Improving Community Health: Community Concerns

The thing is, we have few projects, depending on desktop environments – Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu-Budgie, Ubuntu-Kylin, Ubuntu, Unity and Xubuntu, maybe some I’ve forgotten. And, depending on the desktop environment, the given community has different goals, most times don’t match at all with the other community. The community is fragmented. What happens, when something is fragmented?

I don’t think the community is fragmented. Sure many of us have different set of goals, but there’s a subset where there’s great cooperation and common goals, this and the core goals and values of Ubuntu, and friendship is what drives us together.

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Maybe that’s what’s needed as Ubuntu is the parent/umbrella favor of the family. The main problem that I see is it will all ran by volunteers and many of us don’t have much time to volunteer. But that’s just me.

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It is nice to have nice thoughts. But, the real life is different and diverse.
How come those, who run for example XFCE, have the same goals of those, who run Gnome shell? For those, who run XFCE, LXDE, LXQT, KDE Plasma, Gnome, Mate, Budgie can run them in Ubuntu or Debian or Arch or any other distro base, but those who ran/still running Unity, there’s no other distro to go to. What about that community of users? Won’t they feel abandoned? One of the main reasons that the community is disintegrating?

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I’ve already explain that not all goals have to align perfectly, I can live perfectly with difference and diversity, and to cooperate on the goals where I’m motivated and that are common, and many goals can be common, the fact that we have such a diversity of flavours proves it.

Personally I would love to have an Unity focused distribution, as I still rather Unity to anything else, however I don’t feel that enough to make me contribute to the effort that some are doing in that regard (well do do contribute to UBports, so in a certain way I’m contributing to similar goal).

I do feel the loss of Unity, I don’t consider my self entitled enough to demand that others work for free, so that I’ll have what I want for myself.

We are not those distros even if we have a special relation with Debian, and many of the people that contribute to Ubuntu also contribute to Debian. Those distros can do whatever they wish, it doesn’t harm me or Ubuntu.
I really love their freedom to go out and do things the way they want, and whenever the Ubuntu community can cooperate with them on the goals we have in common, I’ll glad that it happens. Those goals maybe smaller subset than those we share within the Ubuntu Community, but has the efforts of the great people at Ubuntu MATE prove, they can be more than meets the eye.

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It is not about Unity, but as in the OP “improving the community health.” How can you improve the community health, when you abandon the majority of them? Around 17.10, that community left, the majority of that community. One can give a chance to 3rd or 4th player to run for a while, but the community that was there for/with the 1st runner won’t glue on. They look elsewhere. So not much of a community left to give some health.

This talk about fragmentation is kind of silly. People come into the Lubuntu help channels and ask how our flavor compares to some other flavor and I always give the same answer: they’re all Ubuntu. It’s true, too. Every single flavor is merely a particular selection of packages available in the Ubuntu archive. This also explains why I regularly touch base with other flavor team members, not to mention members of, say, the Release Team, which serve the whole community. Most of those people were around when I first started and they’re still there, working to make Ubuntu (the whole project, not just one flavor) better.

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I’ve asked questions numerous times on IRC in a flavor community, and often get responses from members of other teams/other flavors (ie. the wider community). This occurs rather frequently and in my opinion show a vibrant community.

I’ve stuck my head up & said something in a non-Ubuntu community discourse site, and received unexpected thanks back from members of other Ubuntu flavors than where I work acknowledging my work in the Ubuntu community. (unexpected as my post was really just a vague thank you). Again I think this reflects a healthy community.

Is the community perfect, nope. We’d have to remove people to get rid of all problems. (same idea in a corporate handout-promo-pin sitting besides me “Security plan: Eliminate all users”)

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I started translating Ubuntu in Rosetta Launchpad. Now I’m translating for Gnome benefiting not only Ubuntu but a bunch of distros that use Gnome software.
We have the power to build a great community. Please don’t think in what we have lost but in what we can do with what we have.

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Unity was abandoned in part because of Community feedback, there was a loud minority of people that didn’t liked it, and Canonical asked for feedback, and to leave Unity was something many of those that gave feedback recommended. I didn’t enjoyed it, I didn’t enjoyed even further due to my involvement with the Ubuntu Touch community, but I understand that there’s only so much that can be done when the feedback was what it was, when the goals that where behind the projects weren’t really being achieved with enough success, and there was lack of community participation on the work to develop and support that software.

People have to get use to actively support what they like, that’s what can prevent it from going away.

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That’s what you say, and maybe some of the Gnome-shell guys say.
Then, why this shout about “improving the community health?”
You abandon a community, and they don’t come back. That’s what happens. 4th or 5th player sometimes come first, but very rarely. Rarely happens in sport, if ever. Rarely happens in politics, if ever. Rarely happens in business, if ever.

A community has one goal, it works and succeeds. People rally around, for they know they’d never be abandoned. Apple and MS from the other world as an example.

Someone mentioned Lubuntu. Sure, there was a community, when it was Lubuntu with LXDE. Once, it had gone LXQt, even the former devs had gone away.

https://lubuntu.net points to a forum at Ubuntu forums, while the “official” https://lubuntu.me points to another forum. Fragmented or not?

Yes, but I’m pretty sure that’s from forum technology changing where some are still “old school”.[1] And that’s where one of the causes of fragmentation. No standard format/technology that all can use instead of multiple. Same thing with Ask Ubuntu, IRC, mailing lists, ect.

[1] I hope I didn’t sound rude there. :wink:

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Of course not! :slight_smile:
Its quite interesting reading starting from here. One can go down the memory lane, from January 2009.

In fifteen years of Ubuntu’s existence, Unity was there for seven. That’s slightly a minority. It certainly doesn’t define Ubuntu. Also, I’m not sure a community was abandoned so much as a technology.

Um, the big guys are constantly changing things and shifting goals (see Google and Facebook as well as the two you mentioned). This makes sense because they’re following the dollars. Here we have no such concern.

In LXDE’s time, we really had one developer. The last few LXDE releases didn’t see much activity in terms of development. That one dev was rarely heard from (though he did help with the initial transition to LXQt, which negates the idea that’s why he left). I’ve not seen him reappear somewhere else. He left amicably, too. I think he saw that the project could take care of itself and he needed a break so he handed over the reins. That’s not a bad thing.

Now we have a bunch of developers actively doing all sorts of development. And if we look at all consistent contributors from before, many of them, including the most active of them are not only still with the project, but contributing even more.

That occurred long before the transition to LXQt. Basically the original founder who long ago stopped contributing to the project (like when Lubuntu became official; you can track this the blog which is very active until the first release or so, not to mention the original mailing list on Launchpad) held onto the dot net with an iron fist, but it was constantly out of date. Frustrated, the Lubuntu Team created the dot me to resolve the issue.

The Lubuntu Team does still monitor Ubuntu Forums but it gets very little traffic compared to Discourse. We also see a lot more participation since using Telegram. Using modern, familiar technology does seem to aid in participation, which was my earlier point.

My understanding of Ubuntu is that it’s sort of the easy and more stable version of bleeding edge Debian. In both cases, there are a variety of packages in the archive, not all of which are used with all of the image releases, of which there are many. We use apt/dpkg for package management. We have systemd. How has that set of criteria changed? No matter how many flavors we have or how much they change, it hasn’t.

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Here is a news item about Lubuntu becoming a flavour written May, 2011.

There are 4 comments at the bottom. Read the last 2 paras of the 3rd comment in it. It is true today, as it was true in 2011.

For those, who don’t want to read links, here’s screeny.

fragmentation

Hey all. Just popping into this thread to say “hello” and that I’m reading the posts, but not had an opportunity to reply yet. In summary, the suggested issues raised include (but not limited to):

  • Community Council is non-functional
  • LoCo Council is non-functional
  • Documentation / wiki is outdated
  • Lack of Community Manager role at Canonical
  • It’s difficult for people to get involved
  • There’s a lack of leadership in Ubuntu

Did I miss any significant issues that can be summarized in a single line? :slight_smile:

I am keen for us to resolve these, if they’re indeed considered to be significant, and require fixing.

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Users/consumers are utterly confused which one (Ubuntu) to use/choose.

As in, which flavour within the various desktops, or whether to use desktop or server, or some other choice?
What data do you have to support this?

First off, offering a custom product is not something that confuses consumers because if it did, no one would offer them. As an employee of a company offering such a product that has been in business much longer than Ubuntu has been around, I can tell you that this idea is absolutely untrue.

Actually, one of the biggest complaints I hear people have (and I have personally) about MS and Apple is that you don’t have any choice. You’re stuck with what you get and if you don’t like it, too bad. This is the beauty of Linux: a vast and ever changing landscape of possibilities. That’s a strength, not a weakness. And it’s something that every single major Linux distribution takes advantage of.

Secondly, you seem to propose this as proof of your idea that the community is fragmented. Well, that means it was fragmented in 2011. Actually, given that Kubuntu has been around since 2005, it means the community has been fragmented since basically the beginning of Ubuntu. And before Unity, no less. Something doesn’t add up there…

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You asked for a one-liner, I gave you a one-liner.