Hacker News Reader

Comment by batmansmk | Hacker News Reader

I was tempted to try the new Gnome out, but your comment feels like the ecosystem around is full of drama and ego; I'll pass, I'm a pro, I have no time for this.

View on HN

To be completely honest, lots of open-source is full of this sort of drama and ego (Linus, Theo, Stallman all have major cult of personalities, and similar problems appear in KDE and the distros too). Don't judge GNOME for following their peers.

Is it exhausting? Oh, yes. It's why I quit and now work on proprietary software full-time; that environment burned me out.

Is it a problem solely with GNOME? No, it's all throughout the Linux and FOSS ecosystems. If you want to fix it, you need to fix it everywhere, not just GNOME. But turns out the people that stay around to contribute to these projects thrive on this sort of stuff, so it's hard to change.

It’s a shame that poor social interaction skills get rewarded by overvaluing technical prowess. It creates an exclusive environment where only other aggressive people (men, usually) thrive, there by decreasing total numbers of potential contributors.

I’ve seen friends grow their professional skills in this environment, learning that being a jerk is ok. They then try to transfer this to corporate employment, leading to predictable issues. They of course don’t understand their own role in these issues, blaming everyone else who just “don’t get it.”

I doubt this is exclusive to open source. Pretty much every team of developers has drama and conflict.

I'd put money on the exact same conversations happening at Apple and Microsoft, but in those cases it's happening behind closed doors.

Not to be a jerk, but literally no one cares that you're a "pro" or that you're choosing not to use Gnome 3. Tens of thousands (likely more) people use Gnome-shell and have never heard of any of this "drama". I guess I'm curious, too, what software do you use if you avoid every single piece of tech that has ever been subject to contention about contribution credit? What a self-aggrandizing stance.

>I'll pass, I'm a pro, I have no time for this.

Isn't this "drama" too?

No drama version: There are some feuds in Gnome, like they are in any FOSS or proprietary project/team.

Some GNOME community members and developers got an anti-Ubuntu stance since about ten years ago which I think poisoned the Linux desktop. It is a sad "shoot my foot" strategy and they are not doing something to resolve it.

I was contributing to GNOME for about a decade (1999 to 2011), mostly i18n, l10n and bug reporting.

I think it's understandable that someone would be annoyed that work they've done gets attributed not just to someone else, but a for-profit company.

I'd recommend you try it out anyhow, as a long time gnome user the performance increase in particular in 3.32 and 3.34 is very noticeable, I've learned just to ignore the drama that seems to accompany these projects.

How does the drama affect you using the product? I use open source software everyday and have yet to have any open source drama in my life.

Even if the drama doesn't personally affect you, the internal drama can have technical implications, like key developers leaving the project, or forking it and you end up with multiple similar, but incompatible, products. OpenBSD splitting from NetBSD is a an example of that happening.

Compared to what environment free of "internal drama"?

I'd count the OpenBSD split as a net positive though. They're now different projects with different goals, both worthy in their own respects.

Hard to say. Don't know what happened if they didn't split.

Fair point, but considering OpenBSD's goal is to be absolutely secure and NetBSD's goal is to "just work" on basically anything you want to run it on reconciling that would be at least as much work as just forking and then each project adopting useful things from the other as needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com