improved vs. stable vs. motivation

I feel the same about pretty much everything software. I generally just want work to be done and that's pretty much it. And if the tools I use don't work then that sucks. The more the tools change, the more often I need to adapt, get other tools etc.

However maybe that's just a reflection of the evolution that happened over time in the open source space.

I remember in the "old days" when I'd spend maybe a third of my time reporting bugs, fixing stuff, sending patches etc. while using Linux. I no more do. Stuff more or less just works and works quite reliably. So there's no need to change anything any more. The only time that change comes along is when you need to upgrade.

So when stuff just works and people don't want it to change then how does the change - that will unevitably come along - come into existence? This is no more the old times when people would charge forward and change things. Or is it just me? There are expectations from software and distribution users, that the SW author or integrator will not break stuff.

And I suspect that "working" under such premises might not be so exciting any more. So maybe without us really noticing our open source world has slowly changed under our eyes from "we do it for free because we're motivated by how fun and exciting it is" to a more standard corporate world where you do stuff if and when you get a pay and use your non-work time for family or something else outside of open source?

So my open question is, do we as a open source community maybe need to reconsider our perspective? Should we start to expect to pay for the next stable and tested open source software release? Should we have different expectations towards projects and people that try to experiment, improve and invent new stuff and move it forward than towards "production quality" software?

The reason I am using Xfce is that it doesn't seem to be moving much and is stable and I am not aware that I'd really *need* any additional features out of it. In contrast it seems that both KDE and Gnome seem to be regularily colliding with the apparently contradictory expecations of "all shiny new and exciting" and "stable and upwards compatible".

?