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Comment by evmar | Hacker News Reader

It's a little ironic to see this guy complaining about people insulting him. In porting Google Chrome to Linux we encountered a bug running under kwin, and my colleagues tracked the issue down to a bug in kwin and even wrote a patch that fixed the bug only to be met by rudeness from him.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=15698#c3...

(To be clear, it's fine with me if someone disagrees with some other software's UI decisions, but it's another thing to call those other people "stupid" when those decisions are to make use of an API you explicitly implemented, or call their code "broken" when the bug is demonstrably yours. Quoted words are his.)

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What are we supposed to be looking at. I've searched that entire thread for the word "stupid" and I can't find it. I also don't see the rudeness.

"Is there any valid reason to change the code except Chromium? In general I am against changing our code to fix broken applications and Chromium is broken. They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."

From: https://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/4396/

That is an attack on code, not people. It has no resemblance to Shuttleworth's remarks.

> "They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."

This is a personal insult.

The word "They" refers to Chromium.

Saying that a program and its behavior is stupid, is not a personal insult. For example, I think my gnome3 fallback menu bar is stupid for crashing when loading its icons for a particular sub menu (running unstable). I do not however think that gnome3 developers are stupid.

Have you reported the bug upstream? I'm a GNOME developer and I haven't heard of this crash.

No I have not. On Debian Unstable, I always give the bugs a few months to sort themselves out. Could be a problem in the packages recent dependencies, graphic driver regression, or who knows.

I also want to do some preliminary debugging of the issue before sending in a bug report.

He's criticizing a design decision, an inetention, not a bug.

I know people are prone to take such remarks personally, but it's directed at the action, not the person. "You did something stupid" is not "You are stupid".

It's inflammatory, sure. But it's not a personal insult, the "they" is collective.

    (map stupid-behavior! chrome-developers)

Honestly, Chrom* is broken everywhere. Particularly in XP. I have mine black and the bastard Chrom* chooses to be blue.

In general Google apps play very bad with desktop standards. Logical, regarding their position about the desktop.

I just have to use Chrom* because Opera committed suicide.

I have mine black and the bastard Chrom chooses to be blue.*

The horror.

XP? Really?

It's time to let go of a 12-year-old OS.

I triple boot XP, Windows Seven and Ubuntu Saucy.

Some things (some games I like, ripping disks) are better done in XP.

> I just have to use Chrom* because Opera committed suicide.

12.16 still works nicely (apart from Google+, which takes up unreasonable amounts of CPU time, but unfortunately there are some people there worth reading).

Sounds like an argument about the code which could have done without the word "stupid", but it is not rude at all. And it does not attack any person.

Honestly, I agree.

I guess she meant this thread https://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/4396/ Don't know if that counts as rude or not.

Click through to the linked thread - https://svn.reviewboard.kde.org/r/4396/

Being really clear that some suggestion is not right at all is totally different than getting personal. He's German and really direct regarding technical suggestions. Doesn't make him personal or rude.

"these things you do are stupid" is not personal or rude?

You misquoted him. He didn't say that. He said:

Recommending that they should not do their own stupid things describes the things that they are doing as stupid. I am not interesting in debating how many angels can dance on the head of this particular pin any further, I don't even have a dog in this bloody fight.

It's true for KDE in general. When KDE4 was being made, many many users implored them not to break things for the heck of it. But they went ahead and did it anyway. This ended in them calling their users are stupid and having no clue.

TBH, most people have moved away from KDE. There are very few people using KDE. Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity. They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.

  > There are very few people using KDE.

Interesting. Please provide empirical evidence indicating that fewer people use KDE now than 10 years ago. Thanks.

  > Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity.
  > They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.

I'm surprised that people who prefer Ubuntu would dislike a desktop environment that is highly configurable and allows knowledgeable users to take greater control of their computing experience.

> Interesting. Please provide empirical evidence indicating that fewer people use KDE now than 10 years ago. Thanks.

I'm one of the people that moved from KDE to Gnome after the fuck-ups with KDE 4.x. Plasma taskbar became unreadable after a few hours use and they kept blaming nvidia drivers when in fact plasma had a pixmap leak. I moved on and never looked back.

I would be interested in empirical evidence of the contrary too.

It seems likely that the percentage of linux users using KDE has shrank, while probably the total number went up, but I'd be very curious to get hard data.

KDE 4.0 was released almost 6 years ago, and I wish people would get over it. 4.11 is not the same software. It's very fast and stable, and if you develop for it, you can count on long-term compatibility. It's GNOME and Unity that break backward compatibility with new releases now. They certainly have the right to do that, and I respect their desire to move their desktop forward, but it means software like qtcurve no longer works for GTK because some developers don't want to have to rewrite for every GNOME release.

Well, it was very fast and stable. For the last few KDE major releases plasma-desktop has been segfaulting on a regular basis for me. I looked up the backtrace a few versions back and found a bugreport where a lot of people were experiencing the same issue; the developers confirmed it and reckoned that it was probably a bug in some new Qt functionality they'd moved to that they couldn't do much about.

Could you post a link to the bug report? I'd like to look at it.

I'm fairly this was the bug report: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=311871 Apparently someone finally checked in a workaround a couple of days ago.

Looks like it was fixed on 10/28, which is definitely a long turnaround since it was first posted 10 months ago. I suppose it took so long because it was a pretty specific situation (removing a notification while inserting one while hitting a 10 minute timer) but still, that just goes to show two things: the latest KDE has fixed a ton of bugs, even unusual ones like that, and KDE still needs more people looking at bugs so things like this can get a faster turnaround in the future.

If anyone does find something like this that isn't getting enough attention on the official bug reports, I'd suggest just mentioning it to a developer friend who uses KDE.

Funny thing that I actually moved away from ubuntu several years ago, and from gnome a little bit before that and

I wonder where you got your data, the 2013 /r/linux survey found out: "Just like last year, there is a lot of variety in what /r/Linux is using as it's graphical environment of choice with "Other" being the top category. The top three are KDE 4, Gnome 3, and XFCE. (...) KDE 4.x was third last year. This year it moved up to first place.

For the second year in a row Unity wins "Most Hated Environment" of /r/Linux, followed by GNOME 3, KDE 4, and then KDE 3.

And gnome is well known for telling their users they're stupid and clueless, but I don't remember reading such a thing from kde in the ten years I've been using it.

2013 /r/linux survey: http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html#fav...

2012 /r/linux survey: http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/report.html#f...

  Evironment	Non-Server Users	Server Users	Total
  KDE 4.x	392	667	1059
  GNOME 3.x	376	627	1003
  XFCE  	378	605	983
  Unity 	342	438	780
  Cinnamon	378	397	775
  GNOME 2.x	213	463	676

Totalling the Gnome-based DEs [0], I get 4217 users versus 1059 users for KDE.

[0] http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html#fav...

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