Comment by md8z | Hacker News Reader

Comment by md8z | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sorry, I'm not saying that what they're saying isn't ego-based. I really don't know because I wasn't there for the conversation. What I'm saying is, the only way you can shift it from being ego-based to being fact-based is to present those facts that show the right way, or at least find a way to change the conversation into being headed in that direction. Just calling out ego-based behavior isn't enough. To me this has applied to every professional situation, it's how to keep any meeting on-track and avoid having coworkers getting into fights about egos. If you don't have the data then it's going to be hard to make a convincing argument, I don't know a good solution to this unfortunately. It requires real work and you may have to get creative. At a big company often the most convincing argument you can make is that a decision will save X amount of dollars, so you can start from there. For a volunteer open source project you will have to find out what else really motivates the developers and then go from there.

Apple I think is a good example. It only mattered to Apple when it cost them a non-significant amount of resources. Ultimately they are a company and they respond to profit, if people buy or don't buy the product then that's the strongest fact that will influence them. Also I think it is a misconception that GNOME has a lot of money from Red Hat. They don't really from what I've seen, most of the Red Hat people I know are pretty strapped for time. I also have no idea what you mean by forced it as default. Distros don't have to choose it, I've seen many distros that choose other things or just don't have a default. If you mean things like Ubuntu, IIRC they chose to retire Unity and go with GNOME because Unity wasn't profitable for them. So with companies it always comes back to that...

I also don't really think it is useful to call out people for imposing their vision. On a certain level, everyone who builds things is doing that. They have their point of view and that's the only thing they can express, because well, what else would they express? If they expressed your point of view all the time, then they wouldn't be themselves, they would be you. It's possible to change someone else's vision but that's usually done by presenting new information, i.e. convincing facts.

- GNOME forced on people, the things that come to mind was pushing of tech like Wayland that makes it hard for little DEs. As for the default I remember clearly a giant anti_unity mob , there were some big Youtube channels giving Ubuntu and Linux a chance and the GNOME fanboys popped up in chat and convinced the dudes to purge Unity and install GNOME, this was idiotic because it was not a correct procedure so they created a broken Ubuntu and gave Linux a bad image.

About the "vision" comment, at my work there is always a support team, they get feedback from users and we never give a response "it is our designer vision or our dev leader vision that things are like this". The differences are that

1 we care for each and even one of our users so we never say "go use our competitors because we don't care about your problem"

2 we do not have a big birocracy or a tyrant with a big vision, so we can think for ourselves, propose solutions and implement them. Sure it happen that later the designers demand we simplify the GUI but we know that each complex feature is still used by some power users and w propose ways to keep it in, but more hidden so designers don't complain.

Maybe GNOME does not have enough money for their big ambitions but they have a lot more then other DEs.

My summary would be, vision is fine in your hobby toy project, GNOME, Chrome, Apple's OSX are not toys, if you do a radical change only based on a dudes vision IMO you are doing it wrong, you forgot about the users and are only thinking at your ego/CV.

I don't understand what GNOME using Wayland would have to do with any other DEs, those DEs don't really have to use Wayland if they don't want. Although they probably should for technical reasons. Also I don't think any youtube videos were a particularly big factor in the decision, Mark Shuttleworth said it was because of money: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...

"About the 'vision' comment, at my work there is always a support team, they get feedback from users and we never give a response 'it is our designer vision or our dev leader vision that things are like this'."

Yeah you may not actually say those words exactly but I've many times heard support staff essentially state the same thing. They might say "sorry the product is not designed to do that" or "we don't sell that here", e.g. if you go to a car dealership and what you really want to buy is a helicopter, they will say sorry we don't sell flying cars, these cars were not designed to fly. Maybe they don't use the word "vision" but it's all the same, if you decide you are going to build a car a certain way then you have to stick to that, once you decide to add helicopter blades then it's a different product for a different market. So you could just exchange the word "vision" with "plan" if that helps to understand it.

For a big project, yeah, they can obviously afford to do more and to put more features in a product but they still have to draw the line somewhere.

Your example with cars is flawed when you are talking about

1 having the thing but hiding it for Windows or Linux users because "vision"

2 having the thing, everyone else having same thing but you remove it because of vision.

So is not about just 1 dude demanding Gnome or Chrome to add say something weird like "vim" keyboard support , but many users asking something basic present in similar products and in previous version of same product or for the Chrome issue I mentioned the feature is visible but only on Mac.

Btw I appreciate our conversation, is refreshing to disagree with someone that puts effort int he comments and is maintaining respect, thanks

EDIT: about wayland, we will have to disagree, in my opinion Wayland could have been implemented much better like

1 have a protocol

2 implement this protocol and share the implementation with all DEs, like Xorg , so only say Rust guys could have a go and create their own version in their cool language

3 define the extensions and implement them, not do "X11 did this but it is stupid, it is not our job, go figure it out yourselves"

I don't really know the details of this but for some things it is non-trivial to ship even small changes on other platforms, even those will have to go through full dev-test cycles which takes time and money. About removing things, I don't know, I had a car once that had some really nice cupholders. Really deep and exactly the right size, exactly at the right height for the arm. My current car doesn't have them and I can't find any cars that have that were quite as good as that. They just stopped making them. If that's not "vision" then what is it? I mean somebody has to make the decision of how to make the new cars. There is also the question of, do I value cupholders over everything else in the car? Would I buy a car with terrible steering if it meant the good cupholders? If I could get the good cupholders in any car would I pay an extra $3000 or however much the dealership charges? I think probably not but it really depends. So there's many factors at play here.

Edit: Or say maybe I am a startup founder and I design and build my own car exactly how I want and turn it into a company. It's perfect for me but then someday I get bored of driving my car and I retire. Then I hire someone else to design the cars and pass responsibility on to them and they change some stuff. Well, now the cars are different and everyone pretty much has to accept it because the original designer is gone, and as much as people liked the old one, nobody else can really copy them exactly because it was really their personal vision that made it what it was.

For Wayland, I think all of that is happening already? There is somebody making an implementation in Rust. They did try to make a shared implementation (Weston) but it turned out that people didn't actually want that, they preferred to write their own implementations.

The car examples don't make sense.

It is software, in Chrome case is just a simple popup, the code is there and it only is visible for OSX because the platform forced the vision guy's hand. The bullshit excuses that is hard to code and test and maintain do not work here.

Also excuses do not work even if valid if you destroy your users workflow, you don't remove system tray, server side decorations and just tell your users to find replacement applications because the ones they use do not conform to the GNOME vision.

Again, if is not a toy you target some users, is your duty to listen to this users and not to impose your vision on them, I am upset when there is no actual testing/research involving actual users and real world work, say when you test your app with "hello world" simple workflows that fail in real world with real users, or you make your app look cool on your expensive screen but looks like shit on real users hardware.

But you are right, GNOME has decided they don't want a part of the users and they are cultivating the perfect GNOME type user, a user that adapts to the software and not the reverse.

I don't know what you mean bullshit excuse. Everything has a cost to test and maintain. It doesn't help to say that it's bullshit if nobody has done a real cost analysis. Remember that this is something that has to be maintained for years. If some bugs occur in it later and it has to be removed again then the users will be upset again so it's not really useful for us to say just ship it and don't test, that's what we want to avoid. Yes, you and I could guess what it costs but that doesn't carry as much weight as somebody who actually works on it full time doing their cost analysis.

I get your frustration about your workflow but I'm still upset about my cupholders :) For the system tray and server side decorations, there are technical reasons for those to have gotten removed. Their existence may enable some workflows but it also breaks some other workflows so that's not an area where everyone can win. And if you want to bring them back then I can guarantee you that's not just a matter of flipping a switch, there is real work that needs to be done there and it won't happen if nobody is willing to pay the cost. It doesn't really make sense to blame volunteers for not being able to afford that either when this is something that's so expensive that the bigger contributors like Red Hat don't even want to pay for it.

Sure, but think about it like this:

Your DE has 10 features and 10 users, we decide we remove any feature that is only used by 1 or 0 users. We look around and find that 1 feature F1 is used only by user U1 , we remove F1 and we push user U1 to go away.

2 feature F2 was used by 2 users but now that U1 left , F2 is used only by 1 user, so we remove F2 and kck out the user U2 , we left with 8 users now from 10 and 8 feature

3 feature F3 was used by 3 users including U1 and U2 , but since we kicked this 2 users ut only U2 left using it , so now we remove F3 , kick out user U3 (U3 regrets now that he was a dick to U2 and U2 accusing them of beeing snowflackes and using it wrong)

4 ... repeat until you reamin with 2 users, the designer and the developer (the dev uses other DE on his personal machine anyway)

My second point, GNOME team should just pause and reflect at Apple, see that vision without a connection with users is wrong, Apple has sales numbers and other ways to detect when their big ego vision dude has messed up but GNOME needs to reflect (not change, not implement features just reflect), are we going to far? how do we know when our vison dude has gone too far since we don't have sales number and shareholders keeping the bullshit in check?

There is a chance that GNOME vision is wrong and it can take much more years then it took Apple to do the "courageous" thing and undo the stupidity and replace the vision individual.

For GNOME I guess you could say it's the same way but they are more after volunteer contributions, not money. So they will make changes that tend to increase the contributions, sometimes it's a trade-off i.e. do we make this change to lose 5 contributors but gain 10 contributors in other areas. They're tough decisions to make, and nobody likes to be the one to tell angry users that their workflow is breaking.

I don't think that the ego dudes do this calculation, just use it to pretend they have a motive.

Since I stopped using GNOME i switched to KDE and a few years back Plasma also had a big ego dude in charge, we had similar issues there with the Plasma vision , one example is

- removing the cachew ugly widget, the dude refused to give us the option to hide it even if we contribute the 3 lines patch ... but guess what the cachew is gone or hidden by default now ... my point is that I have an example that is not GNOME where big ego caused issue and when big ego person left things were solved.

My experience contributing to small KDE project was great though, there was no big vision people that needed to approve a feature or adding a new menu, the maintainers were developers that were happy to help the users, help debugging and were super happy to receive bug fixes and improvements. I would conclude(but without serious evidence) that big projects with big visibility will attract the individuals with big ego, like Plsama or GNOME , the big ego people will be attracted to this very visible projects so they canpush their vision into many peoples faces/lives.

But on the other hand if GNOME can double they contributors at the same time they lose half of the users is a metric they prefer then I hope they got their contributers, though by the number of GNOME forks that appeared it is possible their contributors got fragmented too.

To me it helps to think of it like debt, if they get a lot of money (or contributors or whatever) and lose users in the process then that can be re-invested to acquire more users at a later date. The GNOME forks I have seen don't really have a lot of developers, same thing with the KDE/Qt forks.

I don't really have any other comments on "ego guys", every maintainer has their own style. I have seen leadership with a strong vision work for some projects but not work for others.

So the issue would be if the community/team can control the ego person to prevent serious damage.

About GNOME forks, they don't need many developers, they just need enough to fork the shell UX so it screws with the vision of the GNOME team, you still won't get the missing features but you get a different experience because GNOME refused to give you options to customize stuff.

I think Ubuntu were fixing soem of GNOME problems for their users but still give you the option for a vanila setup but I don't know what happened in recent years, is Cinemon still continuing? Pop os was forking GNOME but I read here they jumped on the Rust hype so I expect a lot of disappointment when their DE will not be faster,cooler and bugs free.

Well-put.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com