Yes, people were really accessible when the community was small. I remember calling, by phone, some (also German) guy about a printer problem - my Samsung printer's Epson emulation apparently wasn't good enough for my distro's Epson driver. It must have been in '98 or '99. He was either the printer guy at S.u.S.E. (name at the time) or maintaining a relevant driver. We chatted for about an hour and I remember being impressed by how willing to engage he was and by his collection of workstation-class computers. But my printer problem remained unsolved :D
As a burnt out contributor, my first couple chats debugging for users were beautiful. But then they just kept coming and coming in droves upon droves and I had to set up a wall to let me focus on the work, which soured my relationship with users, which became an ever-increasing stress...
Bless those contributors who were able to keep it up. They're the ones who should have Big Tech salaries, not those of us who gave up and sold our souls to Ad tech.
