I use Linux, macOS, and Windows on a regular basis. I use mostly default settings, only a couple changes. Over time my settings move closer and closer to defaults. I tell people to upgrade their OS (with a couple exceptions). I was on-board with GNOME 3 when it came out (I was an Arch user at the time, but I’m in remission now).
The GTK file chooser dialog is easily the most garbage piece of fucking shit. Honestly, sometimes, if I want to post something online I just copy the file to my Mac first just to avoid dealing with the fucking piece of shit GTK file chooser. If I need to sort through a bunch of files, easier to run Samba and sort through them on my Mac, because Nautilus was scooped out of the same fucking pile of shit than the GTK file chooser was scooped from.
As far as I can tell, the last time that browsing files on macOS really changed was 2007, when 10.5 came out and had Quick Look. Since then, browsing files on Linux has somehow gotten worse. Do you know what it’s like on macOS? Every once in a while, Apple quietly adds support for previewing a couple more formats.
I'm sure there's people here who are long-time contributors and/or supporters. Just ignore me, I'm not your target audience. ... I'm really not sure who your target audience is, though.
I actually have a copy of the book, and it is indeed a good book. The problem is that it somehow empowers GNOME developers to keep creating/maintaining/rewriting broken software, all in the name of "usability".
Holy crap. It reads like a parody written by someone who read this thread and article. I was thinking it couldn't be as bad as people we're saying, but it's worse!
> Free software development is not a democracy, and does not get driven by polls. Features and bugs are introduced by those who show up, within a community that works towards a shared goal.
And it is exactly to let themselves yell that, they work hard to alienate few normal devs left in the project.
I understood now that Gnome 3.0 was from the start Redhat's fully intentional attempt to appropriate the project, and is not dissimilar to Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish.
1. Get command of some more abandoned parts of the project.
2. Push a series of guaranteedly unpopular sharp direction changes which will lead to loss of devs.
3. As devs leave, you get more reinforcement to your casus belli, saying that "nobody maintains this pile of garbage, so now I am taking it over too"
Please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them, you can work in the direction of your choosing. AFAIK there are numerous forks of GNOME over the years that are still going.
The problem is that GNOME is not just a DE. By virtue of being a project that's used by RedHat and Ubuntu, it's the closest thing to the standard DE that desktop Linux has at the moment.
Worse yet, its developers consciously make design decisions that make it hard to write applications that play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it - their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a platform, and their main interest is supporting "GNOME apps", even to the detriment of all the rest.
Between these two things, deficiencies in GNOME affect a lot of people who didn't necessarily choose to be affected.
I'm not sure what you expect can be done about that. Every desktop is going to have its own set of features and APIs that other desktops don't. That's what they mean by "platform." Should e.g. KDE developers spend less time working on their own features and start contributing more to GNOME, to make GNOME apps work better in KDE, and vice versa? Maybe, but they would have to take the initiative to do it.
Having unique features is fine, of course. It's when GNOME goes out of its way to make it impossible for DE-agnostic apps to "do the right thing" for ideological reasons, when every other DE supports some kind of lowest common denominator. Here's one famous historical example:
I don't see how that is an example of ideological reasons, or how that contradicts what I said. It seems like exactly what I was saying -- GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own separate APIs for things. I've seen that issue posted here and on reddit so many times and I never understood why anyone considers it any more significant than all the other times a random open source project removed a deprecated API or did an incompatible version bump. Yes, I get it, it's frustrating when upstream is a moving target, but that's exactly what he's saying. You can choose to follow the moving target or you can target a platform that moves slower.
And because I have to keep saying this, that is a non-issue now anyway. XFCE supports the new app indicator protocol, and since Ubuntu dropped unity their support for it is available as a standard GNOME extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-supp...
Others strive to have APIs that are either compatible across DEs, or there is a way for a DE-agnostic app to feautre-detect and use it when it's available. GNOME is the only project that simply doesn't care about DE-agnostic apps, and ends up making their life more difficult than anybody else. The app indicator issue is brought up time and again, because the comments on it from the GNOME developers make their attitude crystal clear. That this particular issue has been resolved since then is not important - there have been more since, and there will inevitably be more in the future, since, again - they do not care.
If you sincerely believe that it's okay to have a single DE be a self-contained app platform with no interop, that's up to you - but do understand that this is a very debatable premise, and people who don't agree with it have very good reasons to be annoyed with GNOME.
> If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them
I would tell the same to Poettering, Clasen, and co.
There is really nobody who obligates them to work on their "innovations" in GNOME with religious zeal if the rest of the project showed no interest, speaking lightly.
If nobody wants to work on their stuff, they can't claim "victimhood" as if that happens as a result of somebody's ill intents.
I have to reference Torvalds vs. SystemD here as an example how Sievers, Poettering, and co. instantly drew up a picture of kernel community being some kind of a bullying ring when the only thing they did to them was to ignore their (bad quality) patches.
I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made.
Again, if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. You do not have to work on anybody else's stuff if you don't want.
> I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made.
Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians, I've never worked with one but I certainly feel entitled to have harsh opinions about some of them.
If the advice is limited in scope to professional peers, then I have to disagree with it; having double standards for people like yourself isn't great advice.
> Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians
These developers do not wield power over anyone and they are not filing lawsuits. They are developing code, either as their job, or as volunteers. And in either case, contributing their work as open source.
It might help to take a little perspective before publicly passing judgement on _individuals_ and what you imagine their intentions to be rather than merely judging the merit of their contributions. Those are completely different things.
What I'm talking about really has nothing to do with power. Maybe the examples I chose suggested that power dynamics are relevant to my point, but I think they aren't, so here is another example without one: Should an architect refrain from judging Frank Lloyd Wright just because they never worked together? I think certainly not. That seems completely backwards to me. Anybody is entitled to have an opinion on Frank Lloyd Wright, another architect particularly so.
Are you talking about judging his contributions and significance to architecture or his worth as a person?
I get that the two things have some overlap and aren't cleanly divisible. What we do is a major part of who we are.
But I mean, it's one thing to say "I think it [his architecture] is awful", or even "I think his architecture had a negative impact on people/society/cherished values/whatever" but quite another to say "I think he sought the ruination of everything good and decent because he was a demented and feeble mind." Because, yes, I do think the last one would only be appropriate if you actually knew something about the guy...
Edit: And yeah, of course, I'm not trying to censor anyone's opinions. Of course you can _have_ the opinion, you can even express it. I just think that it's not what engaging in productive/civil discourse looks like and, depending on the venue, people may call that out or whatever.
I am not talking about judging his 'worth as a person'; rather his 'worth as a developer.' Maybe in his private life he's a wonderful person, who knows? Who cares? It is his professional activities that concern people.
You are of course welcome to have an opinion, and to choose whatever product you want based on that opinion. But if the extent of your opinion is "this person is a jerk and their work is terrible and not to my taste" that is unlikely to convince that person to change course, especially if they don't know you and if the decision is already made.
Furthermore, the "this person is a jerk" part is clearly not part of some dispassionate evaluation of his professional accomplishments and is just a verbal attack couched in the language of professional criticism.
I suspect that, in many instances, people who do that are not trying to convince anybody of anything. If they expected to be greeted everywhere with agreement then they would not go around saying things which they know perfectly well are not likely to result in a vigorous and healthy debate if they were said to strangers in the street :)
We've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with, no matter how strongly you feel about something or someone. We're trying for something else here because it's the only way to keep the site interesting.
From some of your other comments I gather that you've been around this material for a long time and you know a lot about it. Why not share some of what you know, so others can learn? and make your substantive points thoughtfully? Then you'll be making this place more interesting, and your points will have some persuasive power. Just venting only adds energy and credibility to the views you disagree with.
I get that there's a low probability this argument will work with you but I think it's worth trying to persuade people that it's in their own interest to follow the rules, which are designed to try to keep a community that's interesting for everybody:
I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well.
I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many people love to theorize about what these are, making correlations which are usually driven more by their feelings than reality.
I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not considering that person like they are more likely to do so if they were in person.
I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt by some people in a community where there is freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired (I know that not everyone has this option).
I do think however that the article of this thread expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it explains how it effects them without resorting to emotional attacks towards the project and it's something I really liked about reading it.
I think people believe Linux is community driven project, while in reality it is strongly corporate backed. Just look at kernel contributions [1]. I think same applies to most of the infrastructure, someone works on FreeType, Cairo, Pango, etc.
In such case disjoint between users and developers is even further. I am professional developer, yet I have zero contributions to my framework and just a few contributions to libraries. After 10 years my contributions to Linux community limited to bug reports, few patches and manuals.
In reality there is not enough community support to maintain existing systems. "Freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired" by individual is overrated, that's TempleOS.
EDITED: Some bragging about making a difference
There are a lot of projects with less corporate influence. No systemd on BSD, but hardware support is not as good. Generic distributions is something that works for most of the users. There are a lot of niche distributions and projects (Void Linux runit!). Current state is just a reflection of users priorities.
Sorry if it was not clear, by take it in another direction I generally mean find funding, get hired by someone else to work on it, or start another company to work on it if there is enough of a business opportunity there. It's very hard to make significant changes to a large codebase without a team of people.
This advice definitely applies to open source developers whose work is out completely in the open.
You can literally take millions of lines of code that they may have written wholesale, and change a single word in it that you don’t like.
In open source, they have nowhere to hide. If you disagree with a certain decision they have made, you are welcome to take the effort they have put in to implement the hundreds and thousands of other decisions they have made that you do agree with, with a simple “git clone”.
> if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction.
That would be best said to persons named above.
They were free to fork GNOME into their touchscreen based imaginary future, and experiment with it even more freely as a minority group, rather than trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback.
>trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback
Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be hostile towards any specific developers for any specific project, I will have to decline to get involved with that. You don't have to resort to character assassination, if you have some ideas on a good technical direction for a project, just make the argument and write the code: people will listen if your arguments are sound and your code works.
I personally don't know the full history; you might consider looking for some old blog posts or politely contacting a GNOME developer for an explanation of the history. From what I understand, the run up to mobile was a major source of funding for GNOME 2 from several mobile companies, and that's where all the developers came from, but most of those companies were not able to keep up and failed to iOS/Android. So the funding dried up and Red Hat was one of the few companies that happened to survive because of their other business. That's what I've heard but you should talk to more people who were actually involved in the project back then if you want a more complete answer. (Please assume good faith and don't be hostile, we're all friends here, these are just developers trying to pay the bills like the rest of us)
There was a story recently, On the Graying of Gnome, comment by boudewijnrempt [1]:
> The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous.
> And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012.
> By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.
This sure seems accurate to me, from what I've personally observed, but I don't understand what motive they might have. What's the point of controlling popular software by making everybody hate it?
> What's the point of controlling popular software by making everybody hate it?
I think, in their view, all comes after taking hold of the project. But here, they got that, and now what? Now, all lofty plans have to meet the cold reality.
It's like a mutunineers on a ship throwing officers overboard, just to realise hours later that they are in the middle of an ocean, and they have no idea how to sail a ship without skilled crew.
I saw that happening in public companies: a single asshole activist with puny few percents of the company keeps throwing big radical decisions onto every shareholder meeting, until he gets everybody so discombobulated, or the company so disfunctional that others either leave the company to him for taking, or he gets a legal casus belli to sue the company to try to wreck it further, and then seize it.
For such people, it doesn't matter if the company in question dies, as long as they come out with gain. Some are plainly idiots with too much legal education, and some are genuine degenerates doing it with full knowledge of consequences.
Does GNOME really bring in much paid support momey? In the past I have worked at a company that did have RHEL5 workstations with GNOME by default, but everybody I knew treated that as a joke and sshed into the workstations from their (Windows) Thinkpads or Macbooks. The desktop software on those workstations was unwanted and unused.
A lot of people like it. Just because there are old timers that cannot move past gnome 2 it do not mean that Gnome 3 is bad. It faster and more polished that KDE. Workspace management and screen real estate is supierior to anything I used.
I believe the 'graying of GNOME' discussed here a few weeks ago is evidence that fewer and fewer people like GNOME each year. New developers would naturally be drawn from the ranks of enthusiastic users. (Why would a developer volunteer their labor for software they don't use and care about?) The graying of GNOME shows that the pool of enthusiastic users has been shrinking since GNOME 3. That's about when GNOME tipped over the edge and started losing developers faster than it gained new ones. The missing new developers would be new developers, not old timers. If it were only old timers who feel alienated, I wouldn't expect GNOME to have trouble recruiting new developers.
Gnome 3 is default for most popular distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Debian etc) If anything gnome is getting more popular thanks to Ubuntu switching.
There fewer people contributing because programming in C is no longer fun or hip. It is not Gnome problem but the whole Linux ecosystem. Gnome is slowly adopting rust but the core framework is still C. There is plenty of active forks of Gnome2 people can contribute there.
Screw Red Hat, the amound of crapware and bad attitudes coming from them is astounding. And of course, since they have big bucks, it gets shoved down everyones' throats.
