whole bunch of questions!

[Tony Baechler]

I'm not going to argue the point with you, but look at what happened to
Oralux.  It's long dead with no more support.  I believe there are only a
few active developers working on Vinux.  If one of them loses interest and
moves on, that's about 1/3 or 1/4 of the development team.  Even if they
don't lose interest, what if they have a long-term illness?  Life happens,
like it or not.  Debian has about 1,000 developers, so if one quits, there
are still 999 left.  There are literally thousands of messages on the
debian-user list every month and tens of thousands of questions in the
Ubuntu forums.  I really doubt if Vinux has that much traffic.  The fact is
that most sighted people don't know anything about the blind, don't want to
know and don't have the interest to support the blind even if they took the
time and effort.  There are other issues as well, such as a note on the
Vinux site to not install any Ubuntu updates because they might break the
speech support.  Besides the obvious issue of not gettine newer packages
with possibly better accessibility, your system is left wide open to
security exploits.  That was Vinux 3.X, so hopefully 4.X fixes that.  If you
run Debian stable and choose to upgrade your packages, you won't have system
breakage.  If you run testing and upgrade Gnome, you could lose speech, but
that's your choice and the price you pay for running testing.  Otherwise,
you're at the mercy of the Vinux developers to come out with a new version.

On 2014-07-10 08:39 PM, Christopher Chaltain wrote:
> I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I'm not sure what you mean by
> 
>> The other problem with a specialized
>> Linux is the lack of support.  There are tens of thousands of Debian and
>> Ubuntu users while there are only a few dedicated Vinux users and developers.
> 
> It's true there are fewer people using and developing Vinux, but all of the
> support you get from Ubuntu also applies to Vinux. I find the answers to
> many more questions on my system running Vinux from the Ubuntu forums than I
> do the Vinux mailing list, wiki or IRC channel.
> 
> Vinux developers are just making a lot of the changes you'd be making
> yourself on your own Ubuntu install, so in addition to being able to
> leverage all of the support out there for Ubuntu, you also get support for
> the changes you want to make to make your own system more accessible anyway.
> 
> I'm not trying to talk up Vinux at the expense of Ubuntu or Debian. Going to
> Linux is all about choice. I just don't want people to get the impression
> that if they choose Vinux they'll be on their own.
> 
> Note that this also applies to other distributions customized for the blind,
> such as Sonar, although Sonar is moving to a Arch based distribution instead
> of Ubuntu.
>