WHERE DO YOU STAND 
There’s many different ways you can donate money to help make your desktop better. I’m sure you already know many of these:
https://www.gnome.org/support-gnome/donate/
https://mate-desktop.org/donate/
https://elementary.io/en/ (Yes, the button is right there on the front page!)
They all have slightly different ways of doing this. You can also donate directly to applications like Audacity, GIMP, Inkscape. /…
But what if there was a specific bug you would like to see fixed. This might be of too low importance to the upstream developers who has to priorities stability and security first. Would it be okay to hire a freelance developer for this? This would mean a lot more work for you (compared to pressing a Paypal button), but this way, the money you spend would go directly to fixing an issue that concerns you.
So, my question to you is:
- Does hiring an outside developer belittle (or disencourage) the work voluntary hackers do in their sparetime?
- Would you rather reach out to another community member and “persuade” them to work on your issue?
- Do you have any experience with Upwork, Toptal or similar?
- Would you rather take the time and use this opportunity to learn to write code yourself (scratch an itch)?
Personally, I’m mostly the reaching out / connecting people type (with various output) and I guess, that’s why I’m still in the Ubuntu community and for sure the reason I got started.
I have hired a freelancer for a Wordpress project a few times and it worked fine. Just wondering if this model can be applied to open source 
Let discuss!