[axaxs]

I worked for a while on a distro. The issue tracker is stressful for two main reasons. One, a lot of esoteric bugs that are hardware dependent. It's so frustrating to ask for help in testing to be ghosted or told 'no.' People don't seem to understand that as a small team, you don't have and won't buy all the hardware choices that exist to work on something for free.

The second stressor are people being adament and pushy about what they want, and not bugs at all. Go build your own distro, guys.

I found myself being a real dick to some people, so stepped away as it wasn't worth the stress, and I didn't want to tarnish the reputation of others who worked on the project.

[skocznymroczny]

> People don't seem to understand that as a small team, you don't have and won't buy all the hardware choices that exist to work on something for free.

that's why there shouldn't be as many distros. With fewer distros, it would be easier to test them on various configurations. Also it would make sure any fixes for specific hardware are used more widely, rather than ending up a patch in a single distro.

[magduf]

Yeah, but much of the reason I think there's as much volunteer involvement as there is is because distros are different, and the volunteers are happier to contribute their time to something they believe in.

If you have fewer distributions, that means they're going to make design choices more people won't like, which means volunteers aren't going to be as interested in contributing. You can't please all the people all the time, remember. A small number of distros will equate to making lots of compromises, so no one will be happy. This works for corporate products, because people are getting paid to work on something they don't care much about, but it doesn't work for a volunteer project.

Just as an example: if I were working on, say, Linux Mint, but then all the distro maintainers decided to have a giant meeting and in it they decided we really only need one Linux distro, CentOS, I'd just quit. There's no way in hell I'd want to work on CentOS of all things. I can find more enjoyable ways of spending my free time. I'm sure you'll find this with anything that people are passionate about: if you try to get them to redirect their energy to something "boring", they're not going to do it.

[axaxs]

I see your point... but realize that 99 percent of such bugs are upstream. So it's a matter of locking packages, or adding hacky things to a shell script that runs at install time. In a lot of way, it feels at times a distro maintainer is a secretary between the end user and upstream packages, since we end up opening the bugs.

[Mikeb85]

I don't think there should be fewer distros, but I personally have mostly stuck to the big ones, as they generally have the fewest issues.