This past year has been an exceptional one for GNOME. The project released two excellent releases on schedule with GNOME 48 in March and GNOME 49 in September. Contributors have been relentless in delivering a set of new and improved default apps, constant performance improvements across the board benefitting everyone (but especially lower-specced hardware), a better experience on high end hardware like HiDPI and HDR displays, refined design and refreshed typography, all new digital wellbeing features and parental controls improvements, improved accessibility support across the entire platform, and much more.

Just take a look back through This Week in GNOME where contributors provided updates on development every single week of 2025 so far. (And a huge thank you to Felix, who puts This Week in GNOME together !)

All of these improvements were delivered for free to users of GNOME across distributions—and even beyond users of GNOME itself via GNOME apps running on any desktop thanks to Flatpak and distribution via Flathub.

Earlier this year the GNOME Foundation also relaunched Friends of GNOME where you can set up a small recurring donation to help fund initiatives including:

• infrastructure freely provided to Core, Circle, and World projects
• services for GNOME Foundation members like blog hosting, chat, and video conferencing
• development of Flathub
• community travel sponsorship

While I’m proud of what GNOME has accomplished in 2025 and that the GNOME Foundation is operating sustainably, I’m personally even more excited to look ahead to what I hope the Foundation will be able to achieve in the coming year.

Let’s Reach 1,500 Friends of GNOME

The newly-formed fundraising committee kicked off their efforts by announcing a simple goal to close out 2025: let’s reach 1,500 Friends of GNOME! If we can reach this goal by the end of this year, it will help GNOME deliver even more in 2026; for example, by enabling the Foundation to sponsor more community travel for hackfests and conferences, and potentially even sponsoring specific, targeted development work.

But GNOME needs your help!

How You Can Help

First, if you’re not already a Friend of GNOME, please consider setting up a small recurring donation at donate.gnome.org . Every little bit helps, and donating less but consistently is super valuable to not only keep the lights on at the GNOME Foundation, but to enable explicit budgeting for and delivering on more interesting initiatives that directly support the community and the development of GNOME itself.

Become a Friend of GNOME

If you’re already a Friend of GNOME (or not able to commit to that at the moment—no hard feelings!), please considering sharing this message far and wide! I consistently hear that not only do so many users of GNOME not know that it’s a nonprofit, but they don’t know that the GNOME Foundation relies on individual donations—and that users can help out, too! Please share this post to your circles—especially outside of usual contributor spaces—to let them know the cool things GNOME does and that GNOME could use their help to be able to do even more in the coming year.

Lastly, if you represent an organization that relies on GNOME or is invested in its continued success, please consider a corporate sponsorship . While this sponsorship comes with no strings attached, it’s a really powerful way to show that your organization supports Free and Open Source software—and puts their money where their mouth is.

Sponsor GNOME

Thank You!

Thank you again to all of the dedicated contributors to GNOME making everyone’s computing experience that much better. As we close out 2025, I’m excited by the prospect of the GNOME Foundation being able to not just be sustainable, but—with your help—to take an even more active role in supporting our community and the development of GNOME.

And of course, thank you to all 700+ current Friends of GNOME ; your gracious support has helped GNOME achieve everything in 2025 while ensuring the sustainability of the Foundation going forward. Let’s see if we can close out the year with 1,500 Friends helping GNOME do even more!