On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 11:42:20AM +0200, Aleksandra Fedorova wrote:
That's a slight exaggeration of course, but so is your statement.
People
come to Fedora via many ways. But I doubt any of it starts with e-mail
nowadays. And the fact that you don't see newcomers _here_ actually proves
the point, isn't it?
Correlation is not causation.
Distro building isn't "fun", or sexy. There are much more immediately
(and fiscally) rewarding things for "newcomers" to mess with.
Let's not get into a "who would you miss more"
competition and work on a
solution which actually helps us to bridge the gap and allows us to
compromise between different use cases.
Oh, I know my contributions here are miniscule, but my point is that
we'd lose a ton of voices that collectively represent a ton of
experience and use cases.
In all seriousness, I would advise you to hang out at the current
discussion.fedoraproject.org and feel the vibe a bit.
You kinda just demonstrated my point -- "hanging out at <new web site>
and feel the vibe" is going to take time, attention, and distruption.
My total available time/attention is fixed, which means this "hanging
out" will have to come at the cost of something else that frankly
matters _more_. And I won't personally gain anything from the effort --
at _best_ it will break even vs what I have now.
Distributions _are_ cool and sexy. And people have ideas and interest
in
them. Some of them are totally wrong and misplaced, some may be very old,
and some are better. But that's how it should be.
I'm sorry, the numbers are _not_ on your side here, not just with Fedora
itself but the bigger picture of distributions in general. It's not
"email" that is keeping folks away, it's the nature of the work. And
_work_ it absolutely is.
(And I say this as someone who has spent most of the past couple of
decades working on low-level infrastructure-type stuff. Sure, I find it
fun/enjoyable but I freely acknowledge I am several standard deviations
from the mean)
It seems you feel like you are cornered, but it is you who put
yourself in
the corner by ignoring the part of the community, which actually can and
wants to support you.
By that same token bananas could make themselves more appealing to
people that like oranges if they'd only be more orange-like.
This isn't me "putting myself in a corner", it's Fedora moving the tent
that I was underneath and expecting me to move with it. (Because they
either don't understand _why_ anyone wouldn't want to move, or
understand, and do it anyway. I can actually respect the latter
position, even if I think it's not going to yield the expected results.
But I think this is yet another case of the former)
But whatever, I won't lose any sleep over this. As I already mentioned,
I have plenty of other things to do, both in the F/OSS world and in
(gasp) meatspace where I won't have to look at yet another screen.
> [1] Splitting into the "core" developers (ie those
paid/compensated for
> participating) and an endless summer of newbs seeking help/support;
> the middle gets completely hollowed out.
FWIW, I stand by this analogy.
- Solomon
--
Solomon Peachy pizza at shaftnet dot org (email&xmpp)
@pizza:shaftnet dot org (matrix)
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