Running a project for 8 years

On the 14th of june, Distrochooser turned 8 years old. EIGHT years. When I started the project, I was still an apprentice, now I have an bachelor degree. Never thought a project to keep going that long.

Completely unordered, random facts

• Distrochooser.de was featured in a tagesschau.de online article (unfortunately not accessibly anymore)
• The current version served 200834 results for 329483 visitors
• Overall, the project served 1357765 results
• The service is now available in 15 languages
• 24 contributors (big thanks!)
• The project was moved three times between several server providers
• Revenue: Not a single cent.

Lessions... (and even more random facts)

Document your stuff.

Distrochooser was for the majority of time more or less a prototype and to be honest, I never thought that anyone except me would ever do modifications on it's source. But within these 8 years, quite a bunch of people did changes, so this is a point which I learned and identified as to be improved in my projects.

Maintaining a project takes a lot of time.

Maintaining a project as a "side" project takes quite an significant amount of time. If you don't have this time, it get's messy.

At this point, I need to apologize to people reached me out on several channels which I never managed to respond in time.

Sorry for that. Besides working full time and studying free time it was quite a narrow timeframe to use for Distrochooser and other projects. And often, there was absolutely no time for it.

Not everyone likes your project.

For quite some time, I felt bad for people seeming to dislike or even "hate" the project for some reasons.

Another hard lession was that there will always be people who will criticize the project, but some will argument in a quite destructive way.

Personally I decided not to do the deep dive into comment sections when I got notified that my service linked in news pages or forums. It feels more "healthy" to skip that.

I am always open to direct feedback, but try not to dig out threads from forums anymore.

That dude from spain (?)

The personal feedback "highlight" was some man from spain telling me (in spanish) that he hates the site. Literally just one sentence. Nothing else. I must admit, this was more funny than anything else.

Blogs and pages

I really like that distrochooser has become a "starting place" for some users to Linux or even being used in an educational context. I am really proud of this.

And now?

I will continue working on it. Obviously, in this worrysome times there are more important topics than choosing a Linux distribution.

But for me, Distrochooser was always more than just a project. At least twice it helped me to secure a job opportunity and I think it's worth to continue. And additionally, I still have a version 6 to develop and publish :)

And also, I really want to see this project celebrating it's first decade of being in service.

Photo by Maximalfocus on Unsplash

Photo by Mark Duffel on Unsplash