asbaklm
commented
6 years ago That was certainly an interesting post with a positive conclusion. It must be a huge relief knowing that all that time and hard work was not for nothing, and that people and companies were benefiting, even if this wasn't always apparent at the time when the project started stalling.
Any project such as this relies on motivation, on positive user feedback and on a sense of accomplishment which makes it all worth the hard time spent. The coding and engineering side is just one (although obviously the most important) part to the whole thing.
Where it becomes a struggle is to marry all the disciplines, namely the combination of coding, marketing and promotion, dealing with endless support issues and very significantly, the business side to negotiate for and attract investment.
As your post has shown, there is commercial & vendor interest out there. The trick is attracting more business from such players and in selling and convincing them to sign on and to maintain those relationships. Business negotiations and marketing are obviously very different skills & disciplines to coding but they are quite essential. Insufficient attention to those things (the commercial side) will hamper progress.
It's a drag to have to do, particularly with all the other work that needs doing, but in order to attract business it's essential to keep reaching out to vendors to attract more work and to start building up relationships. And it needs to be done in such a way that the vendors aren't feeling that they are being spammed or annoyed. In simple terms, these companies need to be sold on an idea, on a vision. It needs to be clearly explained to them why and how they will benefit and how they can build sales momentum in new markets. The need convincing, and in order to convince them, a good business case backed up by evidence and success stories is required.
I think it would be useful if a little Linux distro (derived from a mainstream Linux) were developed (not by you, you have no time obviously) by the community which included the more popular common graphics, photo-editing & CAD packages and to have the latest drivers baked in. This could be pitched as another incentive to the manufacturers because such a distro can easily be installed on a PC type device and will work out of the box with tablets and graphics software. It may also be of use to reach out to the community at Libregraphicsworld http://libregraphicsworld.org/ to see what kind of mutually beneficial actions can be undertaken.
One of the biggest challenges facing Linux adoption by end-users is the level of difficulty in getting the hardware & software set up and running. When you buy a Mac, or to a lesser degree, a Windows PC, most of that work has already been done for the end user. Installing software and drivers is usually fairly trivial and they can be up and working without too much drama.
The ultimate end goal with projects such as DIGImend ought to be to strive towards a similar user experience. If it is too complex and difficult, it will only keep attracting people with Linux skills and that's a very limited market. A derived distro based on a popular mainstream Linux containing tablet drivers & software and with a clearly documented hardware compatibility matrix (supported tablets) will make it trivial for non-technical end-users to be up and running quickly. That in turn will encourage adoption by more end-users and translate into increased community uptake and sales.
Pitching such a distro at art schools, colleges etc and getting folks interested will also go a long way toward encouraging uptake. I realise that this seems a bit far removed from the actual tablet drivers but ultimately these things are all inter-related and inter-dependent.
spbnick
doctormo
Alex-Esko
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