The Glitz and Glamour of maintaining an OS

[Valtam]

You gotta have thick skin folks.
(abuse deliberately left in to give you a feel for some of the kind of emails I get)

Still want to develop and maintain your own OS?





This one's a bit different. You also can expect to get emails telling you to do things you've already done



On average you can expect between 2 - 6 abusive emails like this per month.

[MS]

Negativity is not an uncommon trait to encounter, a lot of people only wait to vent their accumulated frustrations upon the others. If one makes oneself open and actually contributes anything of practical worth, it is statistically expected to receive situationally adequate feedback from those aiming to elevate their self esteem relatively through an attempt of putting down those of comparison.

[Artim]

Probably just about every product ever made gets fan mail and hate mail; and in just about every product, hate mail outnumbers fan mail.  When it's bad, people don't hesitate to say so.  When it's good - even awesome - people just don't say so as much.  Which tells more about us than it tells about the products we use.

When hate mail on the forums gets stupid, I always like to tell the complainer,

You are entitled to a full refund of the purchase price for downloading and using this free operating system.  So you want your money back, dude?  Or do you prefer just to whine about something you paid nothing for? 

[m654321]

On average you can expect between 2 - 6 abusive emails like this per month.

As extremely unpleasant as I know this trickle of abuse surely is, you have to weigh it against the torrent of positives that you've received to date, to put that into perspective.

The type of people (a tiny minority) who make these inane comments are probably not happy individuals by nature, and in all likelihood go about their daily lives compulsively complaining or criticising everyone & everything offline, as well as online, that they meet ...

[MS]

The type of people (a tiny minority) who make these inane comments are probably not happy individuals by nature, and in all likelihood go about their daily lives compulsively complaining or criticising everyone & everything offline as well as online ...

It does make sense to generalize this way, but on the other hand, the Internet - with fair anonymity it allows at times - may seduce some people to present their other face, so to say, which would otherwise not be displayed if these people were to be socially bound to it for evaluation.

But that is true one must be able to properly weight the impact of both the constructive, as well as the hateful influence one gets, while it is common to overfocus typically on the burden of negativity received.

[Moltke]

I don't understand why would anybody do this, I mean, what are they winning from this? [member=2]Jerry[/member] sure - I think - doesn't answer to these people, in fact,  he probably doesn't even give too much thought to them, what for? He's doing great maintaining LL so why bother with some morons who don't have a clue? 
These are people whose life is a mess, so they don't have anything better to do than to take it into others. I've never ever emailed anyone even if I think I'm right. If I feel that their product is worthless or doesn't fit my expectations/needs I simply move on and keep looking for the one that does.

[elelme]

Thanks for sharing this, Jerry. I never knew that maintaining an OS would include this kind of abuse.
An eye-opener.  Hope I never took such a tone, even inadvertantly. Live long and prosper!

[Valtam]

It doesn't affect me these days. In the beginning it was a shock, but you have to train your mind to perceive it in a certain way. Now, I just laugh at these emails

[MS]

Speaking of DistroWatch, having given their rankings a brief glance, I do not think it is the greatest point of reference for picking up an OS to use. Not because I am using Linux Lite and think everyone should do the same. Infact, I encourage people to do the exploration on their own behalf. Perhaps then we could confront our observations eventually, if to maintain constructive thinking. But some of the options pointed by DistroWatch as the most popular, do not really seem to myself as being generated by spontaneous popularity among the casual audience. Unless there is no 'casual audience' in Linux.

[TheDead]

The users Jerry quoted seem to have real problems.
For their troubles, they should get back 200% what they paid for their free Linux Lite... oh wait!

Editremoved useless bablabla)