What can I do to help?

xahodo

I'm noticing that the Solus team is having a hard time keeping up. The website hasn't received any love in about a year, isos are old, updates contain fewer and fewer packages as time progresses, and sometimes updates are skipped altogether. 🙁

So, I was wondering. I'm not a software engineer, but perhaps I could help out with translating documentation to Dutch, or work on documentation to work with flatpak or snap for users (I use both)?

I thought about this because for both snap and flatpak you need to go to the CLI and enter commands, none of which are (as far as I'm aware) documented on the Solus website. A guide on how to work with these programs would be really helpful to new, insecure users of Linux. I'm willing to write it. If I can give some love to the other pieces of documentation, I'm entirely willing to do so as well (provided, of course, I'm familiar with them).

I'm already pointing people in the direction of Solus at r/findmeadistro, when I think Solus would be a candidate for them. So I'm doing some advocacy already, because, to be frank this is a rock-solid distribution with some great performance benefits.

Staudey

xahodo updates contain fewer and fewer packages as time progresses, and sometimes updates are skipped altogether.

Just a note here that there will ALWAYS be periods when the weekly sync is skipped to get some additional testing in the unstable repository in before updates are unleashed on everyone. That's just basic quality control and has nothing to do with lacking manpower or activity. I'm also not sure the point about fewer and fewer package updates holds true. At least in the first half of the year we had one of our biggest update syncs ever. During summer of course many people are on vacation and Solus contributors are no exception, so updates will be fewer.

The other points of your post seems mostly reasonable though.
Package maintainers are of course always welcome, as it simply takes a lot of work to keep everything in the repository up to date and working without issues. When it comes to documentation there was a plan to switch to a different infrastructure and page architecture for the Help Center but that process has stalled somewhat.

The ISOs and blog updates are of course things that we have to figure out soon.

infinitymdm

I feel very similar to you - I would love to provide help in any way I can, but I don't know how I can best contribute. Many tasks listed on the dev tracker don't necessarily pertain to how I use Solus, so I don't feel qualified to take them up. Other tasks are more involved in the OS infrastructure than I'm prepared to work on (so far, anyways... learning more all the time!).

I've just been trying to get more involved over the past few months. I've picked up maintainership for a few pieces of software that I actively use, and I try to be helpful here on the forums and on the subreddit whenever I can. I figure that the best way I can contribute to Solus right now is by making the community a friendly place to be and helping others solve problems.

I would definitely love to see some updates to the website - seems like things have been pretty slow over there. You can submit your suggestions for tweaks to the help center documents by creating pull requests here: https://github.com/getsolus/help-center-docs

mbevks

Would money help? Is there a way for us to donate to generate more contributions to Solus?

infinitymdm

mbevks they do have an open collective page here: https://opencollective.com/getsolus

I think some of the contribution tiers are a bit out of date, but donations do put the crew closer to the goal of hiring full time developers.

tomscharbach

mbevks Would money help? Is there a way for us to donate to generate more contributions to Solus?

Money would make a real difference. We are meeting our expenses, and then some, but if we can build a sufficient contribution base, we could pay developers, part time or full time, permanent or temporary contract.