On Tuesday 03 July 2007 09:07:24 Grant wrote: > In December 2006 I started a thread titled "Is Gentoo Healthy?" in > which I was roundly put down for raising the possibility that the > decline in the number of Gentoo users could possibly affect the > remaining Gentoo users in a negative way. > > Is everyone still toeing that line? The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter > hasn't been published in almost two months. Is Gentoo destined to be > just another distro starved for contributors and struggling to stay up > to date? If so, I really misjudged it. The meta approach of Gentoo > is superior to any other in my mind, and I think it's growth and > potential are being stunted by the "we don't need them" attitude which > perpetuates Gentoo's lack of usability features for beginners. > > Gentoo needs as many users as possible to reach its potential. It's a > short-sighted mistake to think that non-contributing users do Gentoo > no good. Non-contributing users become contributors as time passes. > Car mechanics all start as car drivers. > > - Grant
Personally I love Gentoo, IMHO the compile aspect of it ( the part that I love most of all ) is what keeps beginners and novice GNU/Linux users away, the target audience will always be those who don't mind taking the time to build a fully customized system even if it takes a day or two. Gentoo does indeed need more users to become contributors, I have been a "Non-contributing" user for some time now, just promoting it when ever possible, I even got my company to switch many Windows workstations to Gentoo development stations, a few months ago my company offered to pay me to work full time on any free and open source project that might benifit them in the end, I jumped at the chance and applied to work in different areas of Gentoo (mostly C/CPP and Perl development areas), after many unanswered e-mails and one telling me to "be patient" I gave up and applied to work in the KDE project ( in two days I had my own SVN and started porting code to KDE4 ), I personally think Gentoo makes it hard to contribute in many areas, this might be why few Non-contributing users become contributing users. -- Guillermo Antonio Amaral Bastidas # Free & Open Source Software Advocate $ irc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] @ blog: http://blog.guillermoamaral.com/ @ site: http://www.guillermoamaral.com/ % gpg: http://downloads.guillermoamaral.com/public.asc
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