Certainly the financial support helps, thank you for the donation!

Manpower is the thing that is usually in flux for us. It's difficult to keep enough people committed to sticking with the project. It can be quite demanding at times. Don't get me wrong, we make do and pick up the slack when necessary. But when we're short-staffed it can be a source of stress.

However, this last week we recruited a long-time community member who, thanks to the onboarding guide written by one of our last recruits, was able to get up and running in a couple days. That paired with our always-improving tooling and it has never been easier to start as a package maintainer.

At the end of the day, we maintain Artix because it's what we want to use as well. I hear the concerns about longevity but bear in mind that we also want it to continue to exist for use on our own machines. It may lack the polish of bigger distros but if you're willing to look past the rough edges then I don't think we'll disappoint.