Communities Can Only Survive When Trust Prevails
Nowadays many people openly speak about the failure of Debian (MinceR keeps calling it "deadian") and the current election for leadership (DPL) contributes to this. Similarly, the Manjaro project is having problems.
Trust relies on transparency and transparency relies on humility, i.e. people's willingness to expose imperfections and admit mistakes.
The reason our community turns 20 is our radical transparency and commitment to our values, even when it's inconvenient and/or very expensive.
News sites and distros come and go all the time. I used to be a Mandriva user. Mandriva or OpenMandriva is still around and active (see their news section, still updated this past year). The same is true for Mageia (active yesterday). Gaël Duval is still active (he spoke to me on occasions, he reached out); for the uninitiated, he created Mandrake in July 1998, almost 3 decades ago. It still lives on in the form of OpenMandriva and Mageia (two is better than one; the latest release does not impose Wayland like IBM does).
Communities are better off than companies in the Free software space; when money enters the equation there tends to be friction and infighting. In Debian's case, there's a lot of nepotism and censorship (not limited to censoring those who speak about the nepotism).
GNU/Linux gained a lot of momentum in the years of Microsoft antitrust because no geek could trust Microsoft and geeks created cliques or guilds to build alternatives. OpenMandriva is one of the few surviving guilds; it's younger than Slackware and Debian, and unlike Debian it's not infiltrated by IBM and Microsoft staff. That's why many can trust it. Before it was OpenMandriva or even Mandriva the distro "Mandrake" was considered the leading desktop distro. PCLinuxOS is also around (still), it used to be a leading distro (but was eventually getting overtaken by Ubuntu because of the super-rich sponsor and ShipIt "dumping tactics"). PCLinuxOS is still a vibrant and authentic community, but after the fire and cancer (the founder) PCLinuxOS is not as active as it once was. █
Months ago: We Need Community-Run Distros
