2023-03-16
An Update for our Sponsors—and a Request

It has been a little bit over a year since XMonad version 0.17.0 was released; this was also the time in which we first started looking for funding. On the whole, the number of people who decided to support us has been astounding: thank you! While our expenses are completely transparent, it can be hard to keep up if you’re not directly involved in the project. Hence, we’d like to take this opportunity to summarise what we did in the past year.

• We met up! More specifically, many of us went to ZuriHac 2022; conferences like these are a great opportunity to get to know the team a little bit better, as well as to discuss plans and future directions. Not to mention we had the opportunity to talk to (a surprising number of) users! In addition, a few also attended MuniHac 2022; again, some great conversations were had with people as excited about XMonad as us.

  If you missed these, then don’t worry: plans are already being made for ZuriHac 2023, and we hope to see you there—we’ll bring stickers!

• Since 2021-10-27¹, the xmonad-contrib repository has seen quite some activity: all in all, almost 400 commits have been made! Needless to say, this means a lot of new features, as well as several—sometimes long-standing—bugfixes. This could probably not have been done without your financial support, allowing some of us to spend some more time with XMonad than before. As far as future plans go, we plan on completely overhauling the XMonad prompt, making it behave more sensibly in common situations.

  The core of XMonad, the xmonad repository, has long since been declared “stable”; yet, we still managed to squeeze in just under 40 commits. Additionally, in the recent past we have been working on a redesign of the way XMonad handles refreshes, which might enable us to squash other long standing issues with the way the logHook interacts with the windows function.

  While some of this work is unreleased as of yet, during all of this time we also managed to release version XMonad version 0.17.1.

Recently, GitHub decided to stop support PayPal, which caused a lot of free software projects to lose sponsors—we were no exception to this. So that we can continue spending as much time on XMonad as we have, please think about renewing your contribution with updated payment details! If you want to know what exactly happens with the money: all of our monetary activity is completely transparent, and can be viewed here. Thanks!

1. The day of the xmonad and xmonad-contrib 0.17.0 release. ↩