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Comment by emersion | Hacker News Reader

> Those users are the target market that those companies are interested in pleasing.

Not really, no. My company (SourceHut) has nothing to do with Wayland and is just sponsoring me for working on open-source software (_any_ open-source software). A few other developers are working for Collabora, which mainly focuses on Wayland for embedded use-cases. So, none of these companies have a real interest in pleasing desktop users.

Regardless, it doesn't mean that I personally don't care about my users, or that I want to fight against them. It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining.

Maintainers are scarce.

> it’s possible that […] your work makes the world a worse place

Always great to hear that…

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From a fellow maintainer of open source software (currently not being paid for the work at all) - I agree 100%.

Users are always demanding things: new features (which sometimes are very bad ideas), merging patches (which sometimes were never tested), expecting answers for questions that were asked and answered thousands of times before…

> It's just that if you don't like something, you need to step up and do something about it to improve the situation, instead of just complaining.

Exactly. Users who want to say on X (for whatever reason) should start contributing instead of spending time blaming the devs. If they want to switch to Wayland, but are missing something - they should work towards fixing it instead of dragging everyone else back.

> expecting answers for questions that were asked and answered thousands of times before

I don't mean to seem ungrateful for the work that open source maintainers do every day, but I think this sort of complaint is usually a symptom of a problem with either the documentation or the interface being unclear. These pain points are usually an opportunity for improvement in the product. On the other hand, there are probably more such opportunities than there are available maintainers...

But then the only users who get the features they want are programmers, who are a fairly atypical type of user. I understand that you don't owe users anything, but if you don't want to create software that's useful and pleasing to them, why bother creating open source software at all. You could get the same enjoyment from coding for profit or doing logic puzzles.

Hire, we have money for that specific reason.

> why bother creating open source software at all.

I create features for myself, I share it for free, that's gift, not pleasing.

Thank you for sway and wlroots. You, Drew, and others have been doing an amazing job. For every complainer there are many more in the silent majority who simply use and enjoy the products of your hard work.

> > it’s possible that […] your work makes the world a worse place > > Always great to hear that…

Painful, but it is true.

Free Software development is awkward in this respect. Both developers and users feel as if they are doing something virtuous, but it's unclear to what extent the contributions of either party help the other (or anyone else).

Meanwhile the presence of this self-conscious feeling of virtue makes transactions difficult, as every party feels they begin by deserving something out of it. So Free Software users are more demanding and aggressive than users of proprietary software, and Free Software developers are more prickly.

Loss of ego is absolutely essential here.

(More on-topic, this series of HN posts about X and Wayland has prompted me, a long-time holdout X user, to experiment again with switching one laptop to Wayland. It's massively better than the last time I tried it, and I'll probably leave this laptop like this unless something goes awfully wrong. Thank you, unappreciated Wayland developers.)

I am surprised. The system I use is someone else work. I've brought nothing, got it for free.

Demanding users I see looks like spoiled web users. They expect free services, they pay with privacy or are clever enough not to pay (adblock). But Free Software does not sell their data.

Or they compare to Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS, quite profitable companies. But Free Software does not acquire telemetry, does not sell hardware or bundled services. There are some private companies (Red Hat, Canonical, Mozilla), their difference from my industry (web development) is they ship source.

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