Hello Sparky Linux community!
I recently discovered Sparky Linux and am planning on switching to it from Linux Mint soon. It is a real gem of a distro and it is great that it is closer to mainline Debian than Mint is while in many ways actually being easier and more customizable, etc.
However, I'd even previously seen Sparky Linux before but had
almost immediately dismissed it all because of some
trivially easily fixable problems with the formatting of one of its pages that created a terrible first impression. The problem is potentially unwittingly losing you lots prospective users based on something that'd actually be very easy to fix!
I tried to post on that page (the Sparky Linux "About" page) a comment about this issue so that the Sparky Linux maintainers could fix it and hence further improve the distro's reputation, but it looks like the post probably got falsely marked as spam and probably was never seen.
So, here is a copy of that intended message for the Sparky admins/devs/maintainers:
QuoteSparky Linux is a great distro for people who want a distro descended directly from Debian, but which is just as easy (or even easier I'd say!) to set up and customize as Ubuntu or Linux Mint.
This is a real gem of a distro and I am glad I stumbled upon it and realized its value. You should be proud of the work you have done on it! The extra scripts you add in your "app center" add a lot of value, especially for setting up desktop environments and window managers that are less commonly used than the big three overused ones (Gnome, KDE, and Xfce). I especially love Trinity Desktop Environment, FVWM, IceWM, and Window Maker and recommend other users try those.
Technically, I've encountered Sparky Linux before a long while back, but dismissed it almost immediately as probably terrible because of the fact that this page here (the main Sparky Linux "about" page) contains unformatted asterisks and minus signs instead of proper bullet points (which, by the way, can be implemented in either Unicode or via HTML ordered/unordered list item code tags).
That extremely sloppy/careless formatting (or lack thereof) had previously made me assume that if you aren't putting enough effort into your about page to even format your bullet points correctly then the same level of disregard for details was likely happening throughout your entire distro. I very strongly recommend that you FIX THAT FORMATTING as it is potentially actually losing you a significant proportion of prospective users due to the (falsely) very bad impression it creates.
However, luckily I recently tried your distro and found that it is actually by far one of the best Debian derivatives, especially for anyone (like me) who is trying to get away from the "monkey patches upon monkey patches" dependency chain that Linux Mint has as a consequence of being derived first from Debian and then also from Ubuntu which causes many subtle problems and breakages and constant churn in Linux Mint.
I plan on switching to Sparky soon from Mint.
Thanks again for creating such a wonderful and thoughtfully designed distro!
As you can see, literally all that would have been required for me to start using Sparky Linux way earlier would have been for the bullet points on the "About" page to actually be formatted as real bullet points.
Yet, in the past that trivial problem convinced me to not bother even trying the distro since it seemed like a very clear sign of extreme laziness, thus resulting in a false assumption.
There are so many distros that people often make quick judgements based on first impressions like that, as a quality filtering mechanism.
I think it'd be really beneficial to fix it!
Anyway though, thanks for reading and have a great day/night/week/etc!