Do you contribute to a Linux project regularly? Do you consider yourself part of a community?

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onechroma@reddit (OP)

Interesting, any project in particular if you don’t mind sharing? Thanks

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ThePowerOfPinkChicks@reddit

No, thanks. I use to use other avatars and names over there and won't mix stuff.

Latest:

darktable - working on and testing current workflow especially for genuine pure monochrome gear, like Leica monochromes

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I have a couple old (2010 and 2016) computers that I run RHEL betas and Fedora betas on for Red Hat. More so just to report bugs with general use type issues with older hardware. I feel as though what little I do for them is still helping... at a minimum I'm helping those running Fedora on older hardware.

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ProfessionalFamous86@reddit

I used to contribute a lot but since the AI slope armagadeon where every contributions you need to justify you are not have used AI or not a bot, i gave up out of boreness

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Purple_Jello_4799@reddit

I've contributed to noctalia-shell, which comes as a default shell for the niri wayland compositor in CachyOS. it's definitely not much but yeah

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Feroand@reddit

I don't have much energy to report bugs, make translations, etc. But, I am donating to Mint and other software I am using regularly.

I wish I had the energy, though. I like to contribute to a community in much more direct way.

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gotkube@reddit

I don’t play well with others

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

I contributed financially to several Linux and FOSS projects, and participated in some others. /it was easier 20-30 years ago, before the commercialization of the Internet. There were online forums where conscientious Linux users helped each other. What I see here today is lots of Veruca Salt characters saying "I want it now!" They don't care about Linux, they just follow the herd and do what's trendy. They're not interested in Linux, they want an easy button for gaming, and it's exhausting to see the same questions and complaints over and over, from people who refuse to RTFM, and expect the community to spoon feed them.

We used to have local Linux user groups (LUGs), but they have vanished. Nobody does things for fun or for free any more, and even volunteering has been ruined by greedy, selfish people who covet their positions and keep others out. If you can find a group of local people who are truly interested in mastering Linux, count your blessings! Otherwise, making small monetary donations is the best that can be done.

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onechroma@reddit (OP)

Thanks for your reply, a bit sad but true. I was considering helping with whatever can do in free time or valuable, but I found the same kind of vibe you described.

The smaller all volunteers projects are dying, general users are just too "I don't care, give me, do to me" treating volunteers and helping users just like some customer service, the bigger projects are just big corporations or heavily sponsored/controlled directly or indirectly by them (RedHat: Fedora, Gnome, Podman...; Canonical with Ubuntu...) so at the end of the day you feel like working for free for a multi-billion valued company (in the first case, for a IBM subsidiary).

It seems times are changing and Linux is just transforming from being a nerds-space with multiple groups, to just being a common place where multiple companies develop their own solutions and converge. And that's until the new MIT licensing wave (rust rewriting) starts to make some companies to just take things and go closed source on them.

I wanted to be useful even if dedicating little time here and there, but I'm not finding any motivation, to be fair.

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

I resisted writing a long screed about how selfish people have ruined volunteering in general, but I agree with you. I used to do volunteer work to help nonprofits with tech, and every one of them was run by a rich man's wife who loved the power and authority much more than the cause. I got fired from my last volunteer position because I actually showed up and did the work, and that made the no-show boss look bad.

I also agree about the selfishness of all the new Linux users with the "I pay your salary" attitude. I used to be enthusiastic about helping new Linux users, but am sick of the "I wanna be a power user, make it so" posts that put all the onus on others. That's not community!

I tend to use commercial distros specifically because I can buy a service plan and get help if I need it. When I was new, I always read all I could find on a topic before bothering others. That's what adults do. I don't know what happened to cause so many people to remain spoiled children in adulthood, but it's wrecking all of society.

I wish you luck. It has been my pleasure to compare notes with you. I hope that the wave of anti-intellectualism finally passes, and we can resume a normal life.

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PCGA-CD51@reddit

What was the explanation given for firing you, if you don't mind me asking?

I am lucky enough not to have to put up with selfish types; instead, I had to deal with very incompetent people. A few months ago, I started going to a Linux café where people can either seek help with Linux or offer it. The organizer started talking about some close colleagues of hers who dropped a bunch of used laptops at her house with the idea of refurbishing them with Linux and giving them away to members of this repair café.

After a first successful run where everyone was quite happy with the result, she approached me personally to scale up the operation by seeking government funding to reduce e-waste, repurpose old laptops, etc. Her colleagues would provide us with the equipment, and we’d distribute it to whoever needed it. It all started well until she began complaining about said colleagues not giving any feedback to the draft she was going to submit for funding.

From the very beginning, I knew she was the privacy paranoid who refuses to use any social media and so on, but I didn't foresee how bad it could get. When I asked her if she had tried giving them a call instead, she replied that it was "too rude" and that she never does that. She just messages them. Moreover, there were lots of incoherent statements, like her colleagues showing up at her apartment and dropping off more laptops without asking.

In the end, she claims these guys showed up at her house one more time and took back the remaining laptops without uttering a word. Then, she cut off contact with them and told me that she was done with the initiative.

I’m incredibly disappointed because it’s clear the café isn't run with any real professional intent. It's basically a social club where half the people sit for hours in silence, just using their laptops and eating fries. At least I got two laptops in good condition.

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

My firing was little more than an emotional outburst. I had never met the woman, or had any contact with her before that, but she felt very put off that she "had to" come in to the office that she allegedly supervised. In her absence, I just did what the volunteer who had recruited me said. We were doing research for an investigative reporter, and he seemed pleased with my results. It came out of the blue.

I was no stranger to television, having worked as an engineer in other cities, and I had been a board member and chief executive for a 501(c)(3) company before. All I can think is that she was incompetent and felt threatened by my early success.

That Linux café looks like a cool idea! And recycling old computers is something I've done myself. One volunteer job had me teaching school children computer concepts, then helping them build their own machines from parts at a recycling center. I love refurbishing old computers, then putting them in classrooms and other places where they're needed.

I have also had my share of experiences with paranoid people. One project I got into was supposed to be building ad hoc Wi-Fi networks to support data and VoIP telephony without an Internet connection. It came out of the Occupy movement, and the people in charge were so uptight about secrecy, nothing ever got done.

If there was a Linux café in my neighborhood, I think I'd put up with a few layabouts to have a third place where the more industrious members could work. Is it still in operation?

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PCGA-CD51@reddit

The project had a lot of potential, but in the end, she ruined it - partly due to, in my opinion, some mental or social issues on her part. She is a very average, unremarkable person, yet somehow she is convinced she's a person of interest, to the point that she gives her phone number to no one. Unfortunately, I think the Linux community tends to attract certain types of antisocial people who may not be best suited for this endeavor, which requires social skills.

Yes, it's still operational; it takes place once a month. However I've already come to terms with the fact that they do not intend to put in any more effort than they already do. They prefer the informal aspect of it, especially not enforcing any set of rules. Luckily, there's almost always someone new who needs help setting up Linux, so I'm still satisfied. Otherwise I leave early because I can't stand the scent of food and other odors.

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

Well, it's good that there's something left. Better than nothing at all. There are some very strange people out there. All we can do is to carry on, I guess.

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Filipp_Krasnovid@reddit

I don't think it's that bad now to be honest. There a lot of great projects made for free and for fun. People help each other every day on this exact website! Yeah, we see more bad stuff as well, but it doesn't seem like all the good things you described are lost

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SpeedDaemon1969@reddit

I can't speak for all people and all places, but it is that way in the three cities I've lived in. If it's not where you are, please do get involved and keep the good work going!

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srivasta@reddit

Yes. I am a debian developer, though not as active as I used to be. I started by being dissatisfied with how debian manually packaged kernels using cp and ar, so I wrote the infrastructure to create level packages, and took over creating distro kernels for a few years.

I consider the debian developer community as indeed a community, with friends that have been around for decades now.

Traveling across the world for debconfs has been a highlight.

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OdinsGhost@reddit

The only contributions in qualified to offer are bug reports. I’m not a developer.

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ben2talk@reddit

Half the work of developers is simply making decisions and working out how things should be done.

Do you not have any opinion about how, for example, drag and drop should work?

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OrganicNectarine@reddit

Which is perfectly fine. A well documented bug report is worth many hours of work. A bad one can have the opposite effect though, so keep that in mind.

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themuthafuckinruckus@reddit

Couldn't be more true.

Half of the job when looking at a kernel call trace is the root-cause-analysis.

Sometimes the patch for a catastrophic bug is like, 4 lines. Of course, the experience of knowing where to put those lines is invaluable, but by providing things as simple as:

- a reliable reproducer + steps to reproduce

- description of the system's state when it happened (other apps, workloads, etc?)

- sosreport or at least cat /proc/cmdline (if you have it)

the turnaround time can get cut from weeks to days.

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dtsudo@reddit

I contributed 2 apps on Flathub and filed some bug reports on other open source programs.

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ben2talk@reddit

Do you contribute to a Linux project regularly? Do you consider yourself part of a community?

Yes - several communities... not including reddit which is just social media, not taken seriously.

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Palantiri1890@reddit

I was thinking over the same thing recently. I learned that a lot of the distros have torrents for their official iso's. So I started seeding some like fedora, linux mint, etc. Every little bit helps I think.

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StreamingPanda@reddit

I use KDE and I make sure to turn up the tracking on every KDE app in each of their settings so they can gain as much info as possible from my usage. For a small handful of projects I make sure to visit their Git repos and submit feedback/issues and in some cases even helped fix bugs. It's small things but I feel like I helped in some way.

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TiZ_EX1@reddit

I used to package for Flathub. I still like Flatpak itself, but I'm sick of what GNOME does to the ecosystem, and some of Flathub's chief maintainers are serious assholes. There was a time that contributing to Linux didn't result in clashes between cults of personality, but those times are long, long gone.

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Negative_Settings@reddit

No I don't contribute to a specific project, yes of course I'm part of the community!

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acheronuk@reddit

I contribute to a few projects, but mostly Ubuntu and KDE. The reasons were incremental. Started as there were bugs/issues I wanted fixed. Enjoyed that process and the communities, so decided to give back more to somewhat set off the very large benefits I had and continue to have for these things being out there for free. That became development work and testing, and a whole other range of things. I continue because it becomes something you love doling and is very satisfying to see these things out there that you helped to make.

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onechroma@reddit (OP)

Interesting. If you don't mind, how is it organised? I mean, how do you start contributing to projects like Ubuntu or KDE?

I thought about maybe helping Ubuntu a bit as I'm a user, KDE would also fit nicely, but I didn't find any good info about how realistically someone without coding knowledge could make any meaningful effort at some free time slots. Thanks.

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Unlikelycle@reddit

Ensuring job spends alot of the money we used to spend on licenses to support projects we use.

Detailed reproducible bug reports and submit improvements we make internally if they are of any interest to the projects.

Other then that communites has generally been overrun with entitlement so don't really interact much anymore

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Hot-Employ-3399@reddit

Sometimes I open issues/discussion. If it is something annoying to the point it worth time coding, diff is either in the text or I have fork public. Not always. My fork named "keepassxc-autotype-parody-through-ydotool-fuck-me" is private, because keepassxc definitely know about autotype on wayland. I rarelly do PRs

I also bought krita on steam

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Blutkoete@reddit

I contribute with money to Arch and KDE because I use them home.

I tried to contribute to EPEL for a package I use at work and learned that my bug report is ignored and that offering direct support via mail ended with "great, I currently don't have time" on the maintainer's side

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C0rn3j@reddit

I'm just a basic user who wouldn't be of any valuable help even to the projects I use

That's absolutely not true, you can help with documentation, translation, helping others in support groups, and other things that don't necessarily require huge technical skill.

they're already too well fitted and even supported by the companies behind them

Look at Ubuntu's documentation, atrocious pile of garbage does not even begin to describe it.

Having said that, think about where you spend your energy.

A huge corporate project which does not care to do basic things like maintain user documentation is probably not it.

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phylter99@reddit

Sometimes being part of a community and contributing is simply making a post and asking questions. That contributes to documentation because even if you don't know the answer when you get an answer it becomes a more permanent piece of information that is indexed by Google. The number of times that I've needed an answer to something and I found that answer on Reddit because someone else asked first is too numerous to count.

Contributing to the community can be as simple as that.

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DT-Sodium@reddit

Nope, I consider myself more like a prisoner who has to use WSL because most of the technologies I work with are made for Linux first.

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onechroma@reddit (OP)

So you prefer Windows over Linux and would prefer to work 100% Windows?

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DT-Sodium@reddit

No, I don't prefer. Windows is objectively the only decent OS on the market.

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necrophcodr@reddit

Do present the objective facts that make it so. What you're stating is seemingly an oxymoron, so do prove the entire industry wrong.

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DT-Sodium@reddit

Not interested in starting yet another useless debate on enemy territory. You people are basically a cult.

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necrophcodr@reddit

What a weird answer. You brought it up, nobody asked you. Go on and life your life instead.

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DT-Sodium@reddit

Sorry, I apparently made a mistake when I tried to block your account.

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MelioraXI@reddit

You don't understand: He's a prisoner.

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onechroma@reddit (OP)

Enemy territory? Cult? I can't speak for others, but for sure I don't like those words being used so easy. You can freely share and give your opinions, and it will your experience. Nobody can or should convince you're wrong or you should do this or that.

The people using Linux aren't that bad, really.

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discusseded@reddit

I guess that depends on your definition of decent.

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wfp5p@reddit

The nice thing about being open is that if you have the skills, you can fix things. Don't like some documentation or even just annoyed at that little typo in some doc? Well you can fix it!

I originally contributed to the kernel to fix an annoying bug in a filesystem I kept encountering. It was rare, but I was working at a big site so I'd encounter it from time to time. I submitted bug report(s), but since it was an odd edge case it wasn't obviously reproducible. Since I had an environment that would trigger it somewhat often, I was able to find it and fix it myself and there you go, one less pain point at my then job.

For packages, I contribute simply because it's stuff I'm doing already. If there's a package I'm using that I made because I needed it, I'll go ahead and add that package to the distro -- in the end that makes it easier on me because then I don't have to maintain a local package repository.

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Jumpy-Dinner-5001@reddit

No, not really.

I used to and have some smaller public github projects but they're mostly dead.

Most of what I do is creating issues and sometimes PRs for work related stuff in some FOSS libraries.

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MelioraXI@reddit

I contribute to some FOSS projects (mostly bugfixes), tooling but I don't feel my C skills are good enough to learn how to contribute to the kernel or something like that.

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DFS_0019287@reddit

I have, in the past, contributed financially to some projects such as PostgreSQL. I've also helped hunt down and fix bugs in a bunch of projects, including the kernel. And finally, I maintain a handful of my own open-source projects and one of them has a fairly active mailing list, which makes it feel like a community.

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Scoutron@reddit

I know C but don’t feel near the level of confident to push to anything mainline. I work with Linux professionally and contribute by helping newbies where I can

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OrganicNectarine@reddit

I have built a couple of tools because I use Arch (btw) and they didn't exist, or at least not in a way I wanted them to have. I have contributed to some tools I use on Linux, but just minor things here and there. I have never contributed to any distro directly.

I would still consider myself part of the Linux community though, because I care about the philosophy, and I like to help others.

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niggo372@reddit

For me Linux is just one part of the wider open-source community.

I like the idea that you can contribute however you're able, and receive contributions from others in return. And that's not limited to just coding. You can contribute by creating designs and art assets, working on documentation and articles, giving constructive feedback, writing detailed bug reports, help organizing events, providing support to others, and so on.

In that sense I definitely do feel like part of a community of like-minded people.

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Puzzled-Garbage-250@reddit

I used to contribute a lot but too many toxic people online, especially in the linux community. I may contribute more again some time in the future but we really need a stronger enforced code of conduct across many of the communities that exist.

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soulless_ape@reddit

You dont have to submit to the kernel or build a program. Being part of the community is using any Linux distro, sharing knowledge and helping others.

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Own_Nail_2999@reddit

I find it rather bestranging that people are forming opinionated cults around an operating system / kernel. So no, I just enjoy the software

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hangint3n@reddit

I've been using Linux since 1998. I'm not a coder, nor am I any good at problem solving and I can't write to save my life. So I limit myself to forums and IRC channels. Where I can, I submit bug reports.

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DoubleOwl7777@reddit

depends on how you define it: - programming? nope, though i have taken a look at the open source vr drivers once (specifically windows mixed reality controller tracking drivers), but could figure anything useful out.

-testing? a little bit yes, i tested some things for other people.

-helping others/documenting? yes absolutely.

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PaddyLandau@reddit

I used to, for years. I contributed on forums, helped with documentation, reported bugs and tested proposed solutions, and I forget what else. I haven't had the time and energy to do much of that these days.

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hotchilly_11@reddit

I contribute to the arch wiki here and there, make a couple bug reports, and can be somewhat active on help forums but haven’t yet actually contributed code anywhere, even though I kinda want to

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CptSpeedydash@reddit

I do consider myself as minor part of the community but I haven't contributed to any code base yet, with the closest contribution is a bug report on an app I use.

I do however try to help on r/Linuxquestions when I'm able to, as other did when I was first changing to Linux.

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Randzom100@reddit

I use Linux for around half a year, and even tho I somewhat know my way around programmation, my only contribution right now is just... Trying to help other new users. Who knows, maybe one of these new users will code something on Linux out of passion. All I'm doing is trying to help the community grow, and that's fine with me.

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Slight_Manufacturer6@reddit

I get involved in Linux groups and podcasts to share the knowledge. I just kind of fell into it.

If you aren’t coder or anything like that, you can always help with documentation and testing betas and submitting bug reports.