[txutxu]

People,

This is great news for few of us.

But it has been hard to read trough this comments and realize how much ignorance about what Debian is, how it works, what the Debian bug tracker is, what a voluntary-based project is, and to read some assertions and prepotency around in HN

If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one.

Debian is not a startup. Debian is not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. Debian may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. Debian isn't perfect.

The Debian bugtracker maybe not the web application I could write in 2016, but I'm conscious on how much work has been around it, and it's ecosystem, how much I'm in debt with the Debian bug tracker as opensource user, and how much should I THANK to the people who did work on it, who works on it and who uses it, and even translates it

Depressing to sometimes find great threads, and sometimes loose the time with subjective views, inexperienced reviews, false and incomplete assertions, haters, and mass style thinking.

I'm scared to imagine on hands of what kind of people there are technological choices... or to think that people gets influenced by content creators of this level... maybe I'm lucky and most of those opinions I dislike, are not from real engineers/hackers, but from lost re-users, and people without humility repeating what they find shocking, like a child of 3 years.

Feel free to downvote without reasoning why.

[daeken]

> If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one.

Are you really saying that the only way to contribute to Debian's success is to directly fix problems yourself? Community feedback (in the form of bug reports, comments on forums, mailing list discussion participation, etc) is hugely important in most every open source project; dismissing that is foolish at best and harmful at worst.

[txutxu]

well, I suppose my point there was:

"Talk about the problem, where you can fix it, not just a comment in a third party forum".

I was after a telephone discussion and maybe I was a little bit harsh.

It's not that bug reports are not useful, it's that if you follow the debian manual, you don't need the web interface for reporting bugs...

People working on web technologies, use to blame opensource projects a lot, without any help.

[protomyth]

> If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one.

Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

> Feel free to downvote without reasoning why.

I didn't bother, but "Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[chei0aiV]

> Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

Absolutely not. You can use Debian and help improve Debian without being a developer and even without being very technical.

https://www.debian.org/intro/help

[cbd1984]

> Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

This might not be a bad characterization of where it sits now.

If you want a hand-holding "user-friendly" (and I use the term advisedly, based on the common, flawed conception of what a "user" is), create one based on Debian, leveraging the Debian tools and packages and processes to make an Ubuntu or Mint or something else.

Debian isn't a meta-distribution. It is a distribution in its own right. However, it is commonly used as the foundation for a different distribution, with different goals and different ways of relating to the world. Debian itself remains unchanged, ready to base another distribution off of, and another, and another...

[yebyen]

For a plug of my friend Thanatermesis' great Debian-based distribution, which recognizes the distro and free-software ethos is not always fully conducive to a positive user experience at the forefront...

http://www.elivecd.org/ - The latest release is always based on Debian Stable and is currently under active development. The whole system is changed in (mostly subtle) ways to make it more attractive to a new Linux user. This is Debian, with some additions. I push this to any friends who say they are interested in Linux, but maybe just want to try it first.

I would not recommend Ubuntu to a new user (unless they were my employee, we use it at work) or Mint for that matter. I would not recommend Debian in spite of using it myself at home, because I don't always want to be the Debian support guy, or have to be the one to say RTFM. Elive tries to be as self-explanatory as possible, even in its somewhat Tarzanic way.

[chei0aiV]

Hmm, the website says "Elive is not made for newbies".

[yebyen]

The website says a lot of things, he's probably right, but as a newbie IMHO your first task is to compile enlightenment, and in elive that's already done for you...

[txutxu]

> Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

Well, as an user of a openly licensed system, you are free to use the source. As well as, you're free to don't use it :)

But regarding voluntary work, it's useless and ugly to harm and bash it, without helping the cause.

Didn't know that guidelines, thanks, and sorry.

[mwcampbell]

> Ok, so Debian is a developers-only distribution?

For all practical purposes, I'd say yes. GNU/Linux as a PC operating system for non-programmers is a lost cause. Sure, some organizations make it work, but it probably requires a lot of technical support; they'd probably be better off using Android tablets and/or Chromebooks if they need something less expensive than a Windows PC, let alone a Mac. And when non-programmers need web hosting, they don't reach for a DigitalOcean droplet; they use a shared host that offers an abstraction over the LAMP stack like cPanel, or an even more non-developer-friendly service like Squarespace.

[ableal]

> GNU/Linux as a PC operating system for non-programmers is a lost cause.

Engineering workstations. Lots of them.

[auxym]

In the 90s maybe? Even CATIA doesn't officially support UNIX anymore.

[tomphoolery]

"$PROJECT is not a startup. $PROJECT is not an elastic architecture in the cloud to support/pay-for traffic peaks. $PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. $PROJECT isn't perfect."

I have half a mind to just add this to every single project's README in the https://github.com/redis-store organization.

[voltagex_]

>$PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources, if you're so good. $PROJECT isn't perfect.

May I suggest using "$PROJECT may benefit from your solutions and resources. $PROJECT isn't perfect." - "if you're so good" could be interpreted as "if you're good enough".

[txutxu]

When I did arrive to the post I was on bad mod by other reasons, the modification that voltagex_ suggests is totally right.

Happy that my keyboard rage was inspiring for something :)

[voltagex_]

The problem with "you can go fix it if you want" is that the barrier to "fixing it" is very high, even with such great things as #debian-mentors.

I fully understand the need for all the process and policy but it can be very difficult to get things fixed in Debian without talking to the right people or attending the right conferences.

[txutxu]

Agreed, what you can do on first contact, is not always what you would like to do.

I didn't mean it's the only and single way to change something in Debian... the subtle of my message was, that complaining outside the project, does not help to anybody, and forms subjective opinions on persons that didn't have them.

Today, someone at $work that never did write perl, was complaining on perl and Larry Wall just for laughs, I told him: when Mr Google calls you to speak about _your_ language, when the world is full of mirrors of libraries written by all kind of persons and companies for _you_ language, please, come back, and we have some laughs.

It seems that some people needs to "attack third parties together" to feel "in society".

[voltagex_]

>when Mr Google calls you to speak about _your_ language, when the world is full of mirrors of libraries written by all kind of persons and companies for _you_ language, please, come back, and we have some laughs.

I dunno, I'm pretty sure that this is a form of the "appeal to authority" logical fallacy - i.e. person X has achieved less than person Y, therefore their opinion is invalid. Perl has problems like any language has problems, but sometimes it's the right tool for the job.

I know the kind of person who derides languages for whatever reason - sometimes I am that person. It's fun to bash PHP, C#, Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, even Shakespeare Programming Language [1] but at the end of the day they're a means to an end, not an end to themselves.

Some comments at Linux.conf.au recently made me aware of platform/language shaming. It's not a good thing and I'm working to stop doing it.

1: http://shakespearelang.sourceforge.net/report/shakespeare/

\ VB6 can bugger off

[greggarious]

As a usability expert, I can tell you that: "If you see ANYTHING wrong with Debian, go fix it, or shut up and go to sell your stuff to another one." is why it will NEVER be the year of Debian on the desktop.

Users use computers to compute - "using linux" is not a primary task. I'm not saying open source should compromise on their core values, but Debian could stand to take a page out of, say, the Tor Project's book and focus harder on usability.

[JeremyNT]

Keep in mind the target audience of txutxu's post: this is Hacker News! His reply is to a group of people who are, if not all experts in technology related fields, likely capable of contributing to the Debian project in some meaningful way.

Debian is an amazing project that is where it is because so many people decided to "go fix it." Not everybody who uses Debian needs to have that mentality, but anybody on HN who is complaining about the project and wants to see it improved should consider translating that opinion into action.

This isn't to say that txutxu worded his response in the most tactful manner, of course, but you have to consider it in context.

[TheCoelacanth]

There already is a usability focused Debian. It's called "Ubuntu".

And I don't mean that metaphorically. Ubuntu literally is Debian with usability enhancements.