You talk about Lubuntu, Lubuntu, but calls those, who by chance installed Xubuntu as the “other” system in that, as having Frankenstein installation. See the matter?
We are fragmented, the little community that still exists.
You say, the users shouldn’t have to know Linux. Why not? There are no out of box devices with Ubuntu/Linux, except some terribly expensive ones from few businesses. So, you at least have to know how to download, copy to a usb/dvd and install the distro. Only those, who like to explore, experiment and learn come to Linux. Others won’t.
If the community has to be rebuilt, it has to be done around one one major flavour/system. Arch has a community without a DE. Debian has a community, where they even argue against systemd, and allowed to do so. OpenSuse has a community, where the main installer iso comes with all 3 main officially supported DEs. And, so on. Ubuntu, too had a community that rallied around the default, once.
You just can’t have 3-5 discourses pulling people around, away from each other to have a lively, dedicated, oriented community. Today, Ubuntu is just another flavour. Once, from Ubuntu 10.10 up to half way 17.10, Ubuntu was unique, the heyday of the community. There was a lot of Ubuntu related web sites, some creating lot of ppas, but most of them are gone dormant since. Those web sites were also the community. All gone. There should be lot of related web sites, high interest in the internet for the community to grow. Not any more, sadly.
We have the Free software foundation that tries to group several different companies around open source. But we don’t have a community that tries to group all projects and tries to coordinate efforts on which technologies to use and support. They compete with each other to see what it’s better and like a kind of Darwin’s law the best product survive.
You can’t force someone to use something they don’t like. In an open collaborative model we put one stone at a time to build a house. We just hope the chaos theory would help us get to the goal.
We could build some structure to help the community grow but you can’t change the basis of what we are.
Maybe this model is not made to succeed in a wide community as we all dream but it’s definitely still here and alive for people brave enough to restart his PC and get into the bootloader.
Agreed, and that major favor should be Ubuntu itself. And it should be the upstream like Dedian is. Hence why I was using the term “umbrella community” in one of my earlier posts.
We could since majority of the community are coders or they upload via Launchpad. But what about the minority, those like me, who are more people-based? My only solution, if we ever consolidate, rely on Discord activity.
As an afterthought, if there things where people-based persons can upload via Launchpad, then Launchpad would be the best choice. I guess when I say “people-based” persons, I’m talking about people like me who try to improve the community or those who help with tech support.
LP is another thing that should be addressed. LP is old, out-fashioned and uses its own version control software, which is not that great and git is the standard. That just increases the barriers to contribute to anything in LP.
The eternal argument is that no one can build a better one or implement features to improve it. I know we cannot simply move to GitHub or GitLab but LP drives people away with its utterly non-practical interface. Still, LP is a problem in my perspective.
The topic of fixing the community is huge. My conclusion is that there are too many issues to address simultaneously, which require a strong leadership with strong, reliable ideas and that the majority of the community accepts. Like many companies do in these days (Facebook is a good example in this case, with all the ReactJs and Redux people), perhaps its time for Canonical to hire a community lead to engage, handle and address most of these issues and have enough power to design, propose and aid implementing any solutions that are needed. Obviously this person will in turn need more people to work closely with him/her, so I am not sure how feasible this is.
My concern is that most of the current problems cannot be resolved by the community alone, the reason being our lack of ability to do so. As wxl suggested, most ideas require waiting for Canonical to do/approve/fix something, or build our own solution which will lead to more diversity, again.
Thank you everyone who has shared their concerns as well and thanks for trying to find a solution. Hope we get it all sorted soon and start implementing ideas to improve our community
A technical solution (having only one flavor) is unlikely to fix a community problem, especially when, as I said before the flavors have existed since the beginning. Lubuntu’s existence or the lack of Unity is not why the Community Council is gone. Also, I note that @chanath is an Ubuntu Unity contributor (not even officially an Ubuntu thing, not unlike the Cinnamon Remix which is having a lively discussion on this very forum) but yet here we are all coming together to try to solve a problem with our shared community. Finally, the distros mentioned all provide different DEs which means there’s a different face to the OS, which was the previously mentioned complaint. Again, the discussion of fragmentation is silly.
Launchpad works with Git. I wouldn’t mind us using GitLab but LP does the trick mostly.
My people-friendly solution to wiki profiles was to put them in the profile section of your Launchpad account. No version control or terminal interface required. Just go to your account, click the edit button, enter some text, hit the save button. You’ve probably already done this.
Those things, though, are technical concerns. Let’s focus on the original topic: the community.
I test many “flavours” and also I have “Frankenstein” systems, based on Ubuntu, even have a clean Openbox system. I am the first to test Lubuntu and give a feedback, when you asked.
I also have Gnome on pure Arch, Fedora, OpenSuse Tumbleweed and Ubuntu default on bare metal, so when I say “the default” is just one of many, I know what I am saying. One should really read OpenSuse’s Wiki(s)!
Well, without writing a book, how about an example:
Years ago as a teenager, I was a in a video-production club. One of our key members was a sweet grandmother. She had the perfect skill set to run a phone tree and scrape up a crew, smooth the ruffled feathers of a host or talent, and was a lot of fun sharing pizza with afterwards. She was rubbish on the equipment - she wasn’t a camera operator or technical director or editor. She didn’t produce, she didn’t manage, she didn’t lead. But she was vital to our successful projects and fun.
In Ubuntu today (it’s changed over time), I currently see two main problems:
Most of the teams that I follow don’t seem to have a clear idea of how they want to do outreach and recruitment, soft-handoff new recruits to a mentor, ensure a positive first experience, help recruits up the skills-chain, provide recognition, and follow-up (attempt to recover or exit-interview) drop-outs. I don’t see those tasks as optional extra work - to me they are essential elements of a healthy team.
I don’t see us recruiting or retaining folks who enjoy doing those teambuilding elements as their primary contribution. For those of us who have already found a way to contribute that we enjoy, less-enjoyable teambuilding tasks are a very-understandable lower priority.
I have seen other clubs, both local and remote, with seemingly-similar problems: Recruiting new participants, meeting goals, holding meetings worth the bother of attending, thanking the folks who do most of the work, and properly saying farewell-for-now to folks who depart.
I have also seen other clubs run very well - I know a book club that people want to join because one member loves to organize it and keep it interesting…she just doesn’t want to pick the book nor use her own house for the club meeting.
It is not enough producing a distro that “might” get installed in some device, but also whether it will be installed in the given device …(brand name, type, etc) computer/laptop/tablet.
There should be a section here (and/or in Ubuntu wiki), where users can write about it and discuss what works, what won’t. That section should be given equal or more visibility than the download page, and linked to it. The people, who’d experimenting on Linux to download it to see how it works in live mode are doing that on device that’s made for another OS platform.
The newcomers (youngsters) are needed most to create and uphold a community, than the oldsters. The oldsters are usually sold to Linux, joining in when it was young and struggling. But also, we are the depleting kind.
This was done back when the wiki was open (not locked down because of spam & destruction of data) yet few people added hardware to it.
I like the idea, but I doubt it’ll get much information added.
Also I looked up one model (dell optiplex 755 desktop) on it, found a reference for it there (it worked on 12.04 amd64 ), but I’ve had multiple boxes with that model number, and know that one model dell came with at least 5 possible motherboards over the life of that product (thus components vary on the one model). Dell/HP/Lenovo deal with the varying hardware via Service Tag codes, but that’s complexity users don’t want to deal with or may miss. That page dealt with it pretty well. but it’s detail that could be missed by end-users (the one 755 in the list on that page did match my 755s audio & ethernet wise, but differs video wise to those listed in my QA-test lists [boxes I use in my QA-testing])
I had mentioned earlier how the lack of a Community Manager has negatively impacted us. That’s sort of what I felt the role accomplished. At the very least, that person always seemed to be trying to gather people together and push community involvement.
I know that in Lubuntu we have achieved success primarily by doing the exact things you were talking about doing. We don’t currently have someone fulfilling this role (right now a bunch of us are involved in the process) but I can see the need to have someone.
And indeed, every team should have such a role, with the “main” Community Manager providing guidance and best practices to their counterparts within teams.
So I propose two things:
The Community Manager should be a central role of our governance structure. It should be as key as the Community Council and should be someone voted on by all of Ubuntu Members. They should work to build and maintain the Community Managers distributed through teams. They should also work to build and maintain documentation that those Community Managers can use to further their efforts to build their team membership. Finally, they should conceive of some event(s) to build community. Something in the same spirit as UDS or LoCos, but with more impact.
We should start working on buidling the basics of that Community Management documentation right now. Perhaps it would be wise to consult past Community Managers to see what they would suggest.
It is interesting to notice the last devices in that, 2005 and 2007!
I still maintain that those, who come to Linux these days are those, who want to experiment, not the main batch of computer users. To get more people to experiment, Ubuntu/community has to show that Ubuntu can be installed in a given device.
It is practically 2020.
(There’s an interesting comment in Distrowatch today, comment #21, asking what can a Linux distro do with certain new laptops? These laptops (1st laptop , 2nd laptop) have innovative touchpads. Ah, btw, I see the same question asked here, without getting any replies.)
So true, but here is the flip-side to the question. We had two already two of them and they in a way moved away from that role. I don’t recall why Jono left but Alan moved into another position. The issue is retention.
Just as I thought.
We are talking about a proverbial desktop. How do we create a community around that? Only for geeky and those, who like to experiment?
), but I’ve had multiple boxes with that model number, and know that one model dell came with at least 5 possible motherboards over the life of that product (thus components vary on the one model). Dell/HP/Lenovo deal with the varying hardware via Service Tag codes, but that’s complexity users don’t want to deal with or may miss. That page dealt with it pretty well. but it’s detail that could be missed by end-users (the one 755 in the list on that page did match my 755s audio & ethernet wise, but differs video wise to those listed in my QA-test lists [boxes I use in my QA-testing])