Dear fellow Devuanists, I just wanted to share with the list a few sparse thoughts, resulting from the events of the last few days. You should read a clear "IMHO" after each period, since these are my personal, humble, minuscle thoughts, which you are free to ignore altogether :)
First, I haven't said that yet, but I am obviously very happy that Devuan Jessie Beta is finally out, and extremely grateful to the people in the development team that made it possible, and to the people in this list who have supported them, in a way or another. We don't forget that the overwhelming majority of the Linux world has always been quite skeptical about Devuan, labelling it as a "futile effort" by a "band of neo-luddites", and that the large majority of commentators, experts, gurus, and fanboys gave Devuan "just a few months" before the whole wagon would disappear to /dev/null. Devuan Jessie Beta is another proof that the majority is quite often wrong: definitely more than a few months have passed, and Devuan is here, and is here to stay. We are all proud of this milestone, but we should be very careful not allowing pride to make us blind. The release of Beta was managed very carefully and professionally, and was overall a success, but we should learn from the few things that were not as perfect as they could be. For instance, several small glitches could have been avoided easily: a few typos in the official announcement, a few typos in the official webpage (see for instance the "mirrors" vs "mirror" in the package source URL), a few inconsistencies in the documentation put online, and so on. These are all things that undermine our public image, and unfortunately many people want to ruin Devuan's image, for a reason or another. Maybe for the future we might have a larger number of people checking this stuff before an official press release comes out. I volunteer from now to help in "typo-hunting", and I will start with our website (which is *beautiful*, BTW). Talking of Devuan's image, I really appreciated that the release of beta was not accompained by trumpets and drums, which helped giving an aura of "well, this is what should have naturally happend, right?" to the whole process. I have to admit that I was also a bit disappointed at first in noting that most of the community out there had barely noticed it. In the end, I concluded that this should not be a problem for us. Let's face it: Devuan *is* a niche, a minority, an effort that goes in a different direction from "mainstream", and there is nothing wrong about it. The most important thing is that *we*, the *Devuanists*, had something to celebrate yesterday, a great operating system to use from today, and a solid project on which to build greater things for tomorrow. All the great things started from niches, minorities, contrarians, and *evolution* alone, not PR, has eventually determined which of the many niches would survive. Finally, about evolution, I have seen several hundreds posts on reddit and slashdot by people who "fight" to show that systemd is evil while Devuan is "the right thing". I would humbly recommend people to avoid wasting their energy in such useless chit-chatting. No informed opinion by a tech-savvy will convince me that systemd is good, and the same is true in the other direction. Devuan is not "against something", but "towards something else". The things that will allow Devuan to remain alive will be a reliable distribution, a large user base, a thriving community. *Evolution* has already sweeped out thousands of distributions, and will sweep out thousands more in the future. Only those which are fit for the purpose they target will survive, whatever is the opinion of the majority, or of their supporters and fanboys. So it's better to put our efforts towards building a stronger, better, fitter Devuan, since our opinions about Devuan will not save it from oblivion. Now off to work to release Jessie stable ASAP. HND KatolaZ -- [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ] [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ] [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ] _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
