[eternityforest]

I'm also worried about Debian's future.

Most of the big names who have left seem like it's a win all around, they seem to be anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch, and never really agreed with what Debian was trying to do.

But at a certain point, you just need more people for that many packages.

Perhaps they should try to transition away from the volunteer model. I wouldn't want to work at a distro if nobody was paying me, that seems like some of the very top unpleasant parts of tech work all it one job. And from what I hear, the Debian people are basically working a second full time job and some are not happy about the thankless drugery.

Either that, or the world should transition to Fedora. I'm sure they could get to Ubuntu's level of everything just works, if they had the whole Debian team helping!

[faho]

> anti-systemd hacker/tinkerer types who will be much happier over at Arch

When you're anti-systemd, you won't be happier over at Arch, considering systemd is the only supported init system in Arch - in contrast to Debian, which supports alternatives.

[eternityforest]

I'm not exactly sure why Debian supports alternatives, that seems like a terrible idea when you're already stretched thin, but most everything else about it seems to be less tinkerer-friendly then Arch.

Seems like a lot more people can kind of grudgingly tolerate systemd, but they really seem to hate outdated packages, and anything "unnecessary"..

Some of them are pretty neutral on systemd itself, or have given up on fighting it.

They seem to mostly just want maximum ability to build their own system

[rascul]

> I'm not exactly sure why Debian supports alternatives

Debian has hurd and freebsd ports for which systemd is not available.

[eternityforest]

Supporting hurd and freebsd ports doesn't exactly seem like the best use of resouces for a smaller-than-google team either, but then again it might be important if losing those would also mean losing some key contributors.

[kasabali]

> Either that, or the world should transition to Fedora.

So, instead of volunteering for Debian, volunteer for IBM?

[eternityforest]

I'm not sure anyone should volunteer for any of this at all, and most of these positions should be paid.

But that might be selection bias, maybe there's lots of happy distro maintainers that we just don't hear from.