On our sister blog Ubuntulog, my colleague Pablinux raises a very interesting question. The possible danger of using small projects. Your article is based on two specific examples. The first is glimpse, a fork of El Gimp whose only visible objective was to change its name, although later, perhaps out of fear of ridicule, they proposed to add other functionalities to it. The second is an unofficial version of Ubuntu with the Deepin desktop that never released the 21.10 edition
I am going to quote Pablinux's opinion verbatim to substantiate mine, but I invite you to read the article anyway.
At no point do I mean to not support the independent developer or small teams. This article is not an attack on them; he just wants us to play it safe or have an ace up our sleeve. For example, we can use Mousai to find out what song is playing, and if it doesn't work, use SongRec which is an unofficial Shazam client. Although the problem is obvious: we could be left without knowing what was playing, so it may be worth using the second first.
Why size doesn't matter
My first observation is that the variable to take into account is not the size. LWhat must be considered to evaluate the viability of a project are the objectives and the commitment of the developers.
Let's see some examples
Apache OpenOffice
As a blogger I continued to cover OpenOffice releases long after much of its community split up to create LibreOffice first and The Document Foundation later. OpenOffice cannot be described as a small project since it has the Apache Foundation behind and the Foundation took over at the request of IBM. Last year I stopped doing it when I realized that the release notes were not only not enough to cover the minimum of three hundred and fifty words required Linux Adictos. They didn't even give me two hundred and forty characters of a tweet.
Surely some of you will be tempted to remind me that, since LibreOffice exists, it is very difficult to find where to innovate. However, OnlyOffice, WPS Office, Calligra Office, Abiword and Gnumeric continue to develop and incorporate interesting new features.
Now let's look at the opposite example.
linuxmint
I tried LinuxMint when it first came out. I remember complaining in a forum that it was just Ubuntu with another wallpaper. It was with Canonical's decision to move from GNOME to Unity and GNOME to discontinue branch 2 and move to infumable branch 3 that it found its place in the world. He developed his own desktop environment (Cinnamon) and created applications to extend functionalities.
There is no doubt that LinuxMint is a small project. In fact, its leader Clement Lefebvre has complained in the past of being tired from the work it takes to bring each new version of the distribution forward.
Of course, it is not easy to carry out a free software project. Especially when you don't make a living from it. In my case I said goodbye to my personal blog for 15 days to transfer it from WordPress to Jekyll. That was in January. I was only able to partially resume it in November. Work, a mother with dementia, the Argentine economic crisis, an old broken computer and a new computer to which the shipowner insisted on putting a less than adequate power source, conspired against me (or in favor of the readers) AND, a blog is much less complicated than the simplest of free software projects.
That leads us to compromise. A project may not update very often, but developers continue to show interest correcting bugs, answering queries or announcing ideas.
My second disagreement with the Pablinux article has to do with the fact that the danger of discontinuity of services does not happen only with small projects. Those who developed paid applications for the Software Center that Ubuntu created for Unity or those who bought a phone with Ubuntu Phone can attest to that. Not to mention the amount of sservices discontinued by Google.