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"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects." I'm sorry, but that's absolute baloney in the context of the parent po

"Because non-technical/non-contributing users are nothing but a drain to FOSS projects." I'm sorry, but that's absolute baloney in the context of the parent post. By and large neither Windows or OSX users need to deal with low level OS stuff, whereas Linux users frequently do. These sorts of issues affect long time users and new users. From what I've seen, Linux users tend to either go straight to a mainstream distro, or distro hop for a while, get bored or frustrated with dealing with unnecessary complications, and end up on a mainstream distro as a result. At first you take pride in learning more, but after a while you just want something that works and gets out of your way. Describing user wants as drains on FOSS means that you're ignoring the issues that are drains for everyone.

freshhawk 12y ago
These problems you describe aren't present for the people being asked to solve the problem, so they don't volunteer their time to fix it. In my experience they aren't even problems for beginner computer users or people who don't need to unlearn Windows/Mac-isms post Ubuntu and modern hardware detection. edit: I should add, I'm not saying a project solving these problems wouldn't be popular among users or generally great for Gnu/Linux as a whole, I'm explaining why it's not popular among potential developers. And when you aren't working in a market capitalism framework a large number of potential non-contributing users isn't enough to get things done.