213
Linux Mint's success also means maintainer stress - The Register
(www.theregister.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
213 points (99.1% liked)
Linux
13028 readers
749 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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