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On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 09:07:24AM -0700, Grant wrote: |
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> In December 2006 I started a thread titled "Is Gentoo Healthy?" in |
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> which I was roundly put down for raising the possibility that the |
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> decline in the number of Gentoo users could possibly affect the |
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> remaining Gentoo users in a negative way. |
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My personal feeling is that Gentoo has dropped off the radar a bit, and |
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is no longer being talked about that much beyond its own community, |
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which probably means that it won't see much growth. Ubuntu is the |
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distribution everyone is talking about at the moment, and no doubt that |
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will suffer the same fate in a year or so. |
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> Is everyone still toeing that line? The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter |
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> hasn't been published in almost two months. |
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The problem with that, as far as I am aware, is a lack of volunteers, |
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although I don't remember GWNs being absent for this long before. |
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Apparently it is coming back in July, so hopefully its absense isn't |
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permanent. |
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> Is Gentoo destined to be |
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> just another distro starved for contributors and struggling to stay up |
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> to date? If so, I really misjudged it. The meta approach of Gentoo |
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> is superior to any other in my mind, and I think it's growth and |
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> potential are being stunted by the "we don't need them" attitude which |
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> perpetuates Gentoo's lack of usability features for beginners. |
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I don't think Gentoo is starved for contributors, at least not judging |
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by the number of developers listed on the website (I've no idea how many |
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of those are active though). In terms of usability features, if you want |
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a nice easy distro that does more or less everything for you, you go for |
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Ubuntu (or perhaps Fedora 7), not Gentoo. They're not really aimed at |
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the same type of user - even though I run both, it's for different |
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purposes (Gentoo for development and breaking things, Ubuntu because |
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sometimes I just want multimedia to work without having to mess around |
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with USE flags and trying to track down which packages I should emerge |
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to get the right codecs for a particular format). |
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> Gentoo needs as many users as possible to reach its potential. It's a |
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> short-sighted mistake to think that non-contributing users do Gentoo |
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> no good. Non-contributing users become contributors as time passes. |
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> Car mechanics all start as car drivers. |
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To be fair, I think Gentoo has one of the better programmes for getting |
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active users to become developers. There's plenty of documentation on |
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the website, plus the developer manual, although I'd personally like to |
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see a bit more emphasis on non-coding developers (e.g. website updates, |
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press work etc.) for those people who want to get involved but don't |
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like fiddling with bash scripts. |
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|
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Paul |
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-- |
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gentoo-user@g.o mailing list |
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