Dear fellow Devuanists,

I just wanted to share with the list a few sparse thoughts, resulting
from the events of the last few days. You should read a clear "IMHO"
after each period, since these are my personal, humble, minuscle
thoughts, which you are free to ignore altogether :)

First, I haven't said that yet, but I am obviously very happy that
Devuan Jessie Beta is finally out, and extremely grateful to the
people in the development team that made it possible, and to the
people in this list who have supported them, in a way or another. We
don't forget that the overwhelming majority of the Linux world has
always been quite skeptical about Devuan, labelling it as a "futile
effort" by a "band of neo-luddites", and that the large majority of
commentators, experts, gurus, and fanboys gave Devuan "just a few
months" before the whole wagon would disappear to /dev/null. Devuan
Jessie Beta is another proof that the majority is quite often wrong:
definitely more than a few months have passed, and Devuan is here, and
is here to stay.

We are all proud of this milestone, but we should be very careful not
allowing pride to make us blind.

The release of Beta was managed very carefully and professionally, and
was overall a success, but we should learn from the few things that
were not as perfect as they could be.

For instance, several small glitches could have been avoided easily: a
few typos in the official announcement, a few typos in the official
webpage (see for instance the "mirrors" vs "mirror" in the package
source URL), a few inconsistencies in the documentation put online,
and so on. These are all things that undermine our public image, and
unfortunately many people want to ruin Devuan's image, for a reason or
another. Maybe for the future we might have a larger number of people
checking this stuff before an official press release comes out. I
volunteer from now to help in "typo-hunting", and I will start with
our website (which is *beautiful*, BTW).

Talking of Devuan's image, I really appreciated that the release of
beta was not accompained by trumpets and drums, which helped giving an
aura of "well, this is what should have naturally happend, right?" to
the whole process. I have to admit that I was also a bit disappointed
at first in noting that most of the community out there had barely
noticed it. In the end, I concluded that this should not be a problem
for us. Let's face it: Devuan *is* a niche, a minority, an effort that
goes in a different direction from "mainstream", and there is nothing
wrong about it. The most important thing is that *we*, the
*Devuanists*, had something to celebrate yesterday, a great operating
system to use from today, and a solid project on which to build
greater things for tomorrow. All the great things started from niches,
minorities, contrarians, and *evolution* alone, not PR, has eventually
determined which of the many niches would survive.

Finally, about evolution, I have seen several hundreds posts on reddit
and slashdot by people who "fight" to show that systemd is evil while
Devuan is "the right thing". I would humbly recommend people to avoid
wasting their energy in such useless chit-chatting. No informed
opinion by a tech-savvy will convince me that systemd is good, and the
same is true in the other direction. Devuan is not "against
something", but "towards something else". The things that will allow
Devuan to remain alive will be a reliable distribution, a large user
base, a thriving community. *Evolution* has already sweeped out
thousands of distributions, and will sweep out thousands more in the
future. Only those which are fit for the purpose they target will
survive, whatever is the opinion of the majority, or of their
supporters and fanboys. So it's better to put our efforts towards
building a stronger, better, fitter Devuan, since our opinions about
Devuan will not save it from oblivion.

Now off to work to release Jessie stable ASAP.

HND

KatolaZ

--
[ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ]
[ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ]
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