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One way is to donate to devs who are working on some specific features in the Linux kernel. The two I remember are Hector Martin who lead the Asahi Linux project and Kent Overstreet who is the main dev behind bcachefs, a new CoW FS.
But I guess this only works if there is some dev already working on a feature and is accepting donations. I wish we had community linux project or something similar which was funded by donations and hired kernel devs to work on things the community voted on.
Its written in Rust, is a completely new code base so not held back by tech debt, and is a clean DE while still being fairly customizable even now.
I personally don’t care why system76 felt the need to code a new DE from scratch, Im just glad they did it. It has given us a whole new ecosystem of GUI toolkits, apps, etc. for linux written in Rust.