Shadowfetch Linux
Support the project
Shadowfetch Linux is free, and it will stay free. Nothing is held back for people who pay, there is no paid edition, and no feature is waiting behind a donation. If you want to fund the time that goes into it, there is a tip jar.
What a donation pays for
Development time. Not hosting, and not bandwidth.
It is worth being exact about this, because plenty of projects are not. The website and the ISO mirror cost around five dollars a month to run in total. Downloads are served from object storage that charges nothing for outbound traffic, so a thousand people fetching the ISO costs the same as nobody fetching it: nothing. There is no infrastructure bill here that needs rescuing, and this page is not going to invent one.
What is actually scarce is hours. Building an ISO, testing it on real machines, tracking Debian testing when it moves underneath the release, answering bug reports and writing the documentation on this site is slow work done by one person. That is the thing money can move.
The tip jar
You pick the amount. There are no suggested figures and no ranked tiers: a one-off contribution of any size is the main offer, and it is enough. There is also a single membership at $1 a month for anyone who would rather help on a standing basis. It buys no ranked status and unlocks no feature of the distro, which stays free and complete either way. Members may occasionally hear from the project through Buy Me a Coffee; no schedule is promised, because a promise that quietly lapses is worse than no promise.
Or go straight there: buymeacoffee.com/shadowfetch
That link leaves this site. Buy Me a Coffee is a third party and handles the payment on its own pages under its own privacy policy and its own terms - the no-tracking promise that applies here does not extend to them. Nothing on this page contacts them until you click.
Worth at least as much as money
This is not a polite deflection. For a distribution this young, with almost nothing written about it and no community yet, the following are genuinely more useful than the equivalent value in donations.
Report a bug properly
A reproducible install failure with the hardware, the firmware mode and the point Calamares stopped is worth more than a donation. It is the only way a fault on hardware nobody here owns ever gets fixed.
Send a hardware report that worked
Successful installs are invisible. Laptops, GPUs and firmware combinations that boot and install cleanly are what turn the hardware page from guesswork into a list.
Write about it
Very little has been written about Shadowfetch Linux anywhere. An honest post or review - including a critical one - reaches people that no amount of money spent here would.
Bug reports and hardware notes go to the issue tracker or support@shadowfetch.com. Before you file one, known issues lists what is already understood to be broken and what to collect first.
No strings
Donating does not buy support, priority on a bug, influence over the roadmap or an early build. Everyone gets the same ISO, the same signed APT repository and the same issue tracker. If that changes, this page will say so plainly rather than quietly.