One of the many faces of Jiyuu
So Jiyuu Linux has been dead in the water for quite some time now. As much as I hate to say it, all those neigh-sayers were right: This project, since its inception, was a pretty poor concept. If you wrote a checklist containing what not to do when coordinating a community project, an aspect of Jiyuu would be based around each point. I guess my goal here is to enumerate and discuss the problems that led to our demise and plagued us throughout, I suppose mainly as a reference for the future.
(Its probably worth noting that when I say “we” in reference to mistakes, I pretty much mean me. Management of Jiyuu was pretty autocratic in nature, though in my defence my autocratic decisions were democratically supported. It is certainly not my intention to talk down any of our supporters, everyone that has ever jumped in the IRC for a chat or shitposted in the threads is greatly appreciated. Thank you for making the thought bubble possible!)
To clarify, I don’t think the idea of having a flexible and easy-to-use platform is a bad idea. There are certainly caveats that idea carries (which were completely ignored by our approach), but that’s another issue. The problems with this project, as I see it, can be pretty neatly summarised:
Lack of direction
Even in the beginning, back when we were flying the banner of /g/OS, the objective was to make an operating system that /g/ would approve of. As many issues as there are with this approach, the biggest becomes apparent pretty quickly: What does that mean? It didn’t take very long for us to discover a pretty impressive breadth of different opinions. We had some ideas, like creating an eselect-based theming system, but it’s difficult to create a platform to cater to such a wide group of people. After a very long discussion in #AcuallyOS, a name change and a refocusing had occurred and we were going to take on a challenge that many others, both more experienced and better resourced than ourselves, had completely and utterly failed to accomplish: Make an operating system that was both user-friendly and flexible, whilst encouraging technical literacy and an understanding of the platform. Some would say that this is a worse place than where we started, but regardless of difficulty the goal was certainly more tangible. This is largely where the second issue comes into play.
Lack of experience
Back in that very first thread, there was much activity around putting in suggestions for what people would like to see in this new distro. I, along with many anons active in the thread, was pretty excited about this so I started the SlashGeeSlashOS Github. To see ideas coming together under the coordination of someone who seemed to know what (s)he was doing was, for lack of a better word, fun. As I played around with ebuilds and the days passed, I ended up starting the #AcuallyOS channel on Rizon, and after about a week of collating interesting ideas and debating we finally had the original OP join us. I was just about ready to hand over the reins, when
(01:30:07 PM) davis_: bob, uhh i am the original, op, but you know more than me about this so i will help where i can but i underestimated the project
Now at the time I wasn’t phased, I thought I was handling everything pretty well and we in the chan were doing a great job. But as the project grew on, it became more and more apparent how much the project was restricted by a gross lack of expertise. I suppose the people who knew what they were doing also knew how poorly defined our goal was. Shit started to hit the fan about two hours before the official alpha dev preview release deadline, when I booted the built system to discover a huge library linking problem preventing KDE from starting in Wayland. Even though before then all our skilled people were busy working on little but distractions, it was only then when I started to think we’re in over our heads. From there, the direction we headed got more and more crazy from a technical standpoint which stood only to further emphasise our (or rather my) lack of skills. Which I’ve just realised is a neat segue into a third issue which I hadn’t yet considered:
Overcomplication
I am very prone to distraction by shiny things. Planning, or any forethought whatsoever, really isn’t my strongsuit. This is precisely the reason why we have our own IRC bot and not a functioning dev preview ISO. Instead of carefully planning things out, keeping it simple, I ended up attempting to write a bash script to convert ebuilds to different build formats and extending JiyuuBot (!) to serve as a build host. This is an issue born as a direct result of the previous two, and there’s no easy solution besides sitting down and doing that thing everyone hates – planning.
This is a short summary of the retardation that occurred over a fun 6 months. Jiyuu Linux, the educational tool for the masses, might be dying a slow and painful death; but I’d hate to rule out any cool stuff being done under the Jiyuu name. Many of us still lurk around in #Jiyuu on rizon.net, people who are pretty skilled and have some great ideas (people who would have done a better job coordinating this than I). Anyone who might ever read this is expressly invited to come circlejerk with us, maybe you could get us involved in another stupidly ambitious project!