Le Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:21:58 +0100, hollunder <hollunder@lavabit.com> a écrit :
Maybe the issues are somewhere else? I don't know. One observation I, as a stinking normal user, could make is that there are few devs around where users hang out. Let's see.. I know of one dev active in #archlinux on IRC and about three devs active on this mailinglist, including you, Aaron and the IRC-dev. So maybe it's the devs who detached from the users and there's simply no-one around who could pass on the knowledge?
What? I have not been on IRC or the forums for a long time because of the low signal to noise ratio there, but that's just because the number of users increased, not because the presence of the devs decreased. Just by reading the MLs or looking at Flyspray you could easily say that a lot of them are very active and responsive. Not to mention the TUs...
One thing is for sure, elitist and cocky behavior will alienate users, competent ones as well, and alienated users wont help, they wont write patches, they'll switch distro at best.
I'm not sure of that. If by an elitist behavior you mean one that consists in refusing to add complexity to the system to simplify the life of users, then I think it will not alienate all the users. I for one use Arch precisely because of that. You can call it an elitist attitude, or the Arch Way, as opposed to the Ubuntu Way. Ubuntu is "Linux for human beings", Arch Linux is Linux for grown-ups who are not afraid to think, learn and spend some time repairing their mistakes when they fuck up. So I'm with Allan here: either the user base has to adapt / change, or Arch itself has to change. But knowing that the devs are users themselves and that most of them understand the original Arch Way, I guess the users who don't like it will have no choice but to adapt, leave or fork. -- catwell