Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo Healthy? (The Return)

[Paul Waring <paul@xk7.net>]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 09:07:24AM -0700, 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.

My personal feeling is that Gentoo has dropped off the radar a bit, and
is no longer being talked about that much beyond its own community,
which probably means that it won't see much growth. Ubuntu is the
distribution everyone is talking about at the moment, and no doubt that
will suffer the same fate in a year or so.

> Is everyone still toeing that line?  The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
> hasn't been published in almost two months.

The problem with that, as far as I am aware, is a lack of volunteers,
although I don't remember GWNs being absent for this long before.
Apparently it is coming back in July, so hopefully its absense isn't
permanent.

> 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.

I don't think Gentoo is starved for contributors, at least not judging
by the number of developers listed on the website (I've no idea how many
of those are active though). In terms of usability features, if you want
a nice easy distro that does more or less everything for you, you go for
Ubuntu (or perhaps Fedora 7), not Gentoo. They're not really aimed at
the same type of user - even though I run both, it's for different
purposes (Gentoo for development and breaking things, Ubuntu because
sometimes I just want multimedia to work without having to mess around
with USE flags and trying to track down which packages I should emerge
to get the right codecs for a particular format).


> 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.

To be fair, I think Gentoo has one of the better programmes for getting
active users to become developers. There's plenty of documentation on
the website, plus the developer manual, although I'd personally like to
see a bit more emphasis on non-coding developers (e.g. website updates,
press work etc.) for those people who want to get involved but don't
like fiddling with bash scripts.

Paul
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