Many users’ posts are a burden. I say that as a matter of fact - not with any specific animosity. This is a complex project with many pieces - the vast majority of which are developed elsewhere: kvm, xen, qubes, vbox, debian, kde, all the application software, all the system daemons, etc, etc. It’s perfectly fine that new users don’t always know the best place to go to for support, or what is appropriately whonix-specific. And new users often have good ideas (especially regarding usability), so the goal is not to discourage posting.
However, there are things that users can do to lessen the burden.
- First, look at the effort in this thread: Long Wiki Edits Thread - #659 by torjunkie . The accumulated time and energy that has gone into the wiki and forum posts is wasted when posters don’t search even Whonix resources.
- Second, a basic web search can answer many questions, and if not, can make the poster more educated about what exactly they need help with.
- Finally, I don’t post random links. The links I share are directly relevant (and if not, marked as such). I don’t post any links that I haven’t read myself (or written in some cases). My absolute pet peeve is when I take the time to find the appropriate links, and the poster comes back 5 minutes later, having ignored the links, to ask the same original question. That’s a burden.
Ideas to improve Whonix are always welcome - as long as people are mindful of the fact that this is an open-source, volunteer project and not one to which they are entitled to dictate. In many cases (like I2P Integration - #102 by goldstein-otg) when ideas can not be acted upon in a timely manner, suggestions are given to the original poster on how they can get involved personally - by contacting upstream projects, researching ideas further, or testing different scenarios.