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Linux Mint's success also means maintainer stress - The Register
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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As usual, most people don't contribute back in any way (money, nor code, nor documentation).
Might want to read the article first. Mint has received more donations last month than any on record for them, $47,000.
I read that. How many users do they have? 47k seems like a lot but how many devs does that really pay for? The answer is obviously "not enough". Otherwise they wouldn't be talking about dev pressure.
That amount of money a month is extremely substantial for an open-source project, and especially for a non-corporate distro. It also far exceeds previous years.
The pressure mostly seems to be from adding wayland support to Cinnamon, combined with perhaps maintaining more projects at too regular an interval than their team can chew.
That amount of money is one developer full time maybe. Which can make a really, really big difference for an Open Source project actually.
$564,000 / year??? I'd think definitely two, maybe three.
Yeah, feels like 3-4.
You expect everyone to pay for free software?
You should probably read the article.
If there only small percent of contributors from all users count - anyway the more users the more contributors.
It's almost as if the time economy of programmers is managed by their employers, and moral appeals have no effect on that dynamic