If you have cloned themes will those themes still pay 1 cent per download or is the money gonna go to the original owner of the theme.
Hi freefreeno,
we have not changed this, although it is a topic which has been brought up quite some times by people here in the past.
With the introduction of sections, our goal is to look into ways of favoring quality over quantity.
Ok thanks. I am very confused by the new settings and nice long explanation of the new settings and things would greatly help me and a lot more of us. The way I see it is even if you use the stock Breeze stuff to make your themes then it is still not completely made by you because you did not make it from the ground up. I have cloned stuff and I hope the site sees that most if not all of would use OUR stuff if we had the NO HOW to make it. What would greatly help me is a GOOD guide on building svg menus and such for KDE. WE just need to know how to make the menus and a few widgets and most of use could go from there. I hate to say this but that info must be under lock and key somewhere. People will say oh it is all over the web. look that info is not easy form normal people to understand. Heck Inkscape isn’t easy for normal people to understand. Please bare with us and maybe even help with some guides and I promise I will use my own stuff as soon as I can. I would like a thorough explanation on the the info on the new payout page. Before the website changed to the new payout page my plings were a few dollars more than what the September potential payout is showing now but I see that number over underneath the products sum.I don’t understand the new Products Sum vs the Potential Payout. Products sum is a few dollars more on last months than potential payout but for this month the the Potential payout is showing more than Products sum so I am just confused about this. I would like to thank the site for being more than fair to us little guys.
The request for good documentation may be a long-standing issue, and is best adressed on the KDE Forums.
So you can’t give me the info about this site??? I need to know about all the changes to the payout page and what they mean.
I believe that the original idea is not to remove payments from the forks. I think the intention is to give honorable mentions to content creators. I’m wrong?
@freefreeno I find your view point rather disturbing to be honest. Are you saying that a plumber who does mediocre scribbles in his free time when he’s not fixing a tubing and sells them on the internet should be paid the same as a long term experienced painter who does ultra realistic paintings simply based on how both are humans?
Michail Vourlakos (@Psifidotos) is a full fledged developer who re-designed old linux docks from ground up, created a very stable and customizable new implementation of such a program and now maintains the most used linux dock on a daily basis.
If I cloned the open source repo and changed the default icons that appear when starting the application should I gain the same reputation and economical compensation as him?!
Creating digital interactive content requires studying the necessary programming which varies greatly depending on the platform the content is supposed to be used on. Someone might know a lot of Python another person might have studied C and even another one might use a front end like Qt. Programming is time consuming and requires knowledge. And yes, we live in a time where you don’t even have to go to a university anymore to study. It is indeed all over the web.
If you want to learn inkscape, you should start with vector drawing to begin with. If you want to learn to create plugins for dolphin then you should probably start with Qt which has an outstanding documentation. Opendesktop is not a platform of free education for digital content and programming. There are however plenty of such platforms on the internet. Get studying!
Specifically for Inkscape you can start by studying about the SVG graphics standard, or about vectors in general and then get more in to detail on the specific software you want to use to create such technology.
How can we as a society think that all the knowledge and experience put in to quality work (which takes years of time) should be worth the same as a quick fix hammer-nail job? I come across this thinking so often these days in all sorts of professions and work climates. It is just not right.
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So where do you even see that view point besides in the topic at the top??? mainly if you read i wanted to know about the new settings. I asked one simple question in the heading of my topic and then asked for a clear cut explanation on the new settings on the site. The only reason the question in the heading is even there is because I didn’t know what the meaning of the new settings was. Had I known what the new settings were for then I would not have had to even ask that question at all because I would have known the meanings of the stuff on the site. I now have the answer to the one question but as far as an answer to the question about the new settings I do still don’t have a answer for that. I just wanted to know what the new settings were for and what they mean. Anybody??? I welded for 12 years and I believe I know what WORTH is.
There I see it if you ask me like that 
Development is simply not that easy as it isn’t with lots of engineering work. If it was then Linux would be in a way more advanced state overall. (Even more than it is anyways) Apparently everybody is more than welcome to study just like anybody else and get started.
If you handed me a welder and a few materials I would still not be able to do the same as you are able to. It would take me years of practice and looking at or talking to other people to learn tricks and finesses.
As for your question to settings from what I read the team already answered that: for now you still get your cent per download even for cloned “products” (I personally feel this is not the right word to use for anything here on the site but well).
Well yeah,…that’s exactly the point about quality over quantity. It’s as simple as asking yourself: Is the change I made to this car/house/roof/software/toy any real improvement over the original for some users? Apparently that is in a way subject to debate in itself but as long as it is of value to a reasonable amount of people in comparison with the original than I would argue it was an improvement for that user base. But if the user just goes: “Man this car was painted blue, but it’s still the same as the other one that I did like, but I wanted to try someting new.” - then I would highly doubt your product was of value to your user.
It’s as if the simple making of Linux distros would make for easy money. We would have like 300 Arch spin offs, 500 Debian clones and 50,000 Ubuntu forks. The only difference between those being that some have nano installed by default, others vi, others vim others emacs and so on. Where’s the quality in that from an end users point of view? And you know what? That’s exactly what is happening here on opendesktop. And it makes me seriously sad about the project. It was once source for very unique and sometimes weird stuff you could come to to enhance your desktop Linux experience. A lot of registered users have gotten aware of the fact that the monetary implementation on this site has made for veeeery easy money. Just counting the clones of my products I could make the maths on how much money is made off of my knowledge and skills as a developer and graphic designer. I’ve already come to a point where I don’t even care much about the money but I will probably not publish new stuff, neither maintain what I published until now if copy cats make twice or triple the amount by just changing the default editor to nano. I’d rather not make any money at all and get real shit done.
So honestly I think the idea is still the same. I let you do the welding work, then paint the thing black and want to sell them at the same price as you sell it to begin with, investing a fraction of work on the same thing. I am not intending to attack you personally. I’m just commenting what has recently caught my attention.
As for your concern. Maybe you could define your question for “settings” more in detail? I don’t see a lot of “settings” in my user panel at all others than “Email”, “Payout Options”, “Github Dev Account”, “Password” and “Newsletter”. I suspect you don’t even refer to the word “settings” anyway. I feel like you want a detailed insight on how the @opendesktop project is planning to shift importance of the categories and how that would affect payout. From what I see the team is still evaluating that very question.
I would argue you can’t push a company (which Pling is) to publish every math they do for their monetary decisions. It’s like asking Coca Cola how they come up with their retail price of X and why last year it was Y. That’s not to say that users shouldn’t push transparency, so maybe you got your point here. There’s way too many forum posts concerning how “payout has dropped” or “why less payouts” or “how comes so little payout”…not even one comment on how to make the site better, or ideas for the team, user input for the best of all of us.
Sorry, that was quite a large wall of text, I hope I didn’t annoy anybody. One last thought: You should try the appimage of Inkscape 1.0 For me personally on an Arch based distro it’s way more stable even though being in beta stage and has some great new features and tons of bug fixes.
At least I do change more than one line of code and add a new wallpaper. If I reuse stuff it is because I can not make it. I started using computers 4 years ago and graduated from windows to Linux. " I only use Linux" Then after a while I learned to install Arch my favorite Distro by the way and I swear I am not the person that just doesn’t try. I learn stuff almost daily. I just told a friend of mine the other day that I was gonna get back to learning just Linux in general. I have learned a lot BUT what I want is to be able to build my svg menus and icons all by myself and not use ANY breeze stuff or anyone else’s stuff. I explained the exact settings I wanted to know about in my first post all the way down to the names of the settings. I just want the meanings of product sum really compared to potential payout. And the thing about me I will learn it one way or another but people that know it aren’t gonna tell you anything ESPECIALLY if they have stuff on the site. I am not dumb for sure but I also don’t know anything about xml and I need to but I haven’t made it that far. I am pretty good with inkscape after an entire year of use but I still need to learn that too. I learn by doing and that is that. You can tell me how to do something all day long but until I do it several times I am lost. If we are just gonna get all the way into then ok. I used to have not so good of a life and then one day something happened and I said I was gonna change and to do that I set at home ALOT so I needed something to do and that something became Linux first then themes second. So in other words Linux and themes helped change my life and now I am much better person or at least I think so. Linux became more than just hobby for me at the time and so did themes. Sad right but but just to show you I am not lazy about my learning or however you want to put it.I just wanted the products sum vs potential payout defined so i would know. New settings with new meanings so like I have stated I like to know what stuff does and means. If I had knew this then I would have known more about what was going on. And your right about a lot but sometimes a theme or anything else in this world would look better a different color and with some other small odds and inns. And please no this. I can not make anyone do anything, all I can do is ask.
What’s your special difficulties with icons to maybe get you some starters? I would personally advise against learning anything about XML if you want to get better at vector drawing and rather focus on two things: basic rules about visual language and graphic design. This might indeed be a bit harder to find without paying online classes and universities but go wild and see some YouTube channels on this. Some things I could point out:
- The smaller the icon the less points you wanna have.
- The smaller the icon the less details you wanna have.
- The bigger the icon the more details you may add.
- Learn about legibility
- Make yourself understand that although vectors are of infinite resolution your icons will in any case be rendered on output devices with a pixel based resolution and you want to account for that
- Different desktop environments use different defaults, especially when it comes to naming conventions for those resolutions
- Don’t care for XML
- Maybe learn what SVG code is relevant and what is not although its really not too important (if you save as .svgz a lot of attributes will get stripped anyways)
Second I’d say look very closely at icons of others. That does not mean you have to copy them or have to do it their way, but zoom in close and see what people do. KDE has its own guidelines btw.
- Create a pixel sized grid for your icon documents (Document properties -> Grids -> New ; Set spacing to 1px X/Y ; make it visible)
- Activate Icon Preview (View…)
Note how on very small icon sizes you have to be very minimal or else you won’t see anything at all just a spongy something - Play with curves on very small resolutions and see in the Icon Preview how this affects the anti-aliasing of pixel rendering
- Read some eBooks on UI design specifically
There are some really sweet resources out there that want to be read
If you want more specific details don’t hesitate to ask.
P.S.: Naming conventions for icons on Linux are a major pain in the a**.
Well really I need to be taught like a 1st grader how to make my own svg images for KDE. I don’t know but seems menus and such may be easier to start out with than icons. I do want to learn icons also but specifically KDE OS themes. So kickoff menu svg and all the svg’s in the plasma theme. I know that includes icons also so yes all of it of course but I have to start somewhere and I figured a square menu might be easier than an icon.
Any suggestion what you would use instead?
@opendesktop Clone to me implies the entire theme or whatever product was copied and it sounds bad like a rule has been broken.
Well I personally meant the “product” term just to clarify 
You might already have seen these, but they are the best and most official documentation I have found with regards to KDE Plasma themes.
Mainly this:
https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma5/ThemeDetails
but perhaps also this:
https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma5/Theme
I have gone over these many times and then just like you, doing and trying stuff out and seeing what happens.
Hopefully they are to some use for you as well!
@klorax Thanks and yes I have seen and read those but it really doesn’t explain how to build svg files from start to finish. I guess I will find a good class or course on what I need one day hopefully soon.