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by rhlala 3252 days ago
Pretty sad comment.. I though the vast majority of open-source users were devs...
3 comments

At first most of your users tend to be fairly advanced. After all, they've even managed to somehow find the obscure thing you've made. This is the most rewarding time for an open source project as many of the issues are real and the quality of bug reports and feedback is extremely high. Over time, as the project gains popularity, many of these issues will either have been solved, or have become easily googlable. Therefore you'll rarely hear from the advanced, intelligent portion of your users, although it's also certainly possible that they've already moved on to shinier things.

In the end, you tend to have a noticeable, vocal portion of users whom I'd generously call "social developers," who are bad at figuring things out by themselves and/or prefer asking things from another person to save a few minutes of their own time. Many of these users are very draining to deal with.

Dev's can be jerks too.
It depends on the project. Most of the people using my GUI plotting software Veusz [1] are not devs. Therefore I get a lot of questions on how to use it, bug reports, complaints and feature suggestions, but little in the way of code.

[1] https://veusz.github.io/