please keep the focus!
* Long time user and I've converted several friends too! Love the work
you're doing, 2025 is the Year of the Linux Desktop!
* Perfect way to start and continue to use Linux, couldn't be happier
with my pc not only with KDE desktop, but all the software that KDE
provides, like Krita
* Please, keep up the good work! KDE is my hope for a better future in tech.
* Great work team thanks for constantly evolving KDE.
* Hey KDE team, I need to say thank you for your amazing work, I just
entered the linux comunity 6 months ago and am using KDE Plasma since
the beginning and I love it! Please continue doing your amazing work,
making Plasma more modern, adding amazing new features to it and
generally optimizing this incredible DE! =D
* Rettet die Pinguine, bitte weitermachen.   :)
* Thank you ❤️
* Thanks for the amazing Desktop you guys are creating! And thanks for
being super active in the bugzilla and actually fixing the bugs that
people report! I'm looking forward for the Wayland only 6.  8 KDE
Plasma version! Keep up the good work KDE Team!
* Plasma 6 was the release that convinced me to use Linux as my
desktop full-time. It has been wonderful watching it improve further
with every release - thank you so much!
* Been using Plasma and the KDE suite of apps for over 6 years now,
and they just keep getting better, thanks!
* Thank you for all the Free and Open-Source Software! You are all
making valuable and positive contributions to software and the world -
a freer and more open source world is a better world!
* Best desktop, made me stick to linux :D
* I absolutely love using KDE Plasma.   There's no way I could resist
giving some love to the people who made a DE that replaced Windows in
my heart!
* I use KDE everyday, I'm visually impaired and heavily rely on the
magnifier provided by KDE.   Thank you for all you do, keep doing good
work, God bless you and merry Christmas!!
* Thanks for your work on making this DE the best option for power
users like me and people who are new to the Linux world
* Hello, I know that open source landscape is getting rougher, but
your work is becoming more important every year. You are very much
appreciated, I truly could not function with your work.
* Thanks for all the cool work you do, even if i sometimes forget how
much KDE software i do actually use on the daily.   Keep being awesome
and build some more cool things :3
* Happy birthday! I'm a brand new KDE and Linux user but I'm loving it
already. Keep up the good work!
* Using KDE brings me joy and I am happy to be part of such a great
community. Keep up the good work guys!
* A big thank you to all the KDE team for all the good work you put in
the KDE project over so many years.   I wish you many years ahead.   I
will add here a small token of my appreciation.
* Hi, I'm really sorry because I cannot donate much money, but I want
to tell you that I really love what you do, because what you do is
done with love!!!! Thank you very much for your efforts!!!
* Thanks to all the people @KDE.   A different world is possible.
* KDE is the best desktop environment I've ever used, and I can't
imagine using anything else.   Thank you for continuing to put users
first.
* Love you thanks so much 🥰🫶🏻🫶🏻best desktop
* KDE is pretty legit.   thank

A special shout-out to Paul and everyone who supported him for doing
the heavy-lifting on the fundraiser.

Cheers
Lydia

-- 
Lydia Pintscher - https://lydiapintscher.de - WD:Q18016466
KDE e.V. Board of Directors
http://kde.org - http://open-advice.org