On 5/10/23 22:27, Neal Gompa wrote:
On Wed, May 10, 2023 at 4:55 AM Simon Lees <sflees@suse.de> wrote:
On 5/10/23 18:06, Eric Schirra wrote:
Am Montag, 8. Mai 2023, 16:52:30 CEST schrieb Richard Brown:
I don't know if there are any stats on Gnome vs KDE usage with TW, but I would be surprised if the number of KDE users was small.
The number of users doesn't matter. It's the number of contributors that is relevant here. As long as it's greater than 0 I'd say that there's an argument to continue offering MicroOS Desktop with KDE, but as it's been effectively zero for over a month now we need to start considering its removal.
The number of users does not matter? But the number of contributors does? Strange way of looking at things. I think the user comes first. And all others have to follow him.
In a distro that is 100% volunteer based contributors matter, without contributors nothing happens, yes its nice if the contributors listen to what the users want but at the end of the day if there is no contributors to listen to those users nothing will happen.
If you want to only hear from contributors, then we should have split this mailing list into two a long time ago. It was openSUSE's choice to have a merged users+contributors mailing list for openSUSE Factory based stuff. I even argued for this a few years ago during the Mailman migration. But the community wanted to retain it, so we did.
I will point out that contributors don't generally come out of nowhere. Most contributors start out as users (barring a few exceptions). If you're antagonistic to user feedback, that discourages the user-to-contributor conversion funnel, which is already small to begin with.
Keep in mind that "listening" != "doing". Having empathy and consideration for the people that use or want to use openSUSE can have lasting positive effects. This doesn't mean "overcommit yourself" (unless you want to!), but it does mean not being a jerk and making the developer community appear kind and approachable.
A project with no users is also a project with no contributors. That said, while what contributors want to do ultimately wins out, the messaging should be oriented around helping people become part of that group, not saying "your opinion doesn't matter because you're not a contributor".
As a contributor let me say that I do value users opinions and that weighed heavily on my decisions to start looking at a ALP based Leap alternative because I could clearly see it would be useful for alot of people other then me. But this is very much something I am willing to contribute to that I know with minimal effort I can do some things that users need. On the other hand if there is no one willing to do the work then there is also likely no one ready to listen to users about it.
Overall, I'm more concerned about how difficult it is to become a contributor, much less a regular one. The way openSUSE is developed makes it very hard for people to figure out how to contribute because it's splattered all over the place with no guidance available.
I'll provide a bit of a counter argument here, I started contributing because at the time (12ish years ago) no Distro provided good enlightenment support. With obs and our review processes and willingness not to have gatekeepers as to what goes into the core distro it was far easier for me to contribute enlightenment to openSUSE then it would have been for say Debian (fedora although that may have got better) or ubuntu. The fact that Arch and openSUSE are the only two distro's that have continued to have support over that time period while others have come and go says something about how easy it is to contribute new things here.
Some time ago, we set up https://contribute.opensuse.org/, but it only points to very generic guidance. We don't have guidance for working on openSUSE KDE as far as I know. Improving openSUSE KDE improves the KDE experience for all openSUSE "products" (Tumbleweed, MicroOS, Leap, etc.).
I do agree though that while its not that hard for users who see a problem to become contributors who fix that problem, for people who'd like to contribute but don't know where to help or were to start we certainly could do better because this is important for keeping parts of the project going as some contributors naturally move onto other things. But just because we could do this better doesn't necessarily mean it is difficult to become a contributor at least not for myself, and for a number of people over the years who i've helped contribute there first package. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B