Clement Lefebvre: The Man Behind Linux Mint (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Clement Lefebvre: The Man Behind Linux Mint (2013)

staging.computerworld.in

52 pointsdavesailer41 comments

I worked with Clement between 2017-2019. I invested a significant amount of time getting their mutter fork caught up, and there was a fallout resulting from all the work being reverted at the last minute before the next release.

I'm still bitter about this, and I think this experience has been traumatic. On their private Slack workspace they harassed me, later banned me from their Github organization, used social media to defame me, and continued to attack me in Github issues for some time afterwards.

During this time I also got a job with a reference from Clement praising me, but was later laid off after he wrote a blog post attacking me while being increasingly harassed in private by various Linux Mint team members. I wish I still had that reference email I let him send directly to my previous boss, so people could see how quickly he will turn on people within a three month time period.

Needless to say this has spoiled my appetite for being an open source contributor. Maybe I will eventually find a project that interests me, but every time I try to get back into the Linux desktop userland these experiences come back to haunt me.

Edit: It seems people want proof, but all I can show is a public figure who has done irreparable damage to the way I look at FOSS.

Apologies, but you're going to have to provide evidence for these accusations. The alternative is that anybody can come out of nowhere and call another person awful. I understand this might be difficult.

He still left up his attack piece, blatantly lying about a number of events that occurred. I don't think it's worthwhile to defend myself years later, but does this sounds like the tone of a professional? This is one of many poor messages he's been sending about former staff, along with several Github comments:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/bzbomd/comment/e...

I'm not the first person they have ostracized. I have seen other anonymous post-mortems describing experiences similar to mine from earlier time periods. I did so much work for them, it still feels unreal that someone could be that vindictive.

Perhaps this belongs on a Glassdoor equivalent for FOSS projects, but since one doesn't exist and this thread appeared in my feed, I think it's important I'm able to voice my perspective since he tried to assassinate my character.

He comes off as fully professional and measured in that link. Describing that as character assassination makes you seem like someone nursing a grudge, not someone with a legitimate grievance. And at least he’s left his response up for people to judge for themselves, while you’ve deleted everything you put in that Reddit thread.

If lots of other people really agree with your impression of working with Clem, point us at these other, similar opinions you mention. So far this is just “the lurkers support me in email.”

Playing devil’s advocate here.

Here are the red flags: - Lack of context. Why is all of the evidence hidden/deleted/tucked away?

- Speak for “everyone”. Was it really consensus? Why not take direct ownership of a decision, instead of hiding behind a collective?

- Pulling in a snippet of private conversation as a evidence of being reasonable.

- Naming and shaming.

It may well be that the OP deserved the ban, but a single snippet of a measured response doesn’t address the questions that said action raises. Without more evidence, I say it suggests there’s more to this.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, etc. In light of these posts, which clearly do not match what GP is claiming, I'm going to conclude that either side could be right, I just don't have enough information.

It does sound professional, to be honest. His tone is measured, he explains his position, gives reasons for his choices, and offers a plausible timeline.

This particular piece of evidence is not conclusive, but neither is it in your favor.

> neither is it in your favor.

That doesn't matter though. The fact he is retaliating in public over a post that only references public information, using private information, is inherently bad faith acting. The context is what makes it unprofessional.

Your posts are deleted so there is no way to judge what you said and what response it called for. If a former member starts an AMA to badmouth a project, I'd expect the lead to respond and give the necessary information to defend the project and himself.

It's indeed pretty scummy to dox you in what was a pseudonymous post.

Also other posts in this thread seems like victim blaming. Just because someone is famous doesn't make him a good person.

You have the burden of proof exactly backwards.

This is clearly just your side of the story. What we learn from this is that one of you is a difficult person to work with, but not which one.

That is also your side of the story. It's easy for people to defend a product they love. The developer to user ratio for Linux Mint and Cinnamon is very out of balance, and this is a behind the scenes perspective that I don't think people would be able to observe anyway, since most of it happened on a private Slack.

Actually I don't use Linux Mint. Just wanted to let you know how people feel about anonymous internet slandering without proof.

See the other response to my root comment, it links to a Reddit thread where you can find out who I really am, as he was using my full name to slander me. This is not anonymous internet slandering.

Again, you'll need to offer something else if you wish to credibly defend your claim, because that post is not doing the work you think it is.

I think you should allow people to have a space to tell their side. My side of the story is just as credible as his, the only difference is he's more well known, and if that alone is what you think matters most, it shows your bias.

That post was made 3 years ago. People change, and it does not invalidate the way I experienced what happened, even if I failed to articulate it effectively at the time. I only shared it to provide proof of the dispute, not to win sides.

It's not "the only difference" if he has left his side up and you have taken your side down. Of course people are going to be skeptical in that situation.

I see that thread also contains people asking for, and not receiving, proof of (now-deleted) allegations.

Publicizing somebody's full name in a forum thread is pretty bad practice imo

As someone who watched Clement's antisemitic breakdown where he demanded that anyone who supported Israel's right to exist cease using LinuxMint I find this story quite believable. Operating on pure emotion he told people they couldn't use an open source Linux distro unless they agreed with his politics in complete violation of the GPL. So, yeah, I'm not surprised at all to read this kind of story about him.

Makes me really wish people in FLOSS had better memories about stuff like this, it would make it easier to discern context when revelations like this come out. People who know the history can more easily answer questions like 'does this sound like something that person would do' when they remember past events where they acted out like this.

What he did isn't antisemitism, and neither it was arguing against right to exist of State of Israel. It was disagreement with Israeli government, and that's perfectly fine. One might even agree with that criticism given the number of Palestinian women and children killed by Israel at the time.

Let me repeat this, because it seems warranted: criticism of Israeli government (its policy and actions) isn't antisemitism, and isn't calling for Israel to cease existence. Mixing those two is especially dangerous, because this would lead to conclusion that periodically killing 1500 unarmed Palestinian civilians is a necessary price to be paid for continuing Israel's existence, and further discussion if this is a price worth paying.

Having just looked up the "antisemitic breakdown" in question, that seems like a strong editorialization of a viewpoint that was fairly widespread at the time of the events in question.

Yeah I think there's a lesson to be learned there. Something like: Just because everyone is saying something, doesn't mean you won't be held accountable later.

You are talking about aniti-zionism, that is different from antisemitism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Zionism

As inflammatory as it is, my experience with Ubuntu (non-LTS) was the biannual death march. An upgrade broke my system. I never had any such experience with Win or Mac, so it was a Linux-specific problem. I suppose I could've used the LTS version, but then (again unlike Win and Mac) I would've been limited to only old versions of packages. Mint would probably have been similar.

Nowadays I'm using Manjaro for 3 years running. There's no 6 monthly release cycle, but a continuous stream of rolling releases. An upgrade has never broken my system to the same extent as it did with Ubuntu. It's closer to the Win and Mac experience for me.

Caveat though: Manjaro is not as beginner friendly as Ubuntu or Mint or Pop!_OS.

If you don't want to go full rolling, Fedora's every 6 month upgrade has been smooth for me. I have a desktop I've been upgrading since Fedora 17 that is currently on Fedora 35.

I think this is a YMMV kind of situation. Isn't Ubuntu non-LTS supposed to be more... experimental? Like they try out new things which may or may not go on?

Anyway, I've never used Manjaro, but my daily driver is Arch. I remember around the upgrade to Linux 5.16 and gstreamer 1.20 (not 100% sure of the version) the sound on my laptop went to hell.

Pipewire would die and while the system was still more or less usable, it wouldn't turn off. It would hang indefinitely trying to shut down pipewire. Apps that didn't need the sound would work OK, but others would hang at launch, like Telegram. Firefox worked as long as it didn't try to play anything. As soon as it did, it would become unresponsive. I could work around it by disabling pipewire, and I could get back to work by installing the LTS kernel, which was still at 5.15, and the sound worked (I need to be able to make calls with Teams).

My laptop is AMD Zen3 based, but on my (older) Intel boxen everything was OK. However, on the laptop, sound wouldn't work with external sound cards or BT headphones, either.

This was quite shocking to me, since I'd been using Arch since ~2011 IIRC, and this was the only time when an upgrade was this terrible.

> An upgrade broke my system. I never had any such experience with Win or Mac, so it was a Linux-specific problem.

Counterpoint: somewhat recently, a Windows update permanently disabled my wireless headphones. They still work with any device that isn't running Windows. They won't work with other people's devices that are running Windows.

Never heard something similar before, what headphones exactly are they?

Bose QC35 II.

It's funny how the concept of "distro" is losing importance now.

Do people really care if their docker containers run Ubuntu? Debian? RH? Not really

Also 90% of the pain in (traditional) distros seem to be the UI stuff (Window Manager, drivers, audio, etc). Not saying the other parts are not complicated, but upstream does most of the work there.

Distros do not exist because people want different Linux images to run their containers on top of.

> Also 90% of the pain in (traditional) distros seem to be the UI stuff (Window Manager, drivers, audio, etc).

For a second I thought you're completely missing the point but then you say this lol.

> Do people really care if their docker containers

> Also 90% of the pain in distros seem to be the UI stuff

Is it only me who see a contradiction here

We don't run docker containers. We run programs.

Mint was to Ubuntu then what Pop!_OS is to Ubuntu now. Cinnamon was a fine DE when I last used it some years ago.

I love cinnamon, but lately it has fallen behind, sadly. I kept using it for a long time, but KDE was just so much better in a few important ways (fractional scaling, multi monitor performance, battery life for some reason) that I had to switch. I still much prefer the general feeling of cinnamon and miss it.

What is Pop!_OS to Ubuntu?

A batteries includes, newbie friendly OS. Mint in 2013 was a distro that included non-free codecs which allowed it to do things that Ubuntu couldn't out of the box. Pop!_OS now includes Nvidea drivers and other tweaks that make it a more friendly experience for users generally and people new to Linux specifically.

What Ubuntu is to debian ?

Ubuntu to Debian is Red Hat to CentOS.

Love Linux Mint. I say that as a Unix loving, Slack, Arch and OpenBSD wielding geek. I just don't want to deal with anything else than being productive, and Linux Mint helps me do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com