KDE Again Operated At A Loss During 2023 via Phoronix

KDE e.V. announced the availability today of their annual report for covering 2023. While they made a lot of accomplishments and worked a lot on KDE Plasma 6 development, it was another year they unfortunately operated in the red funding wise.

The 2023 KDE annual report is now available for those interested. KDE accomplished a lot of great software development work on Plasma 6 last year as well as various conferences and developer sprints. Unfortunately though they again spent more than they took in for revenue during the year.

It is a bit concerning to read this news, with KDE operating in the red at around $100, 000 Euros, given how important the project is and how companies like Steam utilize the KDE project in products like the Steam Deck which runs the Arch Linux-based SteamOS which runs KDE. What is even more disappointing is to see that Valve isn’t even one of the KDE patrons.

  • Canonical
  • Google
  • SUSE
  • The Qt Company1
  • Blue System
  • Slimbook
  • TUXEDO Computers
  • GnuPG
  • Mbition

It is understandable that their finances are in this state since they underwent a significant development cycle to upgrade KDE which hadn’t seen a version upgrade in nearly a decade.

This news about KDE being in the red does explain why recently a small notification has appeared to donate to the project. It is definitely less obtrusive than the one that appears when using Thunderbird, which at least in my case loads each time I launch Thunderbird.

  1. I am pretty sure this is the software development company that develops the QT toolkit used by KDE to create the Plasma desktop environment. ↩︎