community - Alan's Lair

Unfreezing your desktop: when Compiz goes wrong

A desktop freeze is something that's not so rare nowadays - that's not good, but we shouldn't get desperate about that. I like Compiz with Unity Desktop on my Ubuntu Trusty very much; I feel it's a step forward compared to traditional desktops. The only major nuisance I had on

Ollivander

Building a successful community-driven software project: part 4

This is a multipart post. See part 3Just a brief conclusion to my post sequence; the three principles for succeeding at community-driven projects are:Make it easy for the people to give you their feedback - it's highly valuable.Listen and reply to people's feedback. Don't do every-possible-requested-thing, but reply

Ollivander

Building a successful community-driven software project: part 3

This is a multipart post. See part 26. State your missionWhat's your project for? Who should use it? Which platform is designed for? Answer those questions somewhere in your project page. You won't risk people looking for the wrong solution coming to you and asking strange things, and you'll

Ollivander

Building a successful community-driven software project: part 2

This is a multipart article - link to part 13. Make it easy to report issues.Yes, your software is got a bug. Never thought about it, didn't you? And here it is. Now, users shouldn't be forced to climb mountains in order to report it. You might not want

Ollivander

Building a successful community-driven software project: part 1

There's a lot of buzz about open source software lately. Many projects are supposed to embrace the Bazaar development model, but they really don't, and their leaders just seem to ignore users a lot. This often leads both to wild forking - one new feature, one new fork that's never