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Comment by nilved | Hacker News Reader

I read this article and was very confused about how somebody could create an open source project that lead to actual death threads. Then I googled Lennart Poettering and it all made sense. PulseAudio and systemd make for a particularly wretched resume: Poettering is probably responsible for more frustration to Linux users than anybody else right now. Not that I'm not going to condone online harassment or blame the victim, but I am a little happy that this harassment is based on technical merits instead of appearance or sexual orientation as is normally the case.

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Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them. Yet the software seems quite popular.

Sometimes someone has to step up to do the dirty work and write software that can only give mediocre results. I think he's getting flack as the scapegoat for the general consumerization of Linux (ala ubuntu, gnome, etc).

Really, if people don't like these systems, or if they weren't worth the trouble, why not do something about it? They sound like itches that could be scratched. That was the spirit of a previous, less popular open source movement. Now it's full of useless bitching assholes who will spend 10x the time complaining over time actually fixing.

Note: I'm not saying that you personally are in that category. But this guy should be able to respond with "fix it, fork it, or fuck off."

>> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them.

This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were "not invented here."

That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That he may be a good developer, but what he does has less to do with engineering merit and more to do with politics.

(I'm not asking combatitively, I'm genuinely curious)

Wouldn't RedHat be the one to blame here? And the complicity of other distro vendors who also included it? RedHat doesn't back KDE, but KDE does quite well.

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