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Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

> just never seem to have time to show up to support them.

They're supported just fine. The authors feel no need to bend over backwards to fulfill oddball distribution requirements.

> This kind of stuff is expensive

Yet it all came into existence from open source developers who were paid nothing. Then a bunch of commercial distributions appeared. That's why it's expensive. They're twisting the community for their own profits rather than for broad improvement of the system as a whole.

> to influence the decisions is to show up and chip in.

I don't want to influence things or be required to. I would prefer if people who had "influence" just weren't part of the community. They're exceptionally disruptive and often not focused on users but on their own stature.

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> The authors feel no need to bend over backwards to fulfill oddball distribution requirements.

This is close to the truth in my opinion, but slightly off in two ways:

- It's not just distributions, it's also other software, especially desktop environments.

- The "oddball requirements" are not so odd and mainly based on real world problems users run into.

There are problems that SysVinit will never try to solve, yet that there is no other obvious place to solve except for pid 1, so systems that continue to run SysVinit will just never have solutions for those problems. And I get it: You don't care. However, the people who actually work on free software often do. You don't have to love systemd, D-Bus, Polkit, UPower, UDisks, Pipewire, Wayland or any other number of pieces of software, protocols, or specifications, but you have to be in pretty strong denial to not see what lead to them. The entire Linux desktop can't be built on janky shell scripts that parse CLI tool output forever. Eventually, people want to move on and build more complete solutions to problems.

Distributions exert pressure on the ecosystem because they're the ingress for all of the user pain. A vast amount of issues reported go through them first, and then it's up to them to figure out what to do about it. So if you have a problem with anyone, it's probably not actually the distributions themselves, but the kinds of things the users of those distributions are complaining about.

> Yet it all came into existence from open source developers who were paid nothing. Then a bunch of commercial distributions appeared. That's why it's expensive. They're twisting the community for their own profits rather than for broad improvement of the system as a whole.

This is bizarrely counter-factual. There are community contributors but an awful lot of open source is contributed by people who are paid to work on it (which, to be clear, is awesome!), even in the case of Debian.

It’s also odd in the context of Qt which has been commercially supported since the beginning when Trolltech first released it in 1995. There’s always been the idea that if you want long-term support for old versions you should pay for it rather than expecting the open source community to spend time on old code.

> I don't want to influence things or be required to. I would prefer if people who had "influence" just weren't part of the community. They're exceptionally disruptive and often not focused on users but on their own stature.

You’re welcome to disrespect them but they have influence because they show up: in open source your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions. It’s also inaccurate to say they’re not focused on users: you might not think you need a given feature but you’re not the only user out there. Alternatives are there but most people aren’t using them because they don’t feel the need to switch as strongly as you might.

> in open source your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions.

And your contributions grow in proportion to your income, and a lot of people get their income from companies who have other than the best interests of Linux users at heart, and rather want to steer it in a direction that is most profitable for themselves.

That's certainly fine for open source, but that's not fine for these distros as a whole, at least the ones that portray themselves as a service to the public.

> It’s also inaccurate to say they’re not focused on users: you might not think you need a given feature but you’re not the only user out there.

If your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions, users are not part of that equation. Users enter the equation if they're the users that are desirable for the people who are paying contributors.

> Alternatives are there but most people aren’t using them because they don’t feel the need to switch as strongly as you might.

And because people who insist that Linux move in a particular direction immediately start breaking things that used to work, and making their new thing a dependency. Then the alternatives have to spend all their time shimming that stuff, and the best they can hope for is to almost keep up. The prize for becoming an alternative is having to become an expert on the new thing that you disapproved of, or fall behind. You never get time to work on more parsimonious solutions to the problems the new thing claimed to solve.

> rather than expecting the open source community to spend time on old code.

I don't expect them to "spend time" on it, how about, just don't deprecate it prematurely? Leave users a choice. Then again this why I wouldn't use most of the distributions because they left user choice on the floor a decade ago.

> in open source your voice carries weight in proportion to your contributions.

Their voice should not carry any weight. It's not at all clear that people who contribute code are good at predicting or managing future organizational outcomes correctly. It also creates a model where those who develop out of passion rather than for a paycheck are significantly disadvantaged for no meaningful reason.

Every engineering society that had started with this mechanism has replaced it with something more rationalized. It's the only way to create sufficiently advanced structure and to ensure that new ideas are quickly adapted and made available.

> It’s also inaccurate to say they’re not focused on users

The mere existence of this thread ruins this thesis.

> but most people aren’t using them

Define "use." As in made a conscious effort to get a specific piece of software and use it? Or just ended up with the default piece of software their distribution choose for them? Are you sure you're measuring the correct variables?

In any case, I just don't appreciate this bullying tone, where users have to "shut up and write code" or "just put up with whatever we hand you" whenever the _slightest_ bit of feedback or requests are made on behalf of legacy users and systems. Which might be fine, if the people busily writing code all day weren't intentionally making it more difficult to do just that.

It happens more in other communities but it is absolutely noticeable. It's not enough to simply create a new good project, there's an apparent need to destroy any prior older projects and actively prevent people from using them.

Which is why your entire "voice = influence" model is a problem.

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