Being a reader of the DistroWatch weekly column, I noticed many comments and opinions about Gnome 3, showing a generalized interest about it, along this week

Once the Paldo Gnome 3 release was not announced in DW, and because there are not yet many Distros with a Gnome 3 stable version, I tried to send a comment, on Monday, telling about its release, in the hope it would be interesting for the readers there to know it. For some reason the comment was not published and I decided to email Distrowatch to let them know about the Paldo Gnome3 and ask if they could make a reference to it or let me comment about it in the comments section.

I was not successful, as it can be seen bellow, from the emails we exchanged.

Unfortunately it seems that a small Linux distribution does not deserve much attention, at Distrowatch.

I hope the reason for that isn't about the amount of traffic that a Distro may bring to the DW site, instead of the quality that it may or may not have.

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Since May last year, Paldo has become a rolling release. They used to announce new releases every three months, but due to that change, no news were disclosed, except on the past 20th this month, as due to the adoption of the Gnome 3, a small note was displayed at their news site section.

As this may not be easy for you to catch, I thought it could be a good idea to address the release in the comments section in the DWW.
Unfortunately, I've not been able to enter it in there, so I decided to come by this way to let you now.

The link to the news (a very short note) is this:
http://www.paldo.org/



News
GNOME 3, Linux 2.6.38, and systemd in stable20 Apr 2011
We are pleased to announce that GNOME 3.0.0, Linux 2.6.38.3, and systemd v24 are now available in paldo stable.
glibc 2.13, gcc 4.6.0, and Python 2.7.1 are available in paldo unstable.
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> As this may not be easy for you to catch, I thought it could be a good idea
> to address the release in the comments section in the DWW.

Please don't do this! Imagine if everybody keeps posting every little
news about their favourite distro - what would the comments section
look like? If you find an interesting piece of news please email me
and I might mention it in the next DWW.

Unfortunately, Paldo's announcements are always so ridiculously short,
there isn't much to quote. But if you write up a little paragraph
about it, expanding a bit on the news, I'll be happy to publish it
next Monday.
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"Imagine if everybody keeps posting every little
news about their favourite distro - what would the comments section
look like?"


Due to its novelty, a distro release based on Gnome 3 is great news to the innumerable distro hoppers who follow DW looking for new releases, for the Gnome appreciators, no matter what their favourite distro is, and also for the Linux users in general, as many may also be interested to explore and see how Gnome 3 is being dealt by the various distros.

There's a very limited number of Gnome 3 stable releases issued so far, and I'm of the opinion that the news about the Paldo release, no matter if in the comments section or anywhere else, would be well appreciated by many.

I'm disappointed to notice that your opinion is different and that you don't even care to make that announcement by your own.
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> I'm disappointed to notice that your opinion is different and that you don't
> even care to make that announcement by your own.

Since you feel so energetic, there is an easy solution to the problem:
email paldo and offer to write "proper" release announcements or
release notes, then set up an RSS feed (or an announce mailing list)
for the project. This will be far far more effective than posting
little messages on DWW.
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Everybody is discussing in this week's DWW comments the impressions about the very few Distros who are known to have released a stable version of the Gnome 3. Paldo is a very small Distro community that is in the DW data base and did also release a stable version of it.

It may or may not be a very good Gnome 3 implementation, but the majority of the common DW readers will not have the chance to evaluate it in the next few days. You are the DW owner, you did not like the way how Paldo announced it and you made the decision to boycott any reference to the Paldo Gnome 3 release announcement in this week's DWW comments section.

Under your vision it's a problem that can be solved with an energetic but easy solution. As you explained how that's done, I'll address the emails we exchanged to the Paldo developers to let them know that at this moment any reference to the announcement of Paldo Gnome 3 is disallowed in DW and what's the way how to solve it.
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Hi, zerobug. Distrowatch has fairly tight rein over their editorial content and comments section and generally expects a distro's developers to submit or sanction announcements and updates.

To be fair, paldo has had little in the way of published news to provide for a year or so. At least the offer was made by Distrowatch to consider publishing something newsworthy if written. Updating the main description of paldo in DW would be a good idea as well. That would likely have to come from juerg.

cheers

They could have used the "Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases" section, but they didn't. Not last week nor the current one.

Competition is always good. Would DW have a decent competitor, and I think there's already plenty of room for that, and we wouldn't see this kind of arrogant and prepotent behave (or whims, I don't know).

It's true that nor Paldo's site is updated neither the Gnome 3 release announcement was made with the primary purpose to appear in DW front page.

That doesn't mean Paldo Gnome 3 isn't good, and good distros is what Linux users are interested and the reason why I made the effort to let them know about it.

zerobug, sorry that you were disapointed about the way the new policy of paldo is view by DW. But it's not the only site that can publish news about linux. We can do the same on our own blogs or on other. I did it on mine: www.betanux.blogspot.com
And as redactor of a french community site dedicated to linux, i mention on the forum and the tribune the news and my opinions:
- http://www.quebecos.com/modules/news2/article.php?storyid=363
- http://forums.quebecos.com/showthread.php?tid=6152
I will translate the info on my french blog to the english one i have in wordpress. We can personnaly make know paldo by that kinds of actions, even DW can do nothing about that. On the other hand juerg can send just notes that Jesse Smith/ Ladislav can mention on weekly issues.

Zitat

Original erstellt: 2011-05-27 01:12 von alphad zerobug, sorry that you were disapointed about the way the new policy of paldo is view by DW. But it's not the only site that can publish news about linux. We can do the same on our own blogs or on other. I did it on mine: www.betanux.blogspot.com And as redactor of a french community site dedicated to linux, i mention on the forum and the tribune the news and my opinions: - http://www.quebecos.com/modules/news2/article.php?storyid=363 - http://forums.quebecos.com/showthread.php?tid=6152 I will translate the info on my french blog to the english one i have in wordpress. We can personnaly make know paldo by that kinds of actions, even DW can do nothing about that. On the other hand juerg can send just notes that Jesse Smith/ Ladislav can mention on weekly issues.

Paldo is a great distro.
I discovered it 2 years ago, after joining Linux and while distro hopping to find the best o/s to my needs. At that time Paldo was by far the best distro I had ever tried.
Juerg is involved in other very important projects at Gnome, and I guess he had to make a decision about which he would give prime priority. That's fair and acceptable. Paldo was not his first choice, anyway, its not also completely abandoned. For shabby Linux users, Paldo is still fully usable. I'm not using it as much as I did in the past, because I didn't learn yet to build packages from source.
Gnome3 increases usability to Linux, and that's good for Paldo. Anyway, a first time visitor to the site, will notice things needing a good update. Maybe, sometime Juerg will do that, maybe someone else will.
I'll keep Paldo as one of my o/s installs and will keep an eye on its future development.

Its true that I was disappointed about the out come of that kind of arm-wrestling with Distrowatch, but I'm also very happy to know that I'm not alone about thinking that Paldo as a distro that deserves to be publicly known. So, thanks for your kind words and good will about spreading the world.