So someone recently told me I should cut back on donations to open source projects. So I broke down my spending since October 1st (with subscriptions annualized) and … I’m not spending enough. My spending on FOSS is that 1.3% slither and adding in subscription services makes it 4.1%.
I’m not in a rush to start donations, since I don’t want to add to the December-ness of FOSS donations. I just want to hear people’s thoughts.
I currently donate to:
- GrapheneOS
- KDE
- Mint (Update: Since drawing this graph this has been cancelled. Due to their security and the fact I don’t really use them anymore)
In terms of priorities I have the following:
- Contributes to the “security by default” of the Linux ecosystem.
- Headquartered outside of the US, or at the very least a project that’s a middle-finger to US big tech.
- Something I actually use would be preferable (Currently I use Kubuntu (distro-hop aggressively pending) with DesktopPal97, CachyOS, GrapheneOS, ProtonMail/Drive/Pass, LibreOffice, Steam, Threema, Anki, Lemmy, Firefox, various Accrescent Apps, and various browser extensions)
The real tough part is that I don’t want to use PayPal (Thiel/Musk), GitHub sponsors (Microsoft), or Bitcoin (I’m open to mining it in the background, but I don’t like the idea of turning real cash into fake cash).
So what do you all donate to?
I donate to NetBSD foundation
You can also donate to lemmy devs and whoever hosts your instance, maybe other social media too? liberapay is your friend
Honestly I use Lemmy but just like with Reddit my life would be better without it. So I probably won’t donate.
First thing that comes to mind is to do what uBlock Origin developer says, donate to some blocklist maintainer
Looking it up, apparently uBlock Origin mainly uses easylist which itself also refuses donations.
Ohh xd
I use AdGuard myself because it allows ad-blocking to be on a per-site basis opt-in instead of opt-out.
Not sure it quite qualifies here, but I threw a few dollars at Project Gutenberg yesterday.
Thankyou you just reminded me to donate to Jellyfin 😊
KDE is one, a bunch of more esoteric ones for work stuff (paid by work, so doesnt really count), jellyfin, etc.
Right now I’m mostly saving it to purchase hardware, open hardware specifically. I want an MNT Pocket Reform really bad, and it supports their efforts that I want to see more of, so win-win.
Around the end of the year I look at what I’m running for a while and what I haven’t donated to, and distribute accordingly.
Wow, the MNT Pocket Reform looks so cool, but it’s outside my budget.
I’m busy saving for the Steam Frame myself.
Im really, really into it. I’d carry it everywhere.
But I also just recently got a t480 and a whole bunch of drives for my main NAS (which means moving the replaced stuff around to the backups), so not spending more right now for sure. Otherwise I’d have already ordered 😃
I was eyeing the MNT for a while, but I wasn’t sold on the CPU performance for the price. What’s your thoughts on the specs? Also considering a t480, although the price of SSDs/RAM are concerning me right now, although maybe it’s not as bad for older/slower used parts.
My needs are light for its use honestly. I work from home, so on the go I mostly need something to take notes on or maybe write some code on the go, which its more than enough for. But there is all kinds of fun stuff posted up on mastodon for MNT, like egpu use, enhancements, etc.
But one thing I’d say about the rk3588 is that the performance charts can be misleading. Single core performance, an n100 would win, but parallel processing the 3588 is a champ. It also wins on power and heat. You can run a VM, do some builds, and even light gaming on them. When I compare it to crap ive used in the past that couldn’t do half of that for twice the weight and size, it just seems like a handy workhorse to me.
I’d also mention that the approach from MNT includes easy upgrade paths, including CPU, which they’ve done for the laptop model already.
Couldn’t say whether it works for your needs obviously, but I’d say check against tasks rather than benchmarks.
As far as the t480, similarly I just made sure it had enough ram. Honestly I have a few ssd’s around for various reasons so I’d just swap in whatever, again light on storage requirements when on the go. The biggest problem I have is the battery, internal is at about 50% and external about 70%, so I’ll need to replace that at some point. Still get a good 3-4 hours out of it no problem though, and a replacement for each is like $20-$40 so no big deal. I also dont mind waiting for a bit of a deal though (and really like keeping perfectly good hardware working for me), so I’m happy with it. I did put arch on there over my usual (Debian), and builds there are fairly quick if I let it use all the cores.
I just started donating to GNOME, Guix, and LogSeq. I wish more people used OpenCollective. Sometimes I see orgs there, but I’m not sure if they actually use that account…
Guix seems kinda interesting, but I’m not so much of a maniac to even consider using anything but the default package manager.
I currently donate to Frigate, but I definitely should donate more. Especially to KDE…
So someone recently told me I should cut back on donations to open source projects.
Your being too nice, be more greedy??
More I’m not managing to save any money and FOSS projects are low-hanging fruit. But then I did the math and they’re more of a low-hanging blueberry than a low-hanging apple.
Whenever I find a particularly annoying bug in something I use a lot I go throw a 100 dollar bounty at the devs
Seems like a perverse incentive if you ask me, but it’s not like I haven’t done the same thing with a browser extension one time.
