Complaints from GNOME team caused System76 maintainer stop work on Linux desktop
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I know at some point torvalds raised similar patches for UI element placement and was ignored.
Obviously they have no obligation to do things that subsets of users want, but the result of that is people like me, who will laugh when they become obsolete.
Some features I used have been dropped too, I just adjusted my workflow to the new way. It's not hard to do, especially if you are already used to switching desktops.
IMO it is bad form to laugh at developers and hope a project becomes obsolete, I doubt you will win any friends or change any minds that way. It's not personal against you if someone declines to implement a feature.
This kind of hand-wavy "all patched have a maintenance cost" and "just adjust your workflow" is why people dislike Gnome/GTK. Call me strange, but it has always seemed to me that software should adjust to the human, and not the other way around.
And in this specific case, it's also not even true since they explicitly disable the default behaviour for the file browser and then plug in their new behaviour. The patch to disable that is trivial, so "maintenance cost" is not only hand-wavy, it's also simply not true.
Also see a previous write-up I did on another Gnome issue that's a really bad look for the Gnome folks: https://lobste.rs/s/ky5yop/gnome_has_no_thumbnails_file_pick...
I'm really disappointed to see the thumbnail thing get brought up yet again, it's extremely exhausting to keep having to come back to that issue over and over. None of those patches in your comment appear to have ever been finished for various reasons. We could get into it and try to play the blame game here but also I hope you can understand how that isn't helpful. I know you are posting it in good faith, and if you have something new to add to the conversation that would move it forward and resolve the situation then I'd be glad to listen. But otherwise I have to say I'm sorry, I am not interested to go pick apart 5, 10, 15 year old comments on a bug tracker. Especially if the end goal is just speculating at how we think some developers may or may not have acted like jerks.
Edit: And I don't even work on this stuff, I bet you can imagine how the GNOME people feel after getting brigaded every few months from reddit and 4chan commenters complaining about how something isn't done yet...
regardless of what should have happened in the development, it is not helpful to assume bad faith when your desired outcome is not achived. that is exactly what the gnome dev post did and what caused the system76 maintainer to stop contributing.
assuming bad faith is the underlying core issue for this whole topic.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
To me it is not intellectually rewarding to have a conversation talking about how someone else is a jerk or talking about how we want to make someone else suffer. Especially if the "action" you're trying to punish someone for (i.e. doing bug triage) is something that is a completely normal part of any open source project. I've noticed that once the conversation gets into that mode, it seems fairly impossible to have any kind of constructive dialogue. I just want to talk about technical stuff related to these desktops. It's really exhausting and hard to do that when every comment thread devolves into the airing of grievances against some developer based on some comments that were made years ago. I mean, come on, we are a smart bunch, we can do better than this.
Edit: And I think what you've said is really dangerous, I have to ask you to please stop that line of thinking. You are talking about making people suffer for something that you acknowledge is just an assumption. If you know that there is bad faith happening then that's a different story, you would flag it and then the moderators here will usually ban the person if they keep doing it. But you didn't say that you knew it was happening, you said it was an assumption. I hope you can see how that's not fair to anybody, I don't think you would want to be punished for people making untrue assumptions about you either.
>"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
It seems to me that that is setting the standards of discourse for people on the platform, and isn't intended to apply to large businesses, even if those large businesses mostly get their money from sponsorship and donations.
>You are talking about making people suffer for something that you acknowledge is just an assumption.
I think suffer is a bit of an exaggeration, I'm talking about warning people that a particular platform is user-hostile. Gnome (the organization) has a long history of behavior that I find unpleasant, and expecting me not to tell people about that or to pretend it didn't happen is asking far too much. Gnome is responsible for Gnome's bad reputation, maybe that's something they can fix though if they fix the behavior that's causing this bad reputation. It's the whole "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences" thing all over again. Gnome can make whatever bad decisions they want, but they don't get to be free from criticism for those decisions.
"and isn't intended to apply to large businesses"
This makes no sense to me, GNOME is not a large business.
"I think suffer is a bit of an exaggeration"
You were saying before that they should face consequences. I was just quoting you here, if you didn't mean you wanted them to suffer backlash for some actions then please explain otherwise.
"expecting me not to tell people about that or to pretend it didn't happen is asking far too much."
I never said I expected you to do any of this, you are making false assumptions. Please stop, you may want to go re-read my previous comments.
"Gnome is responsible for Gnome's bad reputation ... Gnome can make whatever bad decisions they want, but they don't get to be free from criticism for those decisions"
This also is vague and makes no sense to me. What bad reputation? What behavior? What bad decisions? What criticism? Who are you referring to when you say GNOME? The foundation? The designers? The maintainers? All of the above? That's at least hundreds of people, many of them volunteers, so are you saying they all make bad decisions all the time every day about everything? Please be more specific than this, remember that GNOME is not a company, it is a large and loosely connected open source project with lots of people who have differing opinions.
This is again why I really advise that you not take this angle when you're trying to discuss this, when you do this it is extremely difficult to figure out what you're actually talking about and what problem needs to be addressed. If you want to take this in a productive direction then please, don't even bother answering the questions I asked above, and just mention your specific complaint so we can re-start from the beginning. Also please try to avoid making platitudes and generalizations, and please avoid saying things that have already been said multiple times, that is not an interesting conversation. I'm trying to help you here so you don't have to feel the need to keep repeating yourself, I'm sure that you can also acknowledge that it is not ideal when you have to do that.
I hear this a lot, but Gnome is a foundation with at least a few developers paid to work on it full time. They bring in almost one million in "revenue" per year, and have a lot of sponsorships and the like. In 2020 they paid out $645,243 USD in employee compensation.
That puts in firmly in small-company scale.
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My basic tenant is that when you make choices that make it difficult for developers to work with you, when you fail to cooperate and compromise, then you're going to suffer reputation damage. Reputational damage has all kinds of effects, one of which is that in situations like these people are going to look at what you say with a bit more skepticism. Another is that you're going to get people recommending against using your project.
Now you may mean something very specific when you say "bad faith". What I say when I mean it is that you should be aware that Gnome developers probably won't be open to collaborating on anything unless it directly benefits the Gnome project in a pretty major way.
>And I think what you've said is really dangerous
That's a very strong claim considering what I said was "When does it become reasonable to assume bad faith?".
For example, I do believe that the switch to libadwaita is going to make things more difficult for people building apps on GTK4, because I think that they're going to move more and more important functionality into it and leave GTK4 to more or less waste away. I suspect that we're going to see a lot of stuff that could have easily been part of GTK4 become part of libadwaita instead, and that's going to make things measurable more difficult for everyone making GTK based desktop environments.
That's a prediction about the future, and if I'm right then I'd say that Gnome is acting is bad-faith, considering their current statements on the issue say libadwaita is going to change very little for those people dependent on GTK4.
This is incorrect, the GNOME foundation does not pay any developers. They paid one developer once for a few years but they don't anymore. There is staff working for the foundation but they handle the administration, not development. Pretty much all development is handled by volunteers.
"They bring in almost one million in 'revenue' per year"
This is also incorrect. There was one year they brought in that much, and it was because of Handshake, and the year after that was another big one time donation. A lot of open source nonprofits also saw a bump in funding for that year because of that and the Pineapple Fund, that amount is not normal, take a look at their financial report for all the other years. Happy to provide more details here. That money was the only reason they were able to fund a developer, it was enough to fund literally one developer for a couple years, and now it's gone, so yeah. In fact I think the feeling at the foundation has been that they don't really want to rely on those big one time donations, because, well they're unreliable.
"My basic tenant is that when you make choices that make it difficult for developers to work with you, when you fail to cooperate and compromise, then you're going to suffer reputation damage. Reputational damage has all kinds of effects, one of which is that in situations like these people are going to look at what you say with a bit more skepticism. Another is that you're going to get people recommending against using your project."
Again I have no idea what you're talking about here. Please explain what choices and please explain who failed to cooperate. You are generalizing and it's not fair. If you want more info on what I mean, take a look at some of the GSOC projects that were done this year: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2021/organizatio...
These students are part of GNOME, they are newcomers looking to contribute in meaningful ways and help improve things, you may not care about those projects in particular but the new contributors may stay around and eventually fix issues that matter to you some day. When you make these sweeping statements you are lumping them in with everything else and it's very rude to these students to say this when they haven't done anything wrong or even participated at all in the disagreements that you were bothered by. Are you honestly saying you think they deserve reputational damage? And that's not even getting into all the other hundreds of contributors who also had nothing to do with any of your complaints.
"Gnome developers probably won't be open to collaborating on anything unless it directly benefits the Gnome project in a pretty major way."
I don't understand why you are saying this. That is every developer. Do you think KDE developers are going to work on something that only benefits XFCE? Or do you think System76 will stop working on their own desktop to do work on LXQt? I don't think they will, they will work on what matters to them which is their own projects. How else would you suggest they do it? I mean, I think it would be great if everyone was able to take a day out of the week to fix bugs in some other project but that's unfortunately not realistic.
"That's a very strong claim considering what I said was 'When does it become reasonable to assume bad faith?'."
I stand by what I said. Please don't assume bad faith. I used to do that often and I stopped because I realized it was just toxic negativity. It was making me miserable and I wasn't able to trust people or look at things objectively. It also was spreading to people around me and making everyone else become more miserable and cruel, that's what I mean by dangerous. It can really hurt people and destroy relationships.
"For example, I do believe that the switch to libadwaita is going to make things more difficult for people building apps on GTK4, because I think that they're going to move more and more important functionality into it and leave GTK4 to more or less waste away. I suspect that we're going to see a lot of stuff that could have easily been part of GTK4 become part of libadwaita instead, and that's going to make things measurable more difficult for everyone making GTK based desktop environments."
I am currently working on an app that uses libadwaita and I completely disagree with this. Most of what was in libadwaita was already stuff that was in libhandy in some form (and maybe libdazzle for a few things, I can't remember). Piling more widgets into GTK itself will just make things worse, it is actually a really bad place to put things if you want to iterate on widgets and designs, because everything that gets put there is going to be somewhat contentious. I have said this elsewhere, but if you sourced your information from social media then a lot of what you read about libadwaita is probably misinformation.
That's not what I said, I said that there were several developers paid full time to work on Gnome. Mostly they're being paid for by other companies, companies like redhat.
>This is also incorrect. There was one year they brought in that much, and it was because of Handshake,
We seem to be disagreeing on public facts. In 2018 they brought in $1,073,797, in 2019 they brought in $915,646 and in 2020 the brought in $925,189.
For the past 3 years they've brought in nearly a million dollars in revenue.
If you're going to claim I'm wrong on such a basic and verifiable fact I don't really think we have enough common ground to have any sort of discussion, we're just living in different realities.
You also seem to be really misunderstanding what I'm saying, in the least charitable way possible. You're making a lot of very negative assumptions about not a lot of text, like claiming that I think a bunch of students should get a bad reputation because they worked on Gnome, which is just so out there that I don't understand how you'd reach that conclusion from what I've written.
Since we can't seem to communicate I don't see any point in continuing this, certainly if we did it would need a lot more structured of a format than this.
You can feel free to email me, it's $MYUSERNAME@gmail.com. If you want me to change my behavior, well fine I'll listen, but try to keep your criticism focused so that I can actually address it.
That's true but then you are talking about Red Hat or some other company, not GNOME. GNOME itself is not a company nor is it synonymous with Red Hat. This is a common source of confusion that I see, if you want to criticize some actions of Red Hat then you can just do that, no need to turn it into an unrelated discussion about GNOME.
"We seem to be disagreeing on public facts. In 2018 they brought in $1,073,797, in 2019 they brought in $915,646 and in 2020 the brought in $925,189. ... If you're going to claim I'm wrong on such a basic and verifiable fact I don't really think we have enough common ground to have any sort of discussion, we're just living in different realities."
No, we are not disagreeing on public facts. I mentioned this, those were because of one time donations. The number in 2021 and in 2017 is much less. Please re-read my comment, thanks, I can re-state what I said if you want. I can also provide additional public sources for this if you don't believe me, just ask. Edit: Also, another thing I want to say is that even if that were a regular thing, a million dollars a year is still a really piddling amount for a US-based non-profit. That is enough to hire a maximum of like 10 full time staff. From what I have heard from the foundation, they don't have nearly enough money to do much besides the bare minimum, if they had more money to hire developers then that would probably go further towards getting some of the long-standing issues fixed that the member companies are not incentivized to fix.
"You're making a lot of very negative assumptions about not a lot of text, like claiming that I think a bunch of students should get a bad reputation because they worked on Gnome, which is just so out there that I don't understand how you'd reach that conclusion from what I've written."
Sorry, let me make it perfectly clear. I am assuming good faith, I don't think that's what you meant about those students, nor am I reaching the conclusion you've suggested. But my point is that what you are saying can unintentionally cause damage to them, and so that's why I'm asking you to stop. If you think this is a stretch, well, it's not, I have seen some newer contributors that were very upset by the various negative comments on social media, when they did nothing to deserve that level of vitriol.
I don't really have any interest to pull this conversation off Hacker News, there is nothing more along those lines that I can say here that hasn't already been said. Again please re-read my comment. Also please understand that when you lead the conversation by suggesting that it's ok to assume bad faith, and saying you think people deserve to suffer reputational damage, that's not really a good incentive for me at least to want to reach out to you professionally. I talked about this before but to me that is the worst possible motivator. Can we please discuss technical stuff? Why is it so hard to do this? If you want to continue then please just put aside your conceptions of what you think other people have done that bothered you, I'm sympathetic to your frustration but those people are not here. You are talking to me, not them. If you really just want to vent, that's fine, but this is not the place to do it, and I am not the right person who can listen to that. Whatever your beef is with someone, I hope you can resolve that, but please don't make other people guilty by association.
Shame KDE is missing the polish it used to have. (I remember kde3). Don't get me wrong I use kde5 a lot and its recently started getting better faster imo.
At this stage I'm backing KDE apps on lxqt as the best desktop for me.
The Gnome-DE has made some brutal horrible design decisions _IMO_ in the last few years (more than just the horrible pastel colour scheme).
That's not to mention the Gnome-foundation who seem to have split focus as to what their primary goals should be.
It seems extremely unlikely that this attitude will contribute to gains in the Linux desktop space.
If they decide later to build their own "gnome-like" core libraries in Rust, it should be straightforward for them to switch to this code.
In 2021 I'd rather see investments in security-focused libraries, frameworks, tools and languages, and that's not going to happen with Gnome with its legacy C code base.
We use System76 desktops and laptops at work, they've been great, and the company remains very responsive to any issues. I'm pretty confident that whatever they come out with will be well designed. I'd bet on their desktop over Gnome any day.
As an aside, it's been a while... but the last time I had to build a cross-platform application with GTK+ was painful. There were so many API changes and things breaking across minor versions, we gave up after supporting our code for 2 years and switched to QT for new work.
I personally wouldn't bet on their desktop, in the past few weeks their developers have made a number technical statements that seem very bizarre and confusing to me, and have openly said they don't really have the manpower to keep up with GNOME.