Elive is not enough known to the world, and it would had a strategy for a big spreading of the 3.0 release, which has not even been noticed in the world, but I haven't had the time for this research and promotion, while busy with the website, fixing last bugs, and making sure that everything is working for the announcement
Elive cannot continue to exist if is not more known to the world, and as said, I have not the resources to do that
In distrowatch there's 2 amazing good articles (write yours if you can!), but the overall rating of Elive is very low, it is also the last one in the distrowatch' ranking column list
Failure is not meeting some expectation(s). There are hundreds of distros out there, all of which are even less known than Elive.
I'm not a betting man, but I'd bet (so to speak) that many of those distro makers don't feel like their promotion or something else failed. There's a tough competition out there, so don't kick yourself for not being more popular
I don't know about that - check my upload. Sure that's not a lot, but it's just my upload counter - there are many others.
What you did wrong, is being too aggressive with the non-positive reviews. What you keep doing wrong, is not building a more welcoming environment for new contributors. And by this I mean a special page where you lay out the plans for the next release, so people can pick what they can help with, and contribute.
Currently, you have to know that the roadmap is in the bug reports section. It doesn't make sense, so people don't make the connection. It would be better if you made a separate page called Roadmap, on the main site, where you tell everyone a few things to let them know the status and what they can help with:
Elive 4.0 will be based on _________
This is the list of software that needs to be ported: link
The Elive software needs testing, feedback, documentation: links_to_where_that_happens
The above mentioned software and documentation need to be translated, which can be done here: link
etc.
If your goal is to make Elive on your own, as a one-man team, then of course my input here carries little weight. But damn it, although I won't get tired poking you for basing Elive 3.0 on Debian 7, I'd still love to see more people helping this distro because it looks and feels great, and we need such operating systems. But you can't hope to do everything alone, so you might just take a break from development for a week or two, and do some serious management/planning, and see what you can come up with.
We can surely help with ideas here and there, but you should set the tone and make it easy for potential contributors to jump in, even for a one-time contribution. Every little bit helps. You don't have to carry everything on your shoulders.
What can we do to help on distro watch ? most people don’t know how to vote etc…
I would let know people what to do step by step on distro watch to help with ranking
Elive now ranked 100 on Distro Watch. Hope very soon it will be ranked in the top. Improving its fame among the famous distro. if it were more updated system i’m sure people would adapt it at an alarming rate. However in the future x64 development it will increase its end user surprisingly.
The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.
BTW I am one of those users who has been going on Distro Watch for 2 years and never never read what you showed me... I just tried the Distros in the top list without " paying attention to comments at all"
I represent % of the society that do not read the fine prints
Ignorance is not what gets any distro more users, and being in a top position on DistroWatch doesn’t guarantee anything - popularity, reputation, donations, etc.
That page I got the information from could probably made more prominent, although there’s a link to it under the top 100:
Anyway, while it’s easy to understand a user’s point of view on using DistroWatch and other online resources, the distro makers should pay attention to what helps and what constitutes wasted effort, so they can focus on what matters. That, of course, if they care.
But if I have to chose between A or B, I choose A without hesitation.
A- Elive in the top 30
B- Elive not showing up on the list.
If there is no other choice than A or B, think and I could be wrong, I often am, A is better for Elive… A will bring more users, more donations and $ to hire programmers and so son…
Those statistics can be easily manipulated. They record 1 hit per IP address per day. They mean nothing significant, nor anything reliable. This is not an A vs B situation. The programmers are usually smarter than that.
I will work hard to make it go in the Top 30 and we’ll see if there is an impact on the number of user using Elive, on the Forum, making donation… Just curious to see. tks for your comments
People that knows me, knows that im not agressive or similar things, but if they do bullshit they receive bullshit and that's a natural "effect" of the universe called karma
There's no contributors, and I cannot spend my time in building environments / platforms / things to make that more easy, because it requires time for a non-worth purpose (nobody would use it), like for example the many things that exists (or existed) in elive, i will give you an example:
I wrote this "emodule-creator" tool 8 years ago as you can see in the video, to entirely-automate the process of creating a desktop module / plugin, i even did a video, nobody ever used it, that's a lot of wasted time for nothing, and we don't even have it anymore in Elive 3.0 because it was not worth to import it (this is just one of the many tools)
So source code is on github, what more I can do? and in the same way if there's volunteer people that wants to help i cannot spend my time teaching them "how to code" or "how to package"
One "welcoming contributors" thing that really worked here was the eltrans application to make easy the collaboration making translations, but like I said, sources are on github, so it is open to anybody do anything, fix, improve, etc...
And Yes, I dream in making a platform so powerful that any user can collaborate with every part of Elive, on which I already brainstormed most of the details of how it should work, but this is for now far in a dream, as said in other threads, there's no resources to build these things
One day I need to wrote the many features and tools that already exists, because nobody knows them (except for the example of the video)
In a similar way, because is much more faster for me to have my own tasks / roadmaps / notes / maps / etc, even my own phone notes, and use the tools that fits correctly in a practical way for me to do things faster, than using other things with "shared features", I cannot spend time updating online information of things that will slow down the development, and also when there's nobody reading it (maybe 2-3, but im talking about worth concepts)
yes this sounds nice, but is a painfully slow task for me to make these pages, losing a lot of time in the website stuff (not talking about updating specific pages)
"how" to port them? this requires a lot of specific knowledge of elive but also about compiling, making debian packages, how they are integrated in the system, etc etc, it is much faster for me to just do it than to explain every detail (unless im stuck in a bug hard to found / fix)
Another problem is that since the collaborator don't knows how things are specifically made / structured in Elive, they will probably do things in a different way, where later I need to spend time in modifying the result to make it work in the way it should (again the problem of: losing more time than doing it myself), well, this has been my experience most of the times I tried it (with some few exceptions)
Actually I tried in the past to post things like "we need this 1 2 3 bugs fixed / we need help / etc... for release the next version" and nobody ever replied to them
I assume that developers help is not so easy to found, and also the dedication required for big quantities of work (on which only when the work is payed you have the needed dedication)
I would of course like to receive help because there's a ton of work, or to pay for extra development (on which there's no funds for that), but as explained previously it is not so easy to get these things, this is what i mean about "lacking resources"
That's why the actual priority is to get more users, to make it more known, its all about numbers, more users means more donations (resources) and also increased possible collaboration
Well, the problem is the same, I don't need much planning / management, if there's no resources I just need to keep doing everything myself
This sounds like an entry for the "make elive more known" (old website page), we should have a list of the top things to do, but unfortunately people doesn't follows that so I don't know how to motivate people to do it
thats right, I always viewed it as a kind of "popularity rank" (and a way to compare "how much is popular elive today's"), let's say an aproximated value
Most people don't know you, so the impression you leave online matters. You're obviously emotionally attached to Elive, but you also need some objectivity because there are several valid points which you rejected. That's security, which you treat like it's unimportant, then you denied that people had to donate to install Elive, although just a few months ago your website said this, in plain English:
Required donation to install: Yes
Then instead of trying to find a better solution to install Elive, so the people don't have to put up with tens of dialogs/pop-ups, you dismiss the fact that the people who complain about it are not out to get you or Elive, but they simply don't like those things. If you want more users to adopt Elive, how else if not by meeting their requirements? Treat this as a personal project with your personal preferences and you will only find a limited number of people who resonate with that.
What if you step outside of your bubble and be more tactful with the reviewers, even when they're not tactful themselves? And if you can't detach yourself enough to get a more objective view about the feedback floating around the internet, why not delegate a few dedicated fans to handle the feedback smoothly?
That's just a tool. Too bad it wasn't used, but stuff like that happens to others as well. It only means you have to find out better areas to invest your time into. You don't have to babysit anyone in particular, but it helps when you have a nicely structured plan of action that people can understand and contribute to, without asking many questions.
Most people don't care as much about Elive as you do, so they won't make the extra effort to research for hours on what they can help with. And making a plan also makes it clear for you what needs to be done, so it's not a waste of time to publish the list. It's not like it will magically make people show up to help, but as it is right now... there's zero chances someone can take a quick look and know how to help. Those who can contribute to the core of Elive don't need marketing talk on the front page, but task lists and maybe a quick overview of the project so they know what the finished release should look like.
Not "how", but "what". You are the only person who knows what the next Elive should look like, so if you think it's wasted effort to publish a plan, imagine how a contributor would feel if they found out their contribution doesn't matter because the tool they helped on was already replaced by another.
An example:
the Elive installer must work on Debian 10 with Enlightenment X
Any contributor interested in porting the installer to Debian 10 will grab the existing code, test it, see what doesn't work and make it work. And then maybe even improve it.
It's hard when you love working on Elive but you have to stop and do some management for a change. It feels like everything will fail because not doing the work (apparently) means nothing gets done. But everyone around you can't just figure out on their own what you have in mind for the next release. That's why you will always work alone if you prefer not to do any management. There's also the option of asking someone else to do some management work by using the Best Practices for Maintainers or a modified version that fits your vision. Open Source Guide has more helpful information, so whoever wants to assist you can get a lot of inspiration from there. I'm actually thinking about @jfbourdeau, but others might be interested in picking up some management tasks.
This is a circular problem because you mostly think as a worker. It's overwhelming for others to know Elive has over 2500 packages to be maintained, but you don't even name the essential ones on a to-do list. And how about trimming the fat, so you don't need to maintain so many packages? Do you really have to burden yourself with so many packages? Isn't there anything you could do to avoid dealing with so many?
It has never been forced, always included cost-free alternatives, and you are referencing the 2.0 stable version which is from 2010, when an installer-module was needed to install, in order to "not surprise" the users later with that I wrote that sentence in that page, but as said, there has been always cost-free alternatives
Again, there's very different ways to say things, you can say "I don't like much those popups, there's many", or maybe "I suggest to remove some popups"... or instead, you can say "this system is crap, i don't recommend it to anyone" (referencing minor trivial things and trashed entirely the rest of the system), this is purely trolling and bullshit speaking, entirely destroying behavior. Suggestions are welcome, not these things
I'm, with reviewers, not trolls, they don't deserve any respect and their only purpose in life is create endless debates
Please, we are seriously talking about these things again?
I don't understand why you are telling me these things, sounds like you are talking to a novice person teaching how to do things and I have 14 years of experience managing everything, where I was forced to do things in the most optimal way with the need to skip some things, and even if I wanted to, I cannot afford to do everything, how you can tell me is not a waste of time if I already tried and I know how much time it requires and proved myself that doesn't produce any worth-of-the-effort results?
This conversation sounds redundant, again, is "how", not "what"
Elive has its own way to do things, own way to package with their specific things to know, it doesn't use the plain debian tools to build packages but own tools that manages and does tons of things in automated ways.
So is not about "what" needs to be done, is about how needs to be done and I don't have the time to teach the ton of details and how everything is structured, also these tools doesn't works in a multi-user way just like repositories aren't, so it is not even possible unless a massive rewrite will happen to the tools allowing them to work in a multiuser, hierarchical and controlled way, Debian is a very good system but has an extremely slow bureaucratic way to develop it, too much manual things and extreme delays for wait your work to be published, they needs to be approved, uploaded, etc etc
In the way packages are made in Elive they are built in less than 5 seconds. Creating a new patch, modifying the code, uploading the changes, rebuilding the package and including it in the repository takes less than 1 minute to do the entire process
How otherwise it could have been possible to maintain 2500 packages ? It would have been impossible.
So it is not so easy to "manage a team", but the source code is publish and everybody can do anything with it, that's the only thing that I can afford to let people collaborate if they want, if you want for example to fix a bug in enlightenment you have the source code on github where you can simply send a patch, there's tons of sources in github.
Sometimes a package is not needed anymore, sometimes more new ones are needed, but they are here for a reason.
We're going up !!!
