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CommunityCommunityPosted Nov 21, 2003 1:20 UTC (Fri) by mmealman (guest, #9223)Parent article: The Success of Gentoo I think a big part of Gentoo's growth has been because of the user community. To communicate with other users you have mailing lists, irc just like everyone else AND the web forums. I have no idea why other major distributions haven't rallied around web forums. I can't count how many times a quick search through the Gentoo forum archive of posts has turned up an answer to any question I might have. I'd love to see other distributions spend as much time building their community as they do working on the distribution. Fedora could easily take off just as well as Gentoo has if they had a decent system of communication in place for their users. Mailing lists and IRC alone just don't cut it anymore. You need a casual place to shoot the breeze with other users, post screen shots and generate anticipation and excitement about your distribution.
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Bug testing Posted Dec 3, 2003 0:38 UTC (Wed) by butters (guest, #17430) [Link] A major side effect of Portage and how easy it is to stay on the cutting edge of OSS developments is that there are now MANY more linux users with convenient access to beta and candidate releases. This makes the process of identifying bugs in new software quicker, especially ones that only effect certain hardware configurations.I bet that a completely disproportionate number of people running a 2.6.0-testN kernel right now are running Gentoo. Same thing goes for GNOME 2.5 and many other testing packages. Gentoo was developed for developers that constantly update their software as changes are made. Gentoo has turned a lot of casual (and often clever) linux users into developers, or at least into masses of bug wranglers. Portage is a very powerful tool for open source software testing and "validation."
Community Posted Dec 6, 2003 18:13 UTC (Sat) by irf (guest, #17606) [Link] mmealman, I agree with you, gentoo's owes it growth because of thewonderfull support of the user's community, especially the gentoo forums. I have been on gentoo for over a year now, and never had to post a problem which I had on the forum (until today), chances are that someone did that already and the problem has been resolved! now that is a hell of a community!
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