Looking at my recent experiences with some packages such as
Thunderbird sqlite,
Gimp (linker), OBS Studio (can't remember what I tweaked but it builds a package now) and even making my own
kernel and installer ISO with 4K page size, none of these things were too hard to resolve or work around but on the other hand, it becomes tedious if a developer encounters stuff like that every day.
With Thunderbird specifically, unless it is fixed upstream, I have to spend some time adapting my patch to each new version of the package. It is not hard work, it may only take 30 minutes but it is tedious and takes energy away from new development.
Hopefully when Vikings
make their products available in Europe, some more developers will decide to try the platform for their next workstation and this will distribute the burden more widely.
It is important to have some reach into other ecosystems, for example, if there were two or three developers in each big upstream community like Mozilla, GNOME and KDE/Qt using this platform, they would notice any issues much more quickly and issues would be fixed centrally, before anybody tries to release or package new versions of those products. Does anybody already know about interest in any of those communities?
For OS level development it can be really useful for developers to have multiple workstations, for example, one as a stable workstation and a second machine that we can reboot multiple times per day to test kernels and hardware. Only having one machine right now, I tend to avoid testing anything that might require a reboot because I don't want to close and re-open all the different applications that I'm using.
If anybody has any old hardware that they wanted to donate to developers or if anybody knows of any funding to subsidize hardware for developers in different projects that could help the platform gain critical mass. As with
Metcalfe's law in telecoms, each extra developer adds more value than their personal contribution. Any other ideas would be welcome too.
