An easy way to contribute that isn't money or expertise.

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cgoldberg@reddit

Submitting good bug reports to the appropriate projects

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iamarealhuman4real@reddit

Just enabling metrics/telemetry is extremely helpful.

Obviously there are personal feelings around this topic, but I would trust KDE or Gnome to 1) collect reasonable data, not absolutely everything they can 2) not sell it on.

It's really hard to get a handle on reach of open source stuff. Even just rough user counts let alone "does anyone even ever use this feature".

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

I had telemetry enabled from the initial setup. I opt out of telemetry in any other circumstance. But it seems fedora project respects the privacy of users.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

I've had fedora notify me of unexpected crashes and ask me if I would like to submit a report. The majority of errors I run into are due to inexperience though. I'll look into these more

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Adam3752YT@reddit

Finally, someone that actually means linux iso's when they speak about torrenting

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

I like the idea of using iso torrents, more than just an emergency backup if I need to reinstall.

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okoyl3@reddit

Seeding Fedora images is a nice way to get people not to like lInux. (Reason: NO CODECS INSTALLED)

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Farados55@reddit

Cleaning up bug reports, identifying duplicates and merging them, identifying related ones and grouping them. It's actually a huge problem in OSS.

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7lhz9x6k8emmd7c8@reddit

That's a perfect use case for an LLM automation.

@OP, time to learn n8n, scrape the bug tracker, get the results, check them manually, clean the tickets.

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XeroRony@reddit

otima ideia pena que os cara não gosta de LLM por pura birra

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7lhz9x6k8emmd7c8@reddit

That's a pathological level of hate.

They can't even stand the mention of something.

They want the purity of doing the work without new tools they see as evil.

Reactionary hating backwards.

I'm running n8n on the devil's setup here: Debian, Docker for the local instance, Ollama for the local model.

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XeroRony@reddit

good and simple ideia, n8n is great for newbas

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I used to do this on and off for Discord when they still allowed volunteers to handle the bug report queue. People might not think it is that important, but it is. It saves a lot of time for the actual developers.

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ZorbaTHut@reddit

I gotta say that good QA workers are highly unappreciated. QA spans a massive range from brute-force testing to something that is frankly management-adjacent, and while there's a lot of cruddy QA people out there, great ones are absolute gold.

(this is true of pretty much every profession, of course)

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MatchingTurret@reddit

Random users don't get developer or admin rights on bug trackers.

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Farados55@reddit

In LLVM, you can get a triage role that gives you specific rights to assign labels and such on github. Other orgs also state about how community members can get involved through bug report help on their "how to get involved" or whatever pages.

You can absolutely get involved as a "random" which will make you not a random.

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iamarealhuman4real@reddit

Oh I can think of one way,

User requested help reducing issue count

Looking at issues ...

There are 25,000 issues, I should help the user with this request.

Deleting issues

There are 23,000 issues, I should help the user with this request.

Nuclear option, trash everything in inbox older than Feb 15

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aaronfranke@reddit

You can still leave a comment and help out those who do have those permissions.

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Catenane@reddit

I don't wanna be negative but neither I nor anyone I know has ever downloaded linux from a torrent. 😂 That's not to say nobody does, but I wonder how many people are just seeding those just to seed them.

Another good way to help is with packaging. Not entirely skill-free, but easier to learn IMO than like, bootstrapping a new project from scratch or jumping into a huge developed codebase and trying to fix things.

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robsablah@reddit

Downloaded a few - can attest its WAY faster than the website / cdn.

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kasperlitheater@reddit

I prefer torrent downloads, as normal direct downloads never seem to max out my internet speed.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

I dont think that's negative at all. I didn't use a torrent to download fedora or bazzite, and everyone i know uses windows. 🤷

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blaaee@reddit

This isn't helping anything but your feeling of self worth, but that's important too I guess

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

Helping or not, is it hurting anything to do this? You could be right, thanks for the reality check.

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matthewdavis@reddit

What else do you do with a symmetric gig home connection without caps?

All-time upload: 317.574 TiB All-time download: 13.004 TiB All-time share ratio: 24.42

Regularly update with latest fedora, arch variants, kali and others.

What's surprising is kali-live-amd64 is BY FAR the most downloaded ISO from all I seed.

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marxist_redneck@reddit

You made want to code an *arr style app for seeding Linux ISOs: pick distros, how much you want to seed, and how many versions in the history do you want to keep. Automate the process of helping seed distros. Plus it would be a funny joke in the piracy community that always refers to what they are torrenting as "Linux ISOs"

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

Mtly connection is currently over wifi, so I'm not getting the upload speeds I'd like. But I'm getting enjoyment out of seeding these, hopefully I can get some good numbers over time!

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Valuable_Leopard_799@reddit

Let us know about the ratios.

I've always wondered if these things are used much.

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Bulky-Bad-9153@reddit

Distro	Time	Ratio
Linux mint Cinnamon 22.3	110d	227
Linux mint xfce 22.3	110d	140
Linux mint mate 22.3	110d	59
arch 2026-01-01	101d	55

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LordSlyGentleman@reddit

This bottle of Sprite OS tastes great! The lemon lime ratio is more tart. more lime on the wire. Does anyone have any Gnutella?

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Max-P@reddit

I had an old bunch of Ubuntu/Debian ISOs I forgot running on a VM. Had a ratio of 350 on like Ubuntu 16.04 ISOs over a few years.

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Larrdath@reddit

arch 2026-1-1, 73 days 2 hours, 81,03
arch 2026-2-1, 55d 22h, 80,78
arch 2026-3-1, 39d 23h, 92,04
arch 2026-4-1, 21d 3h, 74.38
arch 2026-5-1, 1d 19h, 9,91

kubuntu 25.04, 226d 2h, 82,21
kubuntu 25.10, 119d 7h, 53,67
kubuntu 26.04, 7d 3h, 7,35

fedora KDE 43, 25d 6h, 7,77

That's about all I have, I generally keep only the 5 latest arch and I still need to grab Fedora 44. Didn't know Zorin had torrents so I might grab that one too.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

Arch got to a 1 seed ratio in 6 hours, not sure how long I'll be seeding some of these for. But I'd like to get above 1 before I consider stopping.

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Journeyj012@reddit

seeded Mint for 50 days and got 40 ratio.

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Zestyclose-Kale-4856@reddit

For a momment baZZite tricked me ...

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looneysquash@reddit

Well, define technical skill.

You could join their support forum, irc discord, whatever they use. And at first just lurk. Then start answering questions.

They often get a lot of the same questions, so even if you don't know any answers when you start, you'll pick some up.

Also sometimes the answer isn't technical. Its knowing that someone is already working on an issue, or knowing the link to the issue, or that something is actually fixed but not released yet.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

Discord is a good place to start too, thanks for the recommendation.

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troyunrau@reddit

Most open source software will have their core chat community on a platform that isn't discord. Suggest you look at irc and matrix if you want to find the core community.

User communities, on the other hand, tend to be wherever there is critical mass.

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EternallyAries@reddit

I see Archlinux in there. Good, I really like having fast download speeds for it. Maybe sometime soon when I setup a nas or something I'll start using a portion of it resources for seeding.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

A lot of people torrenting arch apparently, I grabbed what I could to seed. In the future I may scale it back to a couple for each distro. But I dont have plans for the drive space used atm.

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archontwo@reddit

Documentation, translations, reporting bugs effectively, advocacy by sharing you love for the project with others. Help out in forums, chats with new confused users. Etc.

There are plenty of ways to help projects that don't always include money or coding.

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heywoodidaho@reddit

KDE has telemetry turned off by default [as it should be]. Turn it up.

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Leverquin@reddit

Interesting. I distro hopped on fedora kde and i was asked about that and i kept it off. O even forgot about that until you write here

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heywoodidaho@reddit

Settings-user feedback. Pick a level you're comfortable with.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

I turned basic telemetry on when I installed fedora kde, but I've been uncomfortable with telemetry as a whole for awhile. Maybe it's different in linux land?

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heywoodidaho@reddit

Only for them, I go full blown paranoid on everything else, but there have to be good guys left out there right? Besides it helps me in theory so maybe they don't cut things I use. The "Leave" on the right click option comes to mind.

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Leverquin@reddit

Leave?

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heywoodidaho@reddit

Right click mouse "Leave" was the name of the option to turn the rig off.

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BashfulMelon@reddit

It's totally different. It's all open source so you can see exactly what information they're getting. Nobody is making money off of it. They just use it to decide what to spend their time improving, what settings should be default, finding bugs... Stuff that makes the software better for everyone.

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

Read through the privacy policy, especially the section on telemetry. It seems pretty straightforward compared to the walls of jargon commercial systems state. I'll probably look at the telemetry levels again and turn mine up.

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Atsetalam@reddit

Does anyone want an old version of Ubuntu Studio?

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EternallyAries@reddit

If it isn't easily accessible, please do upload it somewhere. Multiple places would be a good start.

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brainless_bekub@reddit

What is your qb theme name?

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

I didn't change the theme in qbittorrent, but its probably changed by my global theme which is fedora dark.

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D0nkeyHS@reddit

Documentation.

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PJBthefirst@reddit

Documentation without expertise is not good documentation

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Astronaut6735@reddit

Test, find, and report bugs.

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DustyAsh69@reddit

You could help translate documentation in other languages. If you're good with UI / UX design, you can offer your services for free.

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Indolent_Bard@reddit

We need to improve support for other languages. Translating docs to Asian languages doesn't mean much when using asisn languages in Linux is years if not decades behind Windows and Mac.

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bigus_bear@reddit

good legitimate use of the bittorrent protocol as well

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Palantiri1890@reddit (OP)

Yeah, I didn't know some distros use torrents to distribute their official isos's. I don't know how popular it is to download vs the mirrors, but it's pretty low effort to help a bit.

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daemonpenguin@reddit

The big one is documentation. Read docs for things you are doing and fill in gaps or clarify the language or update them. The documentation for most open source projects is lacking.

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