Dear Ubuntu Studio Community,

I want to thank you all for the amazing generosity that you all showed when we asked for financial contributions back in May. We were able to raise over $1,000 USD since, which was a humongous help. I know that my family and I are beyond grateful.

That said, circumstances for my family and I haven’t changed that much and are likely not to change. For safety reasons, my wife and I have chosen to pull our son from his regular public school and are having him do online school, which means that I must stay at home with him.

This does, however, mean that I have more time during his schooling to work on Ubuntu Studio and make sure it is more polished. Bear in mind, though, that this doesn’t necessarily include the applications that we include which are, for the vast majority, beyond my control as those are developed upstream and/or synchronized from Debian’s unstable branch prior to the feature freeze of each development cycle. My focus is on the overall user experience and usability, and making everything as easy to use as possible while incorporating the newest technologies for open-source content creation. We are gearing-up for a very nice release for 23.10 which I want to lead to an even better release for 24.04 LTS.

That said, we’re financially struggling. The more donations you can give, the healthier my family and I can be. With that in mind, if you could please be as generous as possible with your financial contributions, I would greatly appreciate it. My goal is to be able to generate a part-time income, if possible, but that can only come from your contributions and additional supplemental income from other jobs I receive as a freelance/on-call audio/video engineer.

Personally, I always struggle with asking for money, especially since it’s so uncertain. However, I have seen the generosity of this community before, and know that you can come through.

If you look at https://ubuntustudio.org/contribute, you will see several ways to contribute financially. If you contribute monthly through Patreon, you will get advanced development news, such as some new features coming that were announced during Ubuntu Testing Week.

We also earn commission through purchases of our merchandise at https://ubuntustudio.myspreadshop.com if you wish to buy something and show your support through something you wear, a coffee mug, a sticker, or even a teddy bear.

Thank you so much in advance for your help.
Sincerely,
Erich Eickmeyer