Hello Simargl. Please consider this an open letter to you.
And please bear in mind that I don't mean to bother you and there is no pun intended. This is just me voicing my frustration.
simargl wrote:Just I won't work on 32-bit anymore, that is reasonable because what would my motivation - it would require compiling kernel for i686, replacing some binaries in initrfs, converting i686 packages , keeping them on my disk but why?
That is a very interesting question.
Since the very beginning, still in archpup's days you've said that you were building an OS for your needs,
on your computer(s).
That is not the usual dev approach. Usually devs stand up saying that they are building an OS for them but
with a community in mind. They will usually state what the project is all about and sometimes they even plot a roadmap of what they intend for the future of the project.
In such sense I guess I see why you currently don't have the "drive" to keep doing 32bit versions anymore.
simargl wrote:Those people would anyway use what distrowatch recommends and that is not alphaOS, but some ubuntu derivative.
Then I guess you are not acknowledging that you have here several board members that have more than a couple of 6 or 7 year old computers with only 1 or 2GB RAM that they would love to run alpha on.
We are not distrowatch average joes and we are certainly not interested in running buntoo or it's derivatives otherwise we wouldn't be here, we would be on buntoo boards.
IMHO the project has been zigzaging way too much and this way I don't understand it.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
We had a cool text editor: l3afpad. Then you decided that Geany was more up to the standards of alpha. But then (IIRC in the same week) you decided to create your own text editor in Vala, which is great but this just makes stuff a bit confusing with so many changes in such a small amount of time.
Another example: we had a wiki and It started to get populated. Then some douchebags decided to spam it and you removed the wiki. You said we didn't need it, that we could use the forum instead. Then a couple of days later you added a new wiki but the old posts are now gone...
Another example is the SFS vs LinuxLive. All in all,
at this stage, there is hardly any evidence of what the project can benefit from using linuxlive. If this was a mature and stable project I'd probably agree that wasting time on linuxlive was a good option. But the way I see it we are still on early beta stage with several major issues to deal with.
Another example: the 32vs64 bit. When you started the project you only had 32bit versions and some of us asked for 64bit versions. Now you only have 64bit versions and some of us are asking for 32bit versions. I guess that in light of what you wrote in your previous quote, it is understandable that you don't have the "drive" to make both.
But that's what I believe is the main issue with alphaOS right now: you being the sole developer of the project.
It is hard on you because you have to do everything and it must take you a lot of your precious free time.
Then if you had more people helping the project could go faster, could have less impact on your personal life and you could assign tasks like "this guy takes care of 32bit and that other guy takes care of 64bit".
Of course you would need skilled people to work with you and unfortunately most of us (like me) lack those skills.
Yet I am quite sure that there are still a couple of skilled users that could help you IF you wanted and IF they had the time.
But I'm not so sure if you want to go that way, or if you ever did want to take that road in the first place.
I gave you a couple of examples of zigzaging. Let me tell you why.
You see, while the project was zigzaging there were several major issues that didn't get fixed, maybe because you can't replicate them or maybe because you were working on zigzaging stuff or maybe there was another reason that I can't see right now.
We have to face it: alphaOS has major issues with wireless networking and for what I understand it is lacking lots of drivers/firmwares (or whatever is needed) to get some peripherals recognized and working in alpha, like e.g. my DVB-T usb stick.
Besides there are still (ACPI?) issues that affect the CPU fans, sometimes not working at all and sometimes only working at full speed. I thought this was only happening with my laptop but I have easily replicated this on a couple of other laptops. So either I am doing something very wrong or other people simply are a) not listening to their laptop fans or b) are working with different computer architectures than those of my laptops.
If you asked me I would say that
these are priorities and zigzaging is probably nice and it is probably beneficial in the long run BUT it is not essential for the project right now.
I will keep my interest in alphaOS but I probably won't feel so excited as I felt when I was using archpup 12, that didn't have a single issue of those mentioned before. Unfortunately that one is now unusable because it can't sync with repos and also because it is now unmaintained.
One last word: please don't get mad at me. I simply don't agree on some of your recent decisions but I am very grateful for you having shared (and still sharing) your project with us.
I feel that there is a huge potential on alpha which there once was in Puppy too but that faded away on the latter. I hope that in the near future with or without zigzaging you can get alpha to show that potential and also to show stability.
Oh, and I'm sorry for such a long post. My parents brought me up with --verbose
Cheers mate