12 ms·

Attracting and Retaining Debian Contributors

153 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago
Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS, so Linux came out and people flocked to improve it. Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. I think only a few young kids rely on PCs, thus the issue. I hope it can be solved at some point and good contributors can be found. Otherwise we will be left with just IBM Red Hat.
- shakow 2y ago
  > Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. I mean, they came with enthusiasm and a lot of hard work, brought a new language with many advantages (as said by the BDFL humself), dusted off the whole GPU stack, tried to formalize a bit the FS systems, then got shunned out by the greybeards because “muh youngsters and their religion”.
  - arp242 2y ago
    That's not really a fair representation of the argument, and the stereotyping of everyone who disagrees or expresses some caution as an old stubborn greybeard who refuses to learn anything new is exactly the thing people (rightfully) complain about.
    - shakow 2y ago
      Please feel free to develop what you perceive as being a fair representation of the situation. > or expresses some caution Bellowing about religions while monopolizing a talk Q&A is not “expressing some caution”.
      - arp242 2y ago
        I'm not going to spend half an hour (or more) doing a full detailed write-up in response to a lazy assertion, especially since your attitude does not resemble that of a person with genuine interest in understanding other people's viewpoints. Stereotyping an entire viewpoint as you did in your previous comment is pretty much always wrong. I might be a bit more forgiving if it has included some context or details, but it doesn't. Your post is little more than an insult. I will add that people having been choking each other over all sorts of technical stuff for as long as this "free software" thing has existed, because there are usually 20 ways to do anything and typically between 2 and 10 ways are reasonable. This is really nothing new and discussions surrounding Rust are really not that special.
      - NobodyNada 2y ago
        The full quote: > You're trying to convince everyone to switch over to the religion as promulgated by Rust, and the reality is that ain't gonna happen because we have 50+ filesystems in Linux. They will not all be instantaneously converted over to Rust. Before that happens, we will continue to refactor C code because we want to make the C code better. If it breaks the Rust bindings, at least for the foreseeable future, the Rust bindings are a second class citizen, and those filesystem that depend on the Rust bindings will break, and that is the Rust bindings problem, not the filesystem community at large problem, and that's going to be true for a long long time. And I think we just simply need to accept that, because the answer "you are not allowed to refactor the C code because it would break 5 critical filesystem that distros depend upon" is not a starter. So we'll see; I suspect the best thing to do is for you to continue maintaining your Rust bindings. Over time, there will be continued C code refactoring -- maybe we will start using kfree RCU. If that breaks Rust, we will find out whether this concepts of encoding huge amount of semantics into the type system is a good thing or a bad thing, and instead of trying to convince us to what is actually correct, let's see what happens in a year or two. And it will either work or it won't, and we will see, more likely, where does the pain get allocated. Because with most of these sort of engineering things it's almost always a pain allocation question. > [...] > You're not going to force all of us to learn Rust -- if I make a change, I will fix all of the C code, because that's my responsibility. Because I don't know Rust, I'm not going to fix the Rust bindings. Some of his language is more emotionally charged than was productive, sure, but I think his underlying concern is reasonable: most kernel maintainers don't know Rust, and so when they make changes to C code, they won't be able to fix Rust clients of that C code. The Rust maintainers accept this, and agree to take responsibility for updating Rust code to match changes in C (which is contrary to the usual development workflow of the kernel, hence the concern over what happens if major distros start depending on Rust code). Note also that Ts'o isn't objecting to including Rust in the kernel! His recommendation is to ship the Rust bindings and see "where the pain gets allocated" as the C code continues to evolve. (The idea being that either Rust's type system and borrow checker will make it easy to identify semantic breakages early, thus making Rust code lower-maintenance than C, or the Rust bindings will turn out to be fragile and high-maintenance, and that the best way to tell is by waiting to see). I'm not a part of the Linux kernel community at all, and I certainly don't know all the context that led to Almeida leaving the project -- I imagine Ts'o's comments were a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of thing. But the Linux kernel is a complex project and critical infrastructure, so surely concerns about organization and maintainability need to be hashed out before Rust can make it to production. Also, Ts'o's comments struck me as some of the most reasonable out of that talk, at least from a technical perspective -- the next commenter after Ts'o objects to Rust in the kernel on the basis that its function call syntax reminds him of Java.
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Rust on Linux will happen. One way or another. At the worst, one funeral at a time. I wouldn’t sweat it. I remember a HN comment that I really liked and can’t find now that went something like: You know what stopped me from programming? It wasn’t that I didn’t have a good computer. It wasn’t that I started later than all the other kids. It wasn’t that I had to work. Nothing. Nothing stopped me from programming. There’ll always be folks like that. And I hope I’ll be like that for some thing too!
  - mustache_kimono 2y ago
    It's a shit take, but I like it. Upvote this guy.
- dangitman 2y ago
  [dead]
- cesarb 2y ago
  > Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS It's easy to underestimate how inferior MS-DOS was, unless you lived through it. Windows (3.x and later 9x) was slightly better, but still had severe issues. Modern Windows is, from what I've heard, a lot better, so the incentive to migrate is not as strong. > Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. In particular, BitLocker means that it's harder to share disk space between Windows and an alternative operating system; back in the MS-DOS (and Windows 9x) days, it was not unusual to install Linux in a directory (or a disk image file) on the same partition used by the other operating system.
  - arp242 2y ago
    > Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. Also, don't underestimate the friction that existed in the 90s or early 00s. Nothing worked on Linux or BSD. My government sent me .doc files. Tons of stuff was Windows-only desktop software.[1] Mucking about with xfree86 -configure and /etc/X11/.... was far from easy or straight-forward. Internet access was far more rare and "just Google it" wasn't really a thing, etc. etc. etc. If I look at the amount of effort I spent to "just get Linux running" back in 2000 or so when I first tried it vs. today, then I'm fairly sure the overall experience is a lot better today. Sure, you need to deal with some stupid nonsense, but that was always the case. [1]: For all the hate the "modern web" gets from some people here: it does replace tons of crappy desktop stuff with an abstracted isolated VM which, among other benefits, makes running "alternative" systems like Linux or BSD far more viable.
    - Filligree 2y ago
      > You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. An imagined conversation: “Mom, I want to disable secure boot so I can try a free operating system.” “Oh no you don’t. Security is important.” This won’t happen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but it’s having a real impact on the pipeline for getting there. The conversation isn’t as imagined as all that.
- augusto-moura 2y ago
  There are still a bunch of young ones on PCs because of gaming, unfortunately the gaming scene is chiefly on Windows. Proton and Steam Deck were improvements, but the market share is still heavily leaning towards Microsoft. Maybe if things get better we could see a steadily increase in Linux users, as we are already seeing
- lolinder 2y ago
  I suspect the same number of people want a real OS as before, the difference is that everyone now has an OS of a weaker kind that gives them access to the same web that we're all on. So it's a similar problem that we have on the web as a whole—it's not that there's less good content (there's actually dramatically more), it's that it's hard to find it in the deluge of bad content. The trick that we have now is that young people with potential to be highly technical won't just come to us automatically like they did when we were 60% of the web. Instead we have to make a more conscious effort to do outreach and give people a taste of the power of real computing.
  - skinner927 2y ago
    I agree with your assumption that there’s the same number of people who want a real OS as there ever was. However, I believe there are more active distros and related highly-technical projects today than ever. So everyone has to share fewer contributors, except of course whatever the few hot/popular projects are (the latter is nothing new). I do worry though. Major academic institutions are having to put freshmen in remedial computer classes to teach them what files, folders, and devices are. The average persons is getting farther and farther away from an actual PC and deeper into the “app” world. Everything is moving to “the cloud”. Even software development is being pushed to virtual desktops/thin clients (look at GitHub workspaces [or whatever it’s called] as an example). The extremely large majority of software development today is web/cloud based. There are more and more of the non-technical buying “computers” that are really just glorified tablets. At some point, likely not/hopefully not in our lifetimes, it could become unprofitable for manufacturers to build PCs or only a few remain and the costs become prohibitively expensive to anyone but for-profit companies/corps. Hopefully that’s a pessimistic outlook.
- cedws 2y ago
  I’m ~young (23) and care about Linux. But I’m not going to volunteer to work on it for free. I have bills to pay. I’m here to get paid. Something that I hope dies off in the next decade is corporations leeching off of passionate volunteers doing free work.
Piraty 2y ago
Debian doesn't do a good job in making life easier for its maintainers. https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...
- imtringued 2y ago
  I made my own custom packages for Alpine Linux and Arch Linux for personal use. It is so easy that I am honestly I'm not seeing the point in doing things the way Debian does it. It just makes things unnecessarily difficult for no reason. What does a maintainer realistically do? He builds the software, so you expect that the package builder automatically installs the development dependencies and runs the build software inside a chroot. In case the software requires modifications, there needs to be a way to deliver patch files or additional files that aren't part of the original software or at least a standard location to store the distro specific fork that everyone agrees on. Once the software is built, the maintainer creates a directory structure that conforms to the distributions's conventions, adds things like systemd unit files or desktop shortcuts and other distro specific changes that exist outside the software. I would encourage everyone to at least give Alpine or Arch Linux packaging a try. It really is quite easy. Almost as easy as writing a docker file.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    > What does a maintainer realistically do? Debian maintainers have to coax upstream packages to behave like other Debian packages and use supported linked dependencies. This covers everything from log and config file locations, startup scripts patching dependencies to match the versions supported by the release, backporting security updates, and documenting. I trust Debian (and in turn Debian maintainers) more than I trust the upstream developer of lib-random-4-dev. I only ever had to build a custom package from source a handful of times.
    - homebrewer 2y ago
      Simpler packaging formats like pkgbuild and apkbuild do all of that too. They're easier to use because they do away with "convenient" automation that makes simple things trivial, and slightly more complex things very difficult. You just use the shell with all the standard commands.
binary132 2y ago
open source ain’t what it used to be
- myprotegeai 2y ago
  It's only going to get worse. There's a storm coming. The ageing open source engineers who hold up the whole house of cards cannot keep going indefinitely. It's going to turn into tragedy of the commons very quickly.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    This is one of many reasons humanity really needs to work on anti-aging and life extension therapies. If we can make these old-timer maintainers biologically immortal, we won't have to worry about this stuff collapsing one day.
    - kjs3 2y ago
      So instead of doing a tedious, thankless, unpaid job for 10, 20, 30 years, I can do it for 100, 200 or 300. Sounds awesome.
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        I'm not advocating that you do this tedious, thankless, unpaid job for 300 years: apparently, there's already people who actually want to, for whatever unfathomable reason, so I'm advocating that those people be given the means to do so indefinitely.
        kjs3 2y ago
        I know what you are 'advocating': science fiction solutions to real problems.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        What's wrong with that? It's not like anyone has any more feasible solutions to these problems.
zokier 2y ago
From my point of view it doesn't seem like really appreciate the Debian-style integrated self-contained OS model; what people want (these days) is more just a platform to run 3rd party applications. It is easy to see why some people see Debian more just getting in the way rather than being an asset. Part of the problem might be that Debian is something for everyone, and has cast a very wide net in terms of packages. Especially not all packages are all that integrated to the whole, or follow Debian guidelines very closely. I don't know if it would help if Debian would tighten ship, raise the bar for packages and cull more aggressively some of the less maintained ones. Although on the flip side one of the big advantages of Debian is its vast package archives so its a balancing act. Regarding the language aspect, that is the focus for much of the article, while I think local communities working in their native languages is definitely good thing ultimately I believe that any potential Debian contributor needs to be somewhat fluent in English. Debian is communal project after all and I imagine all the official discussions happen in English; its difficult to see someone being effective contributor if they can not communicate comfortably in community.
Barrin92 2y ago
> IRC is the default chat mechanism for Debian, but younger people do not use IRC; in Brazil, they use Telegram instead. This is I think one of the major reasons why a lot of older open source projects are absolutely starved for developers in their 20s and 30s. A lot of the mail based workflows or IRC based communication is just utterly foreign to any young person and also objectively atrocious in many ways. Having to rely on a chat service that doesn't let you see offline messages without setting up a proxy in 2024 is just not comprehensible to anyone used to modern services, for good reason. It's very obvious that open source projects that embrace github, discord, social media are able to do much better and attract contributors much more effectively. Purism is nice and all but if most of your core maintainers are in their 50s and 60s which is a reality now for a lot of long lived projects with no replacement coming up you're looking at the whole thing dying in a generation.
- davisr 2y ago
  You've outed yourself as not knowing why IRC and email are the established media. IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. These are the only two protocols required to cover most all needs of communication. It's the simplicity and stability that is why they are preferred, and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord. Also, putting the keys to one's communication into proprietary platforms, like GitHub and Discord, is a horrifyingly bad idea. Maybe it helps graduates of computer science work faster, but graduates of computer science also are (usually) embarrassingly bad hacks at what they do.
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    > IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. Is there a compelling reason for those to be separate, beyond "we've always done it this way"?
    - davisr 2y ago
hinkley 2y ago
Every volunteer group eventually starts to look alike. This is as it was explained to me over a decade ago, and I don’t really need to change much since human nature doesn’t change very fast, and this holds for all the groups I’ve belonged to. You get a lot of young adults who have more time than money. Their contributions are energetic but often short lived. They move away, their sense of self shifts away from the cause, their lives get too complicated, or they overdo it. It’s the people who pace themselves that avoid burnout. The trap is caring so much about a cause that they hurt themselves and have to step back. You get a smaller number of generally older regulars who keep the wheels on, and you have a few old timers who remember all the way back to the beginning. What has been tried. Who we have collaborated with or gotten donations from in the past. So attract your volunteers, identify and groom some for small leadership roles. But make sure not to overload them, and encourage them to set healthy boundaries. It’s keeping them that kills many orgs. Though some only focus on retention and become an echo chamber of greybeards. I don’t believe Linux has that problem. Yet.
meisel 2y ago
Moving Linux and its associated projects to GitHub would definitely help. I don't buy the arguments that GitHub isn't suitable for it, e.g. because it doesn't allow each sub-project to have its own area. Things like tags help a lot to separate issues and PRs based on which sub-project they're a part of.
- JonChesterfield 2y ago
  Totally. Microsoft is a surely benevolent entity to host the Linux project. They've proven to be excellent stewards of open source in their copilot project.
never_inline 2y ago
One reason I see hardly mentioned is change of tech stacks. Most modern developers do web development with a highly abstracted stack (including yours truly). So nobody is much familiar with C / Perl / OS level APIs. Closest they get is adhoc shell scripting in form of devops tools. Since people are so much abstracted from the stack, they don't feel much need to contribute to it or improve it to scratch their own itch. That's why new stuff like CNCF gets many contributions, old ones like Debian don't.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
I'm very conflicted, because Debian's strength is the intensity of package maintainership, but it's weakness is the intensity of package maintainership. Debian has a strong focus on being a in-group culture, believes in maintainers as strong operators over their fiefs, with freedom to operate in manners they like, usually with little support or help. There's been suggestions - ideas that maybe Debian should be a little more open to outside contributors, should have ci/CD tools & accept PRs more publicly. https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/merge_requests/8 https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/merge_requests/8 I do think there would be a lot of help that would show up, a lot of drive by contributions. And some people actively converting to maintainership that wouldn't have. But at the risk of a lot of people being able to help, without acculturating onto Debian, contributing more without becoming a full maintained. My only real Debian developership attempt was a go at packaging wayvnc a long time ago, and it's deps, well before it was available. Seems fairly straightforward, but I felt very unwelcome when I tried to ask about finding a maintainer or getting mentorship; it was a long time ago so I don't fully remember, but it was pretty discouraging and experience having re-learned so much about Debian & having some the deeds, only to feel turned away for unclear reasons.
Tarucho 2y ago
The problem with these large open source projects is that they are already on maintenance mode and the fun part has already been done a long ago. Who wants to work for months doing menial tasks so that when they "graduate" they can start doing maintenance.
- recursivecaveat 2y ago
  Truly. God bless the maintainers and we couldn't do it without them, but I cannot imagine myself sitting down on the weekend to do maintenance on a 20yo disk partition utility or something.
Quekid5 2y ago
I'm not qualified to comment on the larger Debian ecosystem, but having been forced (due to work) to create some Debian packages... the tooling is awful. Packages are two(?) layers of tarballs, there's the option of free-form shell scripts in there to do whatever as a pre/post-install step, etc. etc. There's even several ways to try to hide some of that awfulness under the carpet, and yet it's still there. If they want to attract people who care in the least about developer experience they'll need to consolidate and fix their package system and tooling.
- homebrewer 2y ago
  Search HN for "Debian packaging", it's a very old issue that's been discussed at length. Apparently the solution is to write yet another automation utility: https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2023/a-new-debian-package-helper-debputy.html https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2023/a-new-debian-p... Personally I have given up on Debian packaging. Work applications get shoved into /opt and configured via Ansible, and desktop systems run other distributions with simpler packaging formats (with internal or home stuff wrapped into proper packages). I've thought about alternatives for the servers, but Alpine et al have their own issues. Nothing has been decided yet.
ThinkBeat 2y ago
I think having high-quality documentation in one language would be a huge win. That is lots of effort can be spent improving, expanding, and editing existing documentation. English is a prerequisite for the wider Debian community, and it is the most widely spoken language in the world says Wikipedia¹ English 1.5 billion Mandarin. 1.1 billion Hindi 0.7 billion Spanish. 0.6 billion I wonder how real that number is for English. In a lot of nations, people are taught English in school officially, and it is true but with very poor results. (I was taught French in school and that had catastrophically bad results) When it comes to Mandarin Chinese, I wonder if the wider community has better mastery of it compared to English or if its the same or if it is much worse. When it comes to the tools used for communication, having a strong standard is again beneficial. What every 10 years? Every 5 years? There is a new and hip platform that "everyone" uses. If you can't expect younger people joining to adapt some to the wider community, then you will need a lot of difficulty to handle bridges that will cause all manner of problems. Or should "adult" community members have to adopt whatever "everyone" is using every 5 years? IRC has all sorts of different clients, in all sorts of different platforms. Becoming a developer or maintainer for Debian will involve learning to use a lot of different tools that are needed to perform the tasks involved. Surely most of those tools don't change around every year? ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
AzzyHN 2y ago
Reading stuff like this makes me think I should look into contributing. I don't have much programming experience, just some college courses and a very good understanding of the basics, but I'm certainly willing to learn if it would help a package I enjoy
- slavik81 2y ago
  Absolutely. That sounds like all the qualifications you need. There are general channels where you can ask questions (like Debian Mentors on IRC and the mailing list), but feel free to reach out if you need a bit of extra help getting started. My time is limited and I am a relative beginner myself, but I'm happy to give a few pointers.
lynx23 2y ago
[flagged]
mistrial9 2y ago
for those (rightfully) complaining about the experience of making dot-deb packaging .. yes all true and needs to improve YET the Apple iPhone app developer experience has been tremendously painful and rude for a decade also.. somehow given $INCENTIVES the app devs for iPhone just consider it table stakes?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- adamc 2y ago
  Money is a powerful incentive.
  - robocat 2y ago
    Except for 99% psych studies showing that it is a poor incentive[1]. Talking to a person doing hotel reservations today - his personal incentives were to do give quality service (unfortunately the managers incentives were financially misaligned with that!). Most job satisfaction seems to be derived from internal incentives and money is not that good in my experience. Maybe different in the USA from New Zealand. [1] see psych reproducability studies.
    - ericjmorey 2y ago
      All of that is demonstration that money isn't an ideal means of incentive, but I have never worked a job without getting paid despite being asked many times to do exactly that.
    - adamc 2y ago
      No, that demonstrates that the monetary delta wasn't a good incentive. But I challenge you to find a lot of people working jobs without pay. There are some, if they have independent means, but not many. Likewise, most fiction authors expect at least the potential to make an income if enough people read their book -- etc. There are other incentives, for sure. Evidently not enough of them attract Debian contributors.
- 2y ago
candiddevmike 2y ago
Debian losing contributions is a fairly big deal because Debian and its derivatives represent the most popular Linux distributions. You'd think Canonical would contribute more... I think there's also a larger conversation of what folks really need from a Linux distribution in the year 2020+. Desktop Linux is fairly needy but AppImage and flatpak have largely fixed that.
- develatio 2y ago
  > You'd think Canonical would contribute more Context: I have +10y exp with Python, Linux (some packaging, kernel hacking, sys admin / SRE), C, several cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Hetzner, DO, OVH), etc... Applied to a Canonical position (Senior Python Eng + required Linux exp + nice to have cloud knowledge), got rejected automatically because I don't have a university degree. Tweeted about it, asking for some feedback. Tons of replies, same opinion: Canonical are plain elitists. Don't expect them to contribute.
  - intelVISA 2y ago
    I'd rather work fast food than Canonical, you dodged a bullet.
  - marcolussetti 2y ago
    Isn't Canonical the one that hires bases on High School performance?
- rlpb 2y ago
  > You'd think Canonical would contribute more... How much is enough? Did you know that significant contributions to Debian are made by Canonical employees who are Debian Developers being paid to do so? As a recent example, Debian's recent 64 bit time_t transition was driven by Canonical employees. Canonical employees continue to maintain various packages in Debian, but it's not obvious because they use their Debian "hats".
- mass_and_energy 2y ago
  Do we want canonical that involved in our beloved Debian? Look at what they did to glorious Ubuntu, if they think Snap is a good addition to any OS then should we listen to their input?
kaglfh 2y ago
[flagged]
- bee_rider 2y ago
  If we went to work on Arch instead, that seems like a win for the community, right? Arch is (IIRC) known for not being as far from upstream, so whatever he generates there should be more widely applicable to the community in general.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
  One person losing some privileges is not a "purge".
  - golergka 2y ago
    Having read the linked posts, there's clearly a toxic atmosphere which probably drives a lot people off. I'd much rather be a subject of an angry Linus rant than a target of political play like this.
  - nairboon 2y ago
    But it has noticeable consequences when that person was the maintainer of e.g. texlive and KDE...
    - arp242 2y ago
      Projects like Debian have been losing people over drama and infighting since the moment they started. It's not really clear to me that there are "purges" going on or that it's the major reason people are running away and/or not contributing. A single conflict with a single person over two years ago is certainly not demonstrative of that. I'd wager good money that the ten-year long infighting, bitching, and vitriol over merging /usr/bin and /bin, the extremely long and protracted systemd fight, and things like that are far more impactful in chasing people away.
      - JoshTriplett 2y ago
kombine 2y ago
I see little reason to use Debian on a personal computer, despite using a Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu and Debian itself) for more than 10 years. I switched to Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and they perfectly fit my needs.
- pmontra 2y ago
  Honest question. What do they do that Debian or Ubuntu don't?
  - kombine 2y ago
    Basically they have up-to-date KDE desktop environment unlike the obsolete version in Debian. Ubuntu always lags behind too.
  - Yasuraka 2y ago
    Major advantage of Fedora is being closer to the upstream sources, both in terms of freshness and in terms of not meddling with libs or similar. Debian patches lead to several possible exploits over the last few years.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
      > Debian patches lead to several possible exploits over the last few years. Which ones? There was the OpenSSL entropy bug, of course, but that was 1. in 2006, and 2. run by upstream so feels a bit unfair.
      - Yasuraka 2y ago
        I have to admit that I never compiled a list of this type and it seems exceedingly difficult to find useful search results. I couldn't dig up the examples I had in mind from the last 2 years, but stumbled upon others I didn't know of yet in turn, e.g. RCE via Redis, no special config required: > This post describes how I broke the Redis sandbox, but only for Debian and Debian-derived Linux distributions. Upstream Redis is not affected. That makes it a Debian vulnerability, not a Redis one. The culprit, if you will, is dynamic linking https://www.ubercomp.com/posts/2022-01-20_redis_on_debian_rce https://www.ubercomp.com/posts/2022-01-20_redis_on_debian_rc...
mvavassori 2y ago
Genuine question(s): Who pays maintainers? Are they even paid? If they aren't paid, why do they do it?
- stcroixx 2y ago
  The first generation of open source devs did it for fun and ideological reasons. Back then, before any of the big tech companies even existed (except Microsoft, who was widely hated) software was not a highly paid profession, more in line with being a CPA, so people looking to maximize their earning potential weren't in the field at all. Those people did finance back then.
- skobes 2y ago
  I had the same thought. For all the talk of lowering barriers... should we really be surprised that unpaid labor is hard to find? Maybe if I were independently wealthy I would spend my time contributing to Debian.
  - 5040 2y ago
    >should we really be surprised that unpaid labor is hard to find? Music is mostly unpaid labor and there's no shortage of musicians.
    - dingnuts 2y ago
      making music is a lot more fun than making software and way more immediately, personally, and emotionally fulfilling I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever lucrative business problems that are also fun or interesting computer science problems are so rare that whole companies are built around a single interesting CS problem surrounded by a fleet of mundane business problems
      - shiroiushi 2y ago
        >I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever This hasn't been my experience. While it's certainly true that much of my time as a corporate cog has been wasted in non-fun things like department meetings and stand-ups and Jira and MS Office documents and reviewing or debugging bad code from other devs, there's also been some time working on genuinely interesting programming problems. But you're right about music: interesting programming assignments don't come along every day, whereas I can pick up my guitar at any time and play something (however badly) and hear something nice right away.
samatman 2y ago
[flagged]
- xoac 2y ago
  Thanks Sam, really insightfull stuff. Can you please simplify to one paragraph?

153 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS, so Linux came out and people flocked to improve it. Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. I think only a few young kids rely on PCs, thus the issue. I hope it can be solved at some point and good contributors can be found. Otherwise we will be left with just IBM Red Hat.

shakow 2y ago
> Getting smart young people to contribute to Linux Distros (and BSD for that matter) to me is a tough job. I mean, they came with enthusiasm and a lot of hard work, brought a new language with many advantages (as said by the BDFL humself), dusted off the whole GPU stack, tried to formalize a bit the FS systems, then got shunned out by the greybeards because “muh youngsters and their religion”.
- arp242 2y ago
  That's not really a fair representation of the argument, and the stereotyping of everyone who disagrees or expresses some caution as an old stubborn greybeard who refuses to learn anything new is exactly the thing people (rightfully) complain about.
  - shakow 2y ago
    Please feel free to develop what you perceive as being a fair representation of the situation. > or expresses some caution Bellowing about religions while monopolizing a talk Q&A is not “expressing some caution”.
    - arp242 2y ago
      I'm not going to spend half an hour (or more) doing a full detailed write-up in response to a lazy assertion, especially since your attitude does not resemble that of a person with genuine interest in understanding other people's viewpoints. Stereotyping an entire viewpoint as you did in your previous comment is pretty much always wrong. I might be a bit more forgiving if it has included some context or details, but it doesn't. Your post is little more than an insult. I will add that people having been choking each other over all sorts of technical stuff for as long as this "free software" thing has existed, because there are usually 20 ways to do anything and typically between 2 and 10 ways are reasonable. This is really nothing new and discussions surrounding Rust are really not that special.
    - NobodyNada 2y ago
      The full quote: > You're trying to convince everyone to switch over to the religion as promulgated by Rust, and the reality is that ain't gonna happen because we have 50+ filesystems in Linux. They will not all be instantaneously converted over to Rust. Before that happens, we will continue to refactor C code because we want to make the C code better. If it breaks the Rust bindings, at least for the foreseeable future, the Rust bindings are a second class citizen, and those filesystem that depend on the Rust bindings will break, and that is the Rust bindings problem, not the filesystem community at large problem, and that's going to be true for a long long time. And I think we just simply need to accept that, because the answer "you are not allowed to refactor the C code because it would break 5 critical filesystem that distros depend upon" is not a starter. So we'll see; I suspect the best thing to do is for you to continue maintaining your Rust bindings. Over time, there will be continued C code refactoring -- maybe we will start using kfree RCU. If that breaks Rust, we will find out whether this concepts of encoding huge amount of semantics into the type system is a good thing or a bad thing, and instead of trying to convince us to what is actually correct, let's see what happens in a year or two. And it will either work or it won't, and we will see, more likely, where does the pain get allocated. Because with most of these sort of engineering things it's almost always a pain allocation question. > [...] > You're not going to force all of us to learn Rust -- if I make a change, I will fix all of the C code, because that's my responsibility. Because I don't know Rust, I'm not going to fix the Rust bindings. Some of his language is more emotionally charged than was productive, sure, but I think his underlying concern is reasonable: most kernel maintainers don't know Rust, and so when they make changes to C code, they won't be able to fix Rust clients of that C code. The Rust maintainers accept this, and agree to take responsibility for updating Rust code to match changes in C (which is contrary to the usual development workflow of the kernel, hence the concern over what happens if major distros start depending on Rust code). Note also that Ts'o isn't objecting to including Rust in the kernel! His recommendation is to ship the Rust bindings and see "where the pain gets allocated" as the C code continues to evolve. (The idea being that either Rust's type system and borrow checker will make it easy to identify semantic breakages early, thus making Rust code lower-maintenance than C, or the Rust bindings will turn out to be fragile and high-maintenance, and that the best way to tell is by waiting to see). I'm not a part of the Linux kernel community at all, and I certainly don't know all the context that led to Almeida leaving the project -- I imagine Ts'o's comments were a "straw that broke the camel's back" kind of thing. But the Linux kernel is a complex project and critical infrastructure, so surely concerns about organization and maintainability need to be hashed out before Rust can make it to production. Also, Ts'o's comments struck me as some of the most reasonable out of that talk, at least from a technical perspective -- the next commenter after Ts'o objects to Rust in the kernel on the basis that its function call syntax reminds him of Java.
- renewiltord 2y ago
  Rust on Linux will happen. One way or another. At the worst, one funeral at a time. I wouldn’t sweat it. I remember a HN comment that I really liked and can’t find now that went something like: You know what stopped me from programming? It wasn’t that I didn’t have a good computer. It wasn’t that I started later than all the other kids. It wasn’t that I had to work. Nothing. Nothing stopped me from programming. There’ll always be folks like that. And I hope I’ll be like that for some thing too!
- mustache_kimono 2y ago
  It's a shit take, but I like it. Upvote this guy.
dangitman 2y ago
[dead]
cesarb 2y ago
> Linux kicked off in the 90s because young people at that time wanted a real OS It's easy to underestimate how inferior MS-DOS was, unless you lived through it. Windows (3.x and later 9x) was slightly better, but still had severe issues. Modern Windows is, from what I've heard, a lot better, so the incentive to migrate is not as strong. > Today, almost all kids use Cell Phones, which are all locked down. Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. In particular, BitLocker means that it's harder to share disk space between Windows and an alternative operating system; back in the MS-DOS (and Windows 9x) days, it was not unusual to install Linux in a directory (or a disk image file) on the same partition used by the other operating system.
- arp242 2y ago
  > Not just cell phones; with Secure Boot and BitLocker, computers are more locked down too. You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. Also, don't underestimate the friction that existed in the 90s or early 00s. Nothing worked on Linux or BSD. My government sent me .doc files. Tons of stuff was Windows-only desktop software.[1] Mucking about with xfree86 -configure and /etc/X11/.... was far from easy or straight-forward. Internet access was far more rare and "just Google it" wasn't really a thing, etc. etc. etc. If I look at the amount of effort I spent to "just get Linux running" back in 2000 or so when I first tried it vs. today, then I'm fairly sure the overall experience is a lot better today. Sure, you need to deal with some stupid nonsense, but that was always the case. [1]: For all the hate the "modern web" gets from some people here: it does replace tons of crappy desktop stuff with an abstracted isolated VM which, among other benefits, makes running "alternative" systems like Linux or BSD far more viable.
  - Filligree 2y ago
    > You can just disable secure boot, no? I just got a brand new laptop today, and I could just disable it. I know you can get Linux to work with it, but I can't be arsed to mess about with it and the practical security benefits for me are basically zero. An imagined conversation: “Mom, I want to disable secure boot so I can try a free operating system.” “Oh no you don’t. Security is important.” This won’t happen to anyone who actually knows what they’re talking about, but it’s having a real impact on the pipeline for getting there. The conversation isn’t as imagined as all that.
augusto-moura 2y ago
There are still a bunch of young ones on PCs because of gaming, unfortunately the gaming scene is chiefly on Windows. Proton and Steam Deck were improvements, but the market share is still heavily leaning towards Microsoft. Maybe if things get better we could see a steadily increase in Linux users, as we are already seeing
lolinder 2y ago
I suspect the same number of people want a real OS as before, the difference is that everyone now has an OS of a weaker kind that gives them access to the same web that we're all on. So it's a similar problem that we have on the web as a whole—it's not that there's less good content (there's actually dramatically more), it's that it's hard to find it in the deluge of bad content. The trick that we have now is that young people with potential to be highly technical won't just come to us automatically like they did when we were 60% of the web. Instead we have to make a more conscious effort to do outreach and give people a taste of the power of real computing.
- skinner927 2y ago
  I agree with your assumption that there’s the same number of people who want a real OS as there ever was. However, I believe there are more active distros and related highly-technical projects today than ever. So everyone has to share fewer contributors, except of course whatever the few hot/popular projects are (the latter is nothing new). I do worry though. Major academic institutions are having to put freshmen in remedial computer classes to teach them what files, folders, and devices are. The average persons is getting farther and farther away from an actual PC and deeper into the “app” world. Everything is moving to “the cloud”. Even software development is being pushed to virtual desktops/thin clients (look at GitHub workspaces [or whatever it’s called] as an example). The extremely large majority of software development today is web/cloud based. There are more and more of the non-technical buying “computers” that are really just glorified tablets. At some point, likely not/hopefully not in our lifetimes, it could become unprofitable for manufacturers to build PCs or only a few remain and the costs become prohibitively expensive to anyone but for-profit companies/corps. Hopefully that’s a pessimistic outlook.
cedws 2y ago
I’m ~young (23) and care about Linux. But I’m not going to volunteer to work on it for free. I have bills to pay. I’m here to get paid. Something that I hope dies off in the next decade is corporations leeching off of passionate volunteers doing free work.

Piraty 2y ago

Debian doesn't do a good job in making life easier for its maintainers. https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-winding-down/ https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2019-03-10-debian-windin...

imtringued 2y ago
I made my own custom packages for Alpine Linux and Arch Linux for personal use. It is so easy that I am honestly I'm not seeing the point in doing things the way Debian does it. It just makes things unnecessarily difficult for no reason. What does a maintainer realistically do? He builds the software, so you expect that the package builder automatically installs the development dependencies and runs the build software inside a chroot. In case the software requires modifications, there needs to be a way to deliver patch files or additional files that aren't part of the original software or at least a standard location to store the distro specific fork that everyone agrees on. Once the software is built, the maintainer creates a directory structure that conforms to the distributions's conventions, adds things like systemd unit files or desktop shortcuts and other distro specific changes that exist outside the software. I would encourage everyone to at least give Alpine or Arch Linux packaging a try. It really is quite easy. Almost as easy as writing a docker file.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  > What does a maintainer realistically do? Debian maintainers have to coax upstream packages to behave like other Debian packages and use supported linked dependencies. This covers everything from log and config file locations, startup scripts patching dependencies to match the versions supported by the release, backporting security updates, and documenting. I trust Debian (and in turn Debian maintainers) more than I trust the upstream developer of lib-random-4-dev. I only ever had to build a custom package from source a handful of times.
  - homebrewer 2y ago
    Simpler packaging formats like pkgbuild and apkbuild do all of that too. They're easier to use because they do away with "convenient" automation that makes simple things trivial, and slightly more complex things very difficult. You just use the shell with all the standard commands.

binary132 2y ago

open source ain’t what it used to be

myprotegeai 2y ago
It's only going to get worse. There's a storm coming. The ageing open source engineers who hold up the whole house of cards cannot keep going indefinitely. It's going to turn into tragedy of the commons very quickly.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  This is one of many reasons humanity really needs to work on anti-aging and life extension therapies. If we can make these old-timer maintainers biologically immortal, we won't have to worry about this stuff collapsing one day.
  - kjs3 2y ago
    So instead of doing a tedious, thankless, unpaid job for 10, 20, 30 years, I can do it for 100, 200 or 300. Sounds awesome.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      I'm not advocating that you do this tedious, thankless, unpaid job for 300 years: apparently, there's already people who actually want to, for whatever unfathomable reason, so I'm advocating that those people be given the means to do so indefinitely.
      - kjs3 2y ago
        I know what you are 'advocating': science fiction solutions to real problems.
        shiroiushi 2y ago
        What's wrong with that? It's not like anyone has any more feasible solutions to these problems.

zokier 2y ago

From my point of view it doesn't seem like really appreciate the Debian-style integrated self-contained OS model; what people want (these days) is more just a platform to run 3rd party applications. It is easy to see why some people see Debian more just getting in the way rather than being an asset. Part of the problem might be that Debian is something for everyone, and has cast a very wide net in terms of packages. Especially not all packages are all that integrated to the whole, or follow Debian guidelines very closely. I don't know if it would help if Debian would tighten ship, raise the bar for packages and cull more aggressively some of the less maintained ones. Although on the flip side one of the big advantages of Debian is its vast package archives so its a balancing act. Regarding the language aspect, that is the focus for much of the article, while I think local communities working in their native languages is definitely good thing ultimately I believe that any potential Debian contributor needs to be somewhat fluent in English. Debian is communal project after all and I imagine all the official discussions happen in English; its difficult to see someone being effective contributor if they can not communicate comfortably in community.

Barrin92 2y ago

> IRC is the default chat mechanism for Debian, but younger people do not use IRC; in Brazil, they use Telegram instead. This is I think one of the major reasons why a lot of older open source projects are absolutely starved for developers in their 20s and 30s. A lot of the mail based workflows or IRC based communication is just utterly foreign to any young person and also objectively atrocious in many ways. Having to rely on a chat service that doesn't let you see offline messages without setting up a proxy in 2024 is just not comprehensible to anyone used to modern services, for good reason. It's very obvious that open source projects that embrace github, discord, social media are able to do much better and attract contributors much more effectively. Purism is nice and all but if most of your core maintainers are in their 50s and 60s which is a reality now for a lot of long lived projects with no replacement coming up you're looking at the whole thing dying in a generation.

davisr 2y ago
You've outed yourself as not knowing why IRC and email are the established media. IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. These are the only two protocols required to cover most all needs of communication. It's the simplicity and stability that is why they are preferred, and their usage translates to higher quality development -- much higher quality than is usually ever found on GitHub or Discord. Also, putting the keys to one's communication into proprietary platforms, like GitHub and Discord, is a horrifyingly bad idea. Maybe it helps graduates of computer science work faster, but graduates of computer science also are (usually) embarrassingly bad hacks at what they do.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  > IRC is meant to be live chat rooms -- and explicitly not persistent conversation. That is the whole point. For persistence, use email. Is there a compelling reason for those to be separate, beyond "we've always done it this way"?
  - davisr 2y ago

hinkley 2y ago

Every volunteer group eventually starts to look alike. This is as it was explained to me over a decade ago, and I don’t really need to change much since human nature doesn’t change very fast, and this holds for all the groups I’ve belonged to. You get a lot of young adults who have more time than money. Their contributions are energetic but often short lived. They move away, their sense of self shifts away from the cause, their lives get too complicated, or they overdo it. It’s the people who pace themselves that avoid burnout. The trap is caring so much about a cause that they hurt themselves and have to step back. You get a smaller number of generally older regulars who keep the wheels on, and you have a few old timers who remember all the way back to the beginning. What has been tried. Who we have collaborated with or gotten donations from in the past. So attract your volunteers, identify and groom some for small leadership roles. But make sure not to overload them, and encourage them to set healthy boundaries. It’s keeping them that kills many orgs. Though some only focus on retention and become an echo chamber of greybeards. I don’t believe Linux has that problem. Yet.

meisel 2y ago

Moving Linux and its associated projects to GitHub would definitely help. I don't buy the arguments that GitHub isn't suitable for it, e.g. because it doesn't allow each sub-project to have its own area. Things like tags help a lot to separate issues and PRs based on which sub-project they're a part of.

JonChesterfield 2y ago
Totally. Microsoft is a surely benevolent entity to host the Linux project. They've proven to be excellent stewards of open source in their copilot project.

never_inline 2y ago

One reason I see hardly mentioned is change of tech stacks. Most modern developers do web development with a highly abstracted stack (including yours truly). So nobody is much familiar with C / Perl / OS level APIs. Closest they get is adhoc shell scripting in form of devops tools. Since people are so much abstracted from the stack, they don't feel much need to contribute to it or improve it to scratch their own itch. That's why new stuff like CNCF gets many contributions, old ones like Debian don't.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

I'm very conflicted, because Debian's strength is the intensity of package maintainership, but it's weakness is the intensity of package maintainership. Debian has a strong focus on being a in-group culture, believes in maintainers as strong operators over their fiefs, with freedom to operate in manners they like, usually with little support or help. There's been suggestions - ideas that maybe Debian should be a little more open to outside contributors, should have ci/CD tools & accept PRs more publicly. https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/merge_requests/8 https://salsa.debian.org/dep-team/deps/-/merge_requests/8 I do think there would be a lot of help that would show up, a lot of drive by contributions. And some people actively converting to maintainership that wouldn't have. But at the risk of a lot of people being able to help, without acculturating onto Debian, contributing more without becoming a full maintained. My only real Debian developership attempt was a go at packaging wayvnc a long time ago, and it's deps, well before it was available. Seems fairly straightforward, but I felt very unwelcome when I tried to ask about finding a maintainer or getting mentorship; it was a long time ago so I don't fully remember, but it was pretty discouraging and experience having re-learned so much about Debian & having some the deeds, only to feel turned away for unclear reasons.

Tarucho 2y ago

The problem with these large open source projects is that they are already on maintenance mode and the fun part has already been done a long ago. Who wants to work for months doing menial tasks so that when they "graduate" they can start doing maintenance.

recursivecaveat 2y ago
Truly. God bless the maintainers and we couldn't do it without them, but I cannot imagine myself sitting down on the weekend to do maintenance on a 20yo disk partition utility or something.

Quekid5 2y ago

I'm not qualified to comment on the larger Debian ecosystem, but having been forced (due to work) to create some Debian packages... the tooling is awful. Packages are two(?) layers of tarballs, there's the option of free-form shell scripts in there to do whatever as a pre/post-install step, etc. etc. There's even several ways to try to hide some of that awfulness under the carpet, and yet it's still there. If they want to attract people who care in the least about developer experience they'll need to consolidate and fix their package system and tooling.

homebrewer 2y ago
Search HN for "Debian packaging", it's a very old issue that's been discussed at length. Apparently the solution is to write yet another automation utility: https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2023/a-new-debian-package-helper-debputy.html https://people.debian.org/~nthykier/blog/2023/a-new-debian-p... Personally I have given up on Debian packaging. Work applications get shoved into /opt and configured via Ansible, and desktop systems run other distributions with simpler packaging formats (with internal or home stuff wrapped into proper packages). I've thought about alternatives for the servers, but Alpine et al have their own issues. Nothing has been decided yet.

ThinkBeat 2y ago

I think having high-quality documentation in one language would be a huge win. That is lots of effort can be spent improving, expanding, and editing existing documentation. English is a prerequisite for the wider Debian community, and it is the most widely spoken language in the world says Wikipedia¹ English 1.5 billion Mandarin. 1.1 billion Hindi 0.7 billion Spanish. 0.6 billion I wonder how real that number is for English. In a lot of nations, people are taught English in school officially, and it is true but with very poor results. (I was taught French in school and that had catastrophically bad results) When it comes to Mandarin Chinese, I wonder if the wider community has better mastery of it compared to English or if its the same or if it is much worse. When it comes to the tools used for communication, having a strong standard is again beneficial. What every 10 years? Every 5 years? There is a new and hip platform that "everyone" uses. If you can't expect younger people joining to adapt some to the wider community, then you will need a lot of difficulty to handle bridges that will cause all manner of problems. Or should "adult" community members have to adopt whatever "everyone" is using every 5 years? IRC has all sorts of different clients, in all sorts of different platforms. Becoming a developer or maintainer for Debian will involve learning to use a lot of different tools that are needed to perform the tasks involved. Surely most of those tools don't change around every year? ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

AzzyHN 2y ago

Reading stuff like this makes me think I should look into contributing. I don't have much programming experience, just some college courses and a very good understanding of the basics, but I'm certainly willing to learn if it would help a package I enjoy

slavik81 2y ago
Absolutely. That sounds like all the qualifications you need. There are general channels where you can ask questions (like Debian Mentors on IRC and the mailing list), but feel free to reach out if you need a bit of extra help getting started. My time is limited and I am a relative beginner myself, but I'm happy to give a few pointers.

lynx23 2y ago

[flagged]

mistrial9 2y ago

for those (rightfully) complaining about the experience of making dot-deb packaging .. yes all true and needs to improve YET the Apple iPhone app developer experience has been tremendously painful and rude for a decade also.. somehow given $INCENTIVES the app devs for iPhone just consider it table stakes?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
adamc 2y ago
Money is a powerful incentive.
- robocat 2y ago
  Except for 99% psych studies showing that it is a poor incentive[1]. Talking to a person doing hotel reservations today - his personal incentives were to do give quality service (unfortunately the managers incentives were financially misaligned with that!). Most job satisfaction seems to be derived from internal incentives and money is not that good in my experience. Maybe different in the USA from New Zealand. [1] see psych reproducability studies.
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    All of that is demonstration that money isn't an ideal means of incentive, but I have never worked a job without getting paid despite being asked many times to do exactly that.
  - adamc 2y ago
    No, that demonstrates that the monetary delta wasn't a good incentive. But I challenge you to find a lot of people working jobs without pay. There are some, if they have independent means, but not many. Likewise, most fiction authors expect at least the potential to make an income if enough people read their book -- etc. There are other incentives, for sure. Evidently not enough of them attract Debian contributors.
2y ago

candiddevmike 2y ago

Debian losing contributions is a fairly big deal because Debian and its derivatives represent the most popular Linux distributions. You'd think Canonical would contribute more... I think there's also a larger conversation of what folks really need from a Linux distribution in the year 2020+. Desktop Linux is fairly needy but AppImage and flatpak have largely fixed that.

develatio 2y ago
> You'd think Canonical would contribute more Context: I have +10y exp with Python, Linux (some packaging, kernel hacking, sys admin / SRE), C, several cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Hetzner, DO, OVH), etc... Applied to a Canonical position (Senior Python Eng + required Linux exp + nice to have cloud knowledge), got rejected automatically because I don't have a university degree. Tweeted about it, asking for some feedback. Tons of replies, same opinion: Canonical are plain elitists. Don't expect them to contribute.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  I'd rather work fast food than Canonical, you dodged a bullet.
- marcolussetti 2y ago
  Isn't Canonical the one that hires bases on High School performance?
rlpb 2y ago
> You'd think Canonical would contribute more... How much is enough? Did you know that significant contributions to Debian are made by Canonical employees who are Debian Developers being paid to do so? As a recent example, Debian's recent 64 bit time_t transition was driven by Canonical employees. Canonical employees continue to maintain various packages in Debian, but it's not obvious because they use their Debian "hats".
mass_and_energy 2y ago
Do we want canonical that involved in our beloved Debian? Look at what they did to glorious Ubuntu, if they think Snap is a good addition to any OS then should we listen to their input?

kaglfh 2y ago

[flagged]

bee_rider 2y ago
If we went to work on Arch instead, that seems like a win for the community, right? Arch is (IIRC) known for not being as far from upstream, so whatever he generates there should be more widely applicable to the community in general.
JoshTriplett 2y ago
One person losing some privileges is not a "purge".
- golergka 2y ago
  Having read the linked posts, there's clearly a toxic atmosphere which probably drives a lot people off. I'd much rather be a subject of an angry Linus rant than a target of political play like this.
- nairboon 2y ago
  But it has noticeable consequences when that person was the maintainer of e.g. texlive and KDE...
  - arp242 2y ago
    Projects like Debian have been losing people over drama and infighting since the moment they started. It's not really clear to me that there are "purges" going on or that it's the major reason people are running away and/or not contributing. A single conflict with a single person over two years ago is certainly not demonstrative of that. I'd wager good money that the ten-year long infighting, bitching, and vitriol over merging /usr/bin and /bin, the extremely long and protracted systemd fight, and things like that are far more impactful in chasing people away.
    - JoshTriplett 2y ago

kombine 2y ago

I see little reason to use Debian on a personal computer, despite using a Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu and Debian itself) for more than 10 years. I switched to Fedora and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and they perfectly fit my needs.

pmontra 2y ago
Honest question. What do they do that Debian or Ubuntu don't?
- kombine 2y ago
  Basically they have up-to-date KDE desktop environment unlike the obsolete version in Debian. Ubuntu always lags behind too.
- Yasuraka 2y ago
  Major advantage of Fedora is being closer to the upstream sources, both in terms of freshness and in terms of not meddling with libs or similar. Debian patches lead to several possible exploits over the last few years.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    > Debian patches lead to several possible exploits over the last few years. Which ones? There was the OpenSSL entropy bug, of course, but that was 1. in 2006, and 2. run by upstream so feels a bit unfair.
    - Yasuraka 2y ago
      I have to admit that I never compiled a list of this type and it seems exceedingly difficult to find useful search results. I couldn't dig up the examples I had in mind from the last 2 years, but stumbled upon others I didn't know of yet in turn, e.g. RCE via Redis, no special config required: > This post describes how I broke the Redis sandbox, but only for Debian and Debian-derived Linux distributions. Upstream Redis is not affected. That makes it a Debian vulnerability, not a Redis one. The culprit, if you will, is dynamic linking https://www.ubercomp.com/posts/2022-01-20_redis_on_debian_rce https://www.ubercomp.com/posts/2022-01-20_redis_on_debian_rc...

mvavassori 2y ago

Genuine question(s): Who pays maintainers? Are they even paid? If they aren't paid, why do they do it?

stcroixx 2y ago
The first generation of open source devs did it for fun and ideological reasons. Back then, before any of the big tech companies even existed (except Microsoft, who was widely hated) software was not a highly paid profession, more in line with being a CPA, so people looking to maximize their earning potential weren't in the field at all. Those people did finance back then.
skobes 2y ago
I had the same thought. For all the talk of lowering barriers... should we really be surprised that unpaid labor is hard to find? Maybe if I were independently wealthy I would spend my time contributing to Debian.
- 5040 2y ago
  >should we really be surprised that unpaid labor is hard to find? Music is mostly unpaid labor and there's no shortage of musicians.
  - dingnuts 2y ago
    making music is a lot more fun than making software and way more immediately, personally, and emotionally fulfilling I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever lucrative business problems that are also fun or interesting computer science problems are so rare that whole companies are built around a single interesting CS problem surrounded by a fleet of mundane business problems
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >I say this as an accomplished programmer and an absolutely shit musician. the parts of programming that are fun and the parts that make money, also, have almost no overlap whatsoever This hasn't been my experience. While it's certainly true that much of my time as a corporate cog has been wasted in non-fun things like department meetings and stand-ups and Jira and MS Office documents and reviewing or debugging bad code from other devs, there's also been some time working on genuinely interesting programming problems. But you're right about music: interesting programming assignments don't come along every day, whereas I can pick up my guitar at any time and play something (however badly) and hear something nice right away.

samatman 2y ago

[flagged]

xoac 2y ago
Thanks Sam, really insightfull stuff. Can you please simplify to one paragraph?