Hacker News Reader

Comment by vova_hn2 | Hacker News Reader

> forced to make the switch

> users that are now being forced to use unfinished software

> frustration of being forced to use the new hotness

> actual users are forced to use it

Can confirm, Kristian Høgsberg and Drew DeVault personally came to my house and and installed Wayland on every computer I own. They made me watch it. It was horrible.

Jokes aside, I think that it is worth remembering that open source developers can't actually force you to do anything. If you are unhappy with what they provide you can always just use a different software, or make your own fork, or by a commercial product instead.

I know that I am stating the obvious that have already been stated countless times, but still. Using words such as "forced" in this context annoys me every time and I can't stop myself from saying it again.

Edit: it gives me flashbacks of all the Poettering-hate back in the days.

View on HN

The open source developers can definitely force you to do a lot of work.

Whenever they make changes to the program that they are maintaining, which break backwards compatibility, for which an example is replacing X11 with Wayland in the Linux distribution that you may have used for many years, then that forces the users affected by the changes to do potentially a lot of work, in order to find alternatives.

For some special application that you use from time to time, finding an alternative and switching to it may be simple, but when the incompatible changes affect a fundamental system component, which must be used all the time and without which nothing works, e.g. Wayland or systemd, then you must change not some single application, but the entire Linux distribution, and that can be time-consuming, because you may have to learn to do a lot of things in a different way than you are accustomed to.

So obviously, users are not happy about such changes that push work on them without any benefits.

The better Linux distributions may offer their users choices even for such important components like X11 vs. Wayland or OpenRC vs. systemd, for example Gentoo, but the most popular Linux distributions tend to not offer choices for this kind of system components, so when they replace such a component, the users must either accept the change or stop using that Linux distribution, and both choices are bad, because they must adapt their workflow.

No one "forced" you to make some code that you downloaded from the Internet "a fundamental component" of your system. You made this decision yourself. They even warned you about the lack "warranties ... of fitness for a particular purpose".

Why are you now trying to blame someone else for this decision?

Honestly, this attitude is so irresponsible and childish.

That attitude says no one should ever use Linux for anything - is that what the Linux community wants?

I don't know, I personally use Linux for almost everything (it has been my main OS for the last 10+ years), but I do not feel entitled to contributions that other people gift me for free.

Every time something works as intended on the first try without me having to manually configure it first, it always feels like magic.

take meds and stop gaslighting people

There certainly is a paranoid style in Linux politics (where "they" are out to get you.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com