More popular projects with many users tend to have developers that don’t welcome new contributions. The investment required for a new developer to make an initial contribution is huge. Things like setting up the development environment and the stack of technologies and understanding the basic architecture are significant barriers to entry. Existing developers tend to not care about reducing that burden. After all, everyone who’s *actually *contributing to the project is already over that barrier, right?

I've tried to set up the Jellyfin server project locally several times, but couldn't get dependency resolution working on my machine. I assume this is because I use Linux Mint rather than Windows, but I wasted multiple entire weekends trying to get it working to no avail. I'm a senior dev with professional experience in Java, Javascript, Python and Scala, so it's not like I've never done this sort of thing before. This particular setup just happened to turn into a nightmare.

[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This particular setup just happened to turn into a nightmare.

There are certain software setups in linux that are trials by fire. For me it was samba (which happily I don't even use any more) and [insert any mail server here]. Thankfully, once I finally got exim setup and working right, it's worked right for 10+ years.