Record Low Turnout in Debian Leadership Election

daria42 writes "A record low voter turnout - highlighted by the fact that two-thirds of the candidates have not yet cast their ballot - is marring the Debian Project's ongoing elections for the Debian Project Leader position. Project secretary Manoj Srivastava said yesterday: "At the time of writing, half an hour into the second week of the vote, we have the lowest participation ever in a Debian project leader election seen so far"."

Comments

Linux changing in nature

[Grip3n]

I believe there is a trend setting in here with the linux market, and it can be viewed as either something positive or negative, depending on your perspective. To me it is the answer why Debian isn't necessarily as popular as it once was.

Linux has been maturing steadily over the years, and it is beginning to take the shape of something viable for a casual user. It certainly isn't there yet, but there have been notable strides. As linux continues forth, it will only get closer and closer to being a very intuitive system.

That being said, I compare Linux to the likes of computer graphics. There was a stage where it just wasn't "there yet", and graphics clearly looked pasted on. This was fine because our mind said "hey, that's a graphic!", and we could easily tell what it was. Today, for the most part, we can only tell if something is a graphic because we know what is possible and what is not possible. Nothing is exceptionally glarring. Take a look at LotR, the graphics were incredibly seamless and only someone looking at them from a "possible" standpoint could truely make out the difference.

However, there was a stage in between these two levels, I liken to the example of the Final Fantasy movie, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. The graphics were good, but not perfect. Our minds went from "Hey, its a graphic!" to "I guess that's kinda real", and we got confused. It winds up being confusing and awkward for us to watch, because we cannot get out minds to sort out what the heck we are seeing.

Linux is on that stage right now. It was previously something for the elite, it was difficult to use, it was extremely console based and you had to manually enter everything. I recall for the longest time needing to enter in my monitors horizontal and vertical refresh rates, plus then manually specify what resolutions my monitor could do, additionally state the size of my video card's ram. It was as elitest as operating systems really got, and we understood that.

Today, we find ourselves in the middle. Its not quite as plug and play as Windows or Macintosh, but its got some. Our minds are left thinking "Is this mainsteam or not?", and we don't know where to settle. Fedora installs the video drivers well for me the first time, but it was a nightmare getting Limewire to work.

So how does this relate? Well, because Linux isn't exclusively seen as an elitest operating system as much anymore and transitioning into something a little on the brain to use, we're seeing the depature of people from "Middle of the Road" distributions. Gentoo has its niche for the hardcore, but most distributions will attempt to make life as easy as possible for the user, a la Fedora or SUSE. They are trying to remove that middle ground and place themselves firmly into the "easy to use" category, while still retaining the power and flexibility Linux inherantly offers.

Those that did use Debian and the sort are moving on, they don't see the need for the elitest economy as much anymore, as Linux itself isn't as unique and hardcore as it once needed to be. We begin to see users use Linux not just to experiement on, but to actually use in a working environment, something to be taken a little more seriously.

In the end, the flourishment of distributions will begin to phase out, and personally I believe its for the better. We will be left with a handful, but those handful will have the attention of a much larger user and developer base, rather than having them spread thinly out. In the end, I believe this is a good thing. It looks like Debian may perhaps be one of the first examples.

speaking as a debian developer

[Xtifr]

I had not yet voted when this announcement went out. (I have now, however.) The main reason I took so long to get my vote in is that the number of candidates (and the number of new candidates, since the incumbent isn't running) is higher than it has been in recent years, and I needed extra time to figure out who they all were, and how I thought they should be ranked. The last few elections, I had a fairly good idea of how I was going to vote before I even started looking at the candidates in detail. This year, it was a really tough choice, and I had to spend a lot more time on it. So, I wouldn't read too much into the low turnout at this point.

Re:geeze

[aqua]

I'm a Debian developer, and I haven't voted -- yet. I'll cast my DPL vote towards the end of the cycle, as usual. Here's why:

• At the start of the cycle, I hadn't made up my mind. That's generally the case, except in one or two General Resolution votes where I already understood the issue under consideration (e.g. the non-free vote.)
• I haven't finished reading the candidate platforms and debate material yet. When voting opens, the project leader debates are just freshly over. This year, since once again I couldn't attend them live, I have to read them afterward, which takes time. Last year the debate was cancelled, because an email debate had already occurred on debian-vote -- same situation. Voting in Debian is just like voting anywhere else, you often have to do a lot of reading to understand the issues. Debian developers are shy about this right now, because the Social Contract clarification vote a ways back opened a huge unforseen can of worms concerning the freeness of documentation, and derailed Sarge again, until a second vote was undertaken to put the issue off until post-Sarge.
• With Sarge at a release tipping point (RC3 on the installer, and the Vancouver proposal still kicking around), I delay voting so I can see how those issues play out and adjust my planned vote.
• My local Debian meetup is unpredictable, and there might be one, where some longtime DDs show up and can enlighten me on the machinations going on in the Debian functional committees. You know, all those smoke-filled rooms in which the ftpmasters and application managers and buildd administrators meet to shoot heroin and plot how they're going to sabotage the next planned release date and sell the sparc porters into slavery or whatever.
• I am a lazy procrastinating bastard.

Re:Slashdot confirms...

[MemoryDragon]

Actually you could be right. The recent delays in the release of the next stable, are extremely problematic. I am a former debian user who now moved to Ubuntu (probably like many others) The problem really was/is for me the release cycles. Testing sort of is okish, but still running X11, unstable broke too often. And stable, forget it, hell freezes over before they release the next stable. Probably many users of Debian moved to Ubuntu and other apt based distros. If Debian could go for a better release cycle mechanism they could get the uses back. But Debian really is stagnating currently. 10 years after the first installer, they finally have one, still one of the few distros running on XFree 4.3 (and they will be for the forseeable future) KDE and gnome even if they pump out now the next stable already again a year behind the latest releases etc....