I’ve said this previously, and I’ll say it again: we’re severely under-resourced. Not just XFS, the whole fsdevel community. As a developer and later a maintainer, I’ve learnt the hard way that there is a very large amount of non-coding work is necessary to build a good filesystem. There’s enough not-really-coding work for several people. Instead, we lean hard on maintainers to do all that work. That might’ve worked acceptably for the first 20 years, but it doesn’t now.
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Dave and I are both burned out. I’m not sure Dave ever got past the 2017 burnout that lead to his resignation. Remarkably, he’s still around. Is this (extended burnout) where I want to be in 2024? 2030? Hell no.
Reminds me of this xkcd post:
Boy do I find mailinglists impossible to read.
Ontopic: I appreciate what these people are doing, but were I them, a lousy community would have me quit very quickly or never join the project to begin with. Maybe the should just quit and when shit hits the commercial fan, they’ll either pay to get it fixed, get somebody on it to get it fixed, or move on.
Probably fixing whatever non-dev problems they have to make it a nice community to join wouldn’t hurt either. For me, it’s the lack of time and C code. C is a language I absolutely will not touch. There’s not much worse than it IMO and it’s refreshing to see rust slowly entering the kernel with all its tooling.
This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.
The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.
We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.
This plea for help is specifically for non-coding, but still deeply technical work.
That’s more the desktop environment than the Linux kernel though. Gnome, for example, is a simple, good looking, accessible desktop environment.
I love and use GNOME daily, but I think it’s still the case that the interface “needs some getting used to” for a Windows/MacOS user. The design paradigm is just not familiar or self-explanatory to anyone who has regularly used desktop computers in the past decade.
