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/
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