md8z

I am not trying to score points for any side, all of these projects can and do share code when it's practical and useful to do so. There is no "exclusivity", I'm sure you know that most of these licenses in use are compatible with each other. The end result is that we are already unwittingly on the same team, it took me a while to realize it but that's the whole reason things like Github and such have taken off. I'd love to discuss your experiences with that as a lawyer if you have any interesting stories, but I would have to ask you to please avoid the hostilities, that doesn't help when trying to fix issues. We both have the same access to the same code.

That seems dismissive and I don't know why you would be hearing that. If there is a way to do this that you think would not qualify as an excuse, then you should mention it, otherwise both of us are stuck to what we are limited to by these bodies that require rest and sustenance.

I'm making an honest offer to reach out and help and correct past wrongs, I am sorry if it's patronizing, if you want me to do something else then just ask. I'll be here if you change your mind. Please understand that if you refuse to take anything but complete agreement for an answer then it is going to be very difficult for anyone to help you, I can relate to your experiences but I'll never be able to experience them fully myself. So in that way, the ball is in your court.

Don't worry about my project, I'm only commenting here to help you and to explain that those other opinions are not shared by everyone. In fact commenting on social media is usually a waste for my projects as it only seems to attract more negative/toxic comments from people who (incorrectly) assume that I share all my opinions with an upstream project or something like that.

Sorry to hear that but I think on some level it is personal. I have never experienced any of what you're talking about, everyone I've talked to has been pretty respectful and open to collaboration. It's a large project so experiences may differ, we may not have ever interacted with the same people, or you may have caught them on a bad day, etc.

On those individual things, you can certainly make apps outside flatpak although on a technical level I think that flatpak (or a similar packaging mechanism) is going to be the best option for a great number of apps, and I would expect that to become the focus for many app developers just because it's a lot easier and saves time. I think that comment about Adwaita is pretty inflammatory and may be seen as being against the code of conduct, not sure, but it certainly isn't my view and I doubt it is the view of the majority of contributors.

"neglecting basic functionality like thumbnails in the filepicker for almost two decades, even with literally hundreds of pull requests with suggested fixes."

I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm very disappointed to see this issue get continuously brought up, I don't think there is much we can say that is productive at this point. I've never seen a pull request from this that was actually finished to completion. Is there someone in particular you're waiting for to approve this? If so, can you think of something that could help them out? Or do you think they don't want help at all? Because from my perspective, that is not the case.

Edit: Also, hundreds of pull requests to implement thumbnails? Is that an exaggeration? I'd like to see a list of all of those if possible.

Keep in mind, it's not unusual for a large patch to go through many revisions before finally making it in. Take a look at the Linux kernel for another example, you don't have to look far to see many patches that take a long time to go through review or just never make it in because of various reasons. I don't think you are being fair by painting this as a GNOME behavior, it is simply reality on large projects with a lot of complexity and moving parts. It sounds like you are also saying systemd suffers from the same issues (it probably does) but unfortunately it seems that is another area where it's a complex problem space, so that's the trade-off that you make.

There actually are a good number of paid contributors from small companies, and also a good number of volunteers too. That's what I have seen.

Don't feel discouraged if your first contributions didn't make it in, GNOME is a big project so I'm sure you could find some other areas to contribute to if you really wanted. Keep in mind that core areas such as the shell and GTK are probably bad places for first time contributors as they tend to be very complex, it's best to start with a smaller app/library and go from there. Of course if you don't want to contribute then you don't have to either, but I think all of this applies to most large open source projects that I have seen.

Sorry that was your experience but you should probably know, stylesheets and extensions have never actually been considered stable. I don't know what distribution you were using but if you were using those things, it would probably make sense to wait until they're fully tested before upgrading. If all the extensions/stylesheets you're using are complex then it seems it would take a lot more time to update those, sadly. Yes I know this thread is trying to make a comment about unstable software, there are plenty of "stable" desktops you could use but in my experience those have a lot less feature velocity than the big "umbrella" projects. So it's a really trade-off, it seems that at some point you will have to sacrifice some of those beloved features if you want to prioritize something else, such as stability or portability or design choices or anything else really.

I've read the blogs and I don't really agree with any of your comments in the second paragraph, especially the part about destroying themes. I'm currently developing against libadwaita and one of the benefits that it (already) brings is much better theming support. I also have never actually seen the code of conduct enforced on anybody, most people I interact with are very respectful. Although if you have something you want to ask to Tobias then you might consider asking him directly, I can't speak for him. Just please remember to be kind.

"They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this."

That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.

Please avoid such hostility, open source is a team sport and we are all on the same team, even projects that do things in ways that may be not immediately useful to you or I. That kind of hostility is what leads to open source people burning out.

I am not sure why you think they don't have a "share-it-back" mentality or why you would wish any project failure. They use mostly the same set of open source licenses as KDE.

"I've also infuriatingly gotten a 'patches welcome' response before, and then simply faced the 'that's not in our vision' response upon providing a patch."

That has been my experience on quite a few FOSS projects. I had to learn that the hard way (on other projects, not GNOME). Some are more conservative than others, some may delay making a decision until after they get a patch, etc. Ultimately, since it's your time, you have to do your research before you decide to spend months working on a patch or however much time you plan.

Since GNOME is a large umbrella project then it can vary between sub-projects, I have noticed the ones that are popular and user-facing tend to have a much higher bar for contribution and are much more "cathedral-like" in their design approach, and they kind of have to be if they want to have any kind of semblance of stability. So I don't think it really helps much to blame any project for this or call them "bad eggs", it's their choice of how they want to do things.

I'm not sure what that has to do with the Unix philosophy, Windows also has a lot of APIs between subsystems.

Yes, part of it is the inhibitor API although IIRC there are some other parts. GDM and GNOME share the same implementation of this API so they should at least do the right thing, not sure about other desktops and login managers.

Edit: The other part is the device handling logic in logind: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/org.freedes...

Older tools which may use suid helpers to open these devices will probably stomp all over the logind handling.

I have no idea about some of those other desktops, but all the basic moving parts are mostly necessary:

- logind because you probably still want lid/sleep events to work when at a VT

- gdm because you probably still want lid/sleep events to work while nobody is logged in

- desktop settings because different users may want different things to happen on those events

I'm a little confused as to why the gdm settings were needed, at least for me those only take effect when the greeter is actually open. And in GNOME the separate screensaver daemon has been removed, in part because it simplifies the whole equation.

"over time software should converge on being bug free"

Yeah, and the way that's done is by refactoring things, removing buggy/deprecated things, and not adding any more new features/requirements... So, pick your poison, I guess? I'd love to go move on to the next job as much as the next person, but somebody still has to be paid to do those things. I don't see what the significant difference is there with free-with-paid-support, if you pay for it up front you're still paying the same cost.

By default I think the simplest model is to just use references, that should work if you don't move anything into the async task.

AFAIK the win32 API is kept backwards compatible by doing exactly as we describe, shipping older versions of the system libraries and automatically using them when it's detected that an application needs them. So it's the same thing you call a "hack". Please don't misunderstand, I'm not saying backwards compatibility is bad. But it does cost a non-trivial amount of money and time, it's not just a magic solution to reduce the maintenance cost of something down to zero. If you're doing a cost comparison, that always has to be taken into account.

Glibc isn't really a good example, that has a ton of unfortunate broken APIs that should probably be removed entirely (the most notorious example probably being gets) but never will be, and I suspect they will continue to be a source of bugs as long as applications use them and aren't patched. I mean the whole reason musl exists is to get away from some of these maintenance issues in glibc.

I'm still not sure I understand, it sounds like a solution exists and both Steam and Flatpak are working towards it. I don't see why nvidia can't also do the same things.

I hope you can see that "keep libraries backwards compatible forever" is not really a good option either and is probably orders of magnitude more work than just doing all the things you said. In some situations, it is also impossible: if there are bugs in the API contract then it has to be broken eventually.

I keep hearing people say that, but how do you propose we write software that has no bugs and does everything perfectly right the first time? That seems impossible.

IME, using reference counts there is also not a good idea. In practice I think it's better to treat async tasks just like goroutines and then use channels to communicate.

I don't understand, isn't the original complaint here that everything needs support eventually?

I don't see why that's any bigger problem than anything else, flatpak includes mesa as part of the SDK: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/available-runtimes.html#f...

If there ends up being a problem with libstdc++ and LLVM, it's not hard to statically link those, if it's not being done already.

I'm not sure what you mean, this is exactly what Flatpak and Snap were meant to solve. IIRC Steam should also bundle older copies of the libraries needed.

Well that does sound like a lot, I hope you can negotiate for a raise at some point.

Long-term I'm not sure what you mean building solutions for the next decade, it seems quite hard to design something perfectly in hindsight. And of course you have to compare the cost of it to just slapping something in a VM and putting a firewall over it and calling it a day...

I am not following you around, I just happened to read the same thread because System76 developers were in it, they are the ones who I follow. It even seems that you went out of your way to insert yourself into the conversation and make yourself noticed. Yes I read reddit sometimes even though I don't have an account there. I didn't even notice it was you until the bottom of the conversation thread when I happened to look at the name on one of the posts. If you are not comfortable with somebody noticing that you use multiple websites then you may want to use a different username when you post to a different site. Please understand that it is fairly common for people on here to discuss the same things on multiple sites and to use the same handle on multiple sites, e.g. twitter, reddit, medium, mastodon, etc. If you had tweeted at GNOME or System76 developers for example, I may have noticed that too if I was reading about this subject on twitter.

Also, just to reply to your other paragraph:

- I never claimed you are evil, I don't think you are evil. I never even used that word, so please stop with the accusations. I think you are a fine person, and if you'll notice I said before my main goal was to help you.

- Please avoid making baseless generalizations about things. "Gnome has a well deserved bad reputation among a lot of developers" is vague and inflammatory and is a potentially harmful statement. Again if you want to discuss the specific issue of GNOME and KDE theming, I'd love to talk about that, but making these inflammatory statements based on some rather benign comments on one bug report is not helpful.

- If I have misrepresented something then I apologize, it's an accident, please feel free to correct me if that's the case.

- If you cannot address my comments as a whole then we can start with one at a time. And previously I also suggested that we just restart the discussion entirely.

"I said that there were several developers paid full time to work on Gnome. Mostly they're being paid for by other companies, companies like redhat."

That's true but then you are talking about Red Hat or some other company, not GNOME. GNOME itself is not a company nor is it synonymous with Red Hat. This is a common source of confusion that I see, if you want to criticize some actions of Red Hat then you can just do that, no need to turn it into an unrelated discussion about GNOME.

"We seem to be disagreeing on public facts. In 2018 they brought in $1,073,797, in 2019 they brought in $915,646 and in 2020 the brought in $925,189. ... If you're going to claim I'm wrong on such a basic and verifiable fact I don't really think we have enough common ground to have any sort of discussion, we're just living in different realities."

No, we are not disagreeing on public facts. I mentioned this, those were because of one time donations. The number in 2021 and in 2017 is much less. Please re-read my comment, thanks, I can re-state what I said if you want. I can also provide additional public sources for this if you don't believe me, just ask. Edit: Also, another thing I want to say is that even if that were a regular thing, a million dollars a year is still a really piddling amount for a US-based non-profit. That is enough to hire a maximum of like 10 full time staff. From what I have heard from the foundation, they don't have nearly enough money to do much besides the bare minimum, if they had more money to hire developers then that would probably go further towards getting some of the long-standing issues fixed that the member companies are not incentivized to fix.

"You're making a lot of very negative assumptions about not a lot of text, like claiming that I think a bunch of students should get a bad reputation because they worked on Gnome, which is just so out there that I don't understand how you'd reach that conclusion from what I've written."

Sorry, let me make it perfectly clear. I am assuming good faith, I don't think that's what you meant about those students, nor am I reaching the conclusion you've suggested. But my point is that what you are saying can unintentionally cause damage to them, and so that's why I'm asking you to stop. If you think this is a stretch, well, it's not, I have seen some newer contributors that were very upset by the various negative comments on social media, when they did nothing to deserve that level of vitriol.

I don't really have any interest to pull this conversation off Hacker News, there is nothing more along those lines that I can say here that hasn't already been said. Again please re-read my comment. Also please understand that when you lead the conversation by suggesting that it's ok to assume bad faith, and saying you think people deserve to suffer reputational damage, that's not really a good incentive for me at least to want to reach out to you professionally. I talked about this before but to me that is the worst possible motivator. Can we please discuss technical stuff? Why is it so hard to do this? If you want to continue then please just put aside your conceptions of what you think other people have done that bothered you, I'm sympathetic to your frustration but those people are not here. You are talking to me, not them. If you really just want to vent, that's fine, but this is not the place to do it, and I am not the right person who can listen to that. Whatever your beef is with someone, I hope you can resolve that, but please don't make other people guilty by association.

"Gnome is a foundation with at least a few developers paid to work on it full time"

This is incorrect, the GNOME foundation does not pay any developers. They paid one developer once for a few years but they don't anymore. There is staff working for the foundation but they handle the administration, not development. Pretty much all development is handled by volunteers.

"They bring in almost one million in 'revenue' per year"

This is also incorrect. There was one year they brought in that much, and it was because of Handshake, and the year after that was another big one time donation. A lot of open source nonprofits also saw a bump in funding for that year because of that and the Pineapple Fund, that amount is not normal, take a look at their financial report for all the other years. Happy to provide more details here. That money was the only reason they were able to fund a developer, it was enough to fund literally one developer for a couple years, and now it's gone, so yeah. In fact I think the feeling at the foundation has been that they don't really want to rely on those big one time donations, because, well they're unreliable.

"My basic tenant is that when you make choices that make it difficult for developers to work with you, when you fail to cooperate and compromise, then you're going to suffer reputation damage. Reputational damage has all kinds of effects, one of which is that in situations like these people are going to look at what you say with a bit more skepticism. Another is that you're going to get people recommending against using your project."

Again I have no idea what you're talking about here. Please explain what choices and please explain who failed to cooperate. You are generalizing and it's not fair. If you want more info on what I mean, take a look at some of the GSOC projects that were done this year: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2021/organizatio...

These students are part of GNOME, they are newcomers looking to contribute in meaningful ways and help improve things, you may not care about those projects in particular but the new contributors may stay around and eventually fix issues that matter to you some day. When you make these sweeping statements you are lumping them in with everything else and it's very rude to these students to say this when they haven't done anything wrong or even participated at all in the disagreements that you were bothered by. Are you honestly saying you think they deserve reputational damage? And that's not even getting into all the other hundreds of contributors who also had nothing to do with any of your complaints.

"Gnome developers probably won't be open to collaborating on anything unless it directly benefits the Gnome project in a pretty major way."

I don't understand why you are saying this. That is every developer. Do you think KDE developers are going to work on something that only benefits XFCE? Or do you think System76 will stop working on their own desktop to do work on LXQt? I don't think they will, they will work on what matters to them which is their own projects. How else would you suggest they do it? I mean, I think it would be great if everyone was able to take a day out of the week to fix bugs in some other project but that's unfortunately not realistic.

"That's a very strong claim considering what I said was 'When does it become reasonable to assume bad faith?'."

I stand by what I said. Please don't assume bad faith. I used to do that often and I stopped because I realized it was just toxic negativity. It was making me miserable and I wasn't able to trust people or look at things objectively. It also was spreading to people around me and making everyone else become more miserable and cruel, that's what I mean by dangerous. It can really hurt people and destroy relationships.

"For example, I do believe that the switch to libadwaita is going to make things more difficult for people building apps on GTK4, because I think that they're going to move more and more important functionality into it and leave GTK4 to more or less waste away. I suspect that we're going to see a lot of stuff that could have easily been part of GTK4 become part of libadwaita instead, and that's going to make things measurable more difficult for everyone making GTK based desktop environments."

I am currently working on an app that uses libadwaita and I completely disagree with this. Most of what was in libadwaita was already stuff that was in libhandy in some form (and maybe libdazzle for a few things, I can't remember). Piling more widgets into GTK itself will just make things worse, it is actually a really bad place to put things if you want to iterate on widgets and designs, because everything that gets put there is going to be somewhat contentious. I have said this elsewhere, but if you sourced your information from social media then a lot of what you read about libadwaita is probably misinformation.

I am not going to comment on facebook because I have basically no relevant first hand experience with them. I also am not going to speculate with you based on second hand accounts we might have read in the news. Sorry. You'll have to ask those questions to somebody else who is able to answer them.

"and isn't intended to apply to large businesses"

This makes no sense to me, GNOME is not a large business.

"I think suffer is a bit of an exaggeration"

You were saying before that they should face consequences. I was just quoting you here, if you didn't mean you wanted them to suffer backlash for some actions then please explain otherwise.

"expecting me not to tell people about that or to pretend it didn't happen is asking far too much."

I never said I expected you to do any of this, you are making false assumptions. Please stop, you may want to go re-read my previous comments.

"Gnome is responsible for Gnome's bad reputation ... Gnome can make whatever bad decisions they want, but they don't get to be free from criticism for those decisions"

This also is vague and makes no sense to me. What bad reputation? What behavior? What bad decisions? What criticism? Who are you referring to when you say GNOME? The foundation? The designers? The maintainers? All of the above? That's at least hundreds of people, many of them volunteers, so are you saying they all make bad decisions all the time every day about everything? Please be more specific than this, remember that GNOME is not a company, it is a large and loosely connected open source project with lots of people who have differing opinions.

This is again why I really advise that you not take this angle when you're trying to discuss this, when you do this it is extremely difficult to figure out what you're actually talking about and what problem needs to be addressed. If you want to take this in a productive direction then please, don't even bother answering the questions I asked above, and just mention your specific complaint so we can re-start from the beginning. Also please try to avoid making platitudes and generalizations, and please avoid saying things that have already been said multiple times, that is not an interesting conversation. I'm trying to help you here so you don't have to feel the need to keep repeating yourself, I'm sure that you can also acknowledge that it is not ideal when you have to do that.

Well in my opinion, it is never appropriate here, because it is against the HN guidelines:

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

To me it is not intellectually rewarding to have a conversation talking about how someone else is a jerk or talking about how we want to make someone else suffer. Especially if the "action" you're trying to punish someone for (i.e. doing bug triage) is something that is a completely normal part of any open source project. I've noticed that once the conversation gets into that mode, it seems fairly impossible to have any kind of constructive dialogue. I just want to talk about technical stuff related to these desktops. It's really exhausting and hard to do that when every comment thread devolves into the airing of grievances against some developer based on some comments that were made years ago. I mean, come on, we are a smart bunch, we can do better than this.

Edit: And I think what you've said is really dangerous, I have to ask you to please stop that line of thinking. You are talking about making people suffer for something that you acknowledge is just an assumption. If you know that there is bad faith happening then that's a different story, you would flag it and then the moderators here will usually ban the person if they keep doing it. But you didn't say that you knew it was happening, you said it was an assumption. I hope you can see how that's not fair to anybody, I don't think you would want to be punished for people making untrue assumptions about you either.

Out of spite for what? It's open source, nobody owes each other anything. Please don't assume bad faith and please do not take it personal if someone declined a feature request. You may also want to see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29176890

I have not really seen much popularity for those forks. And I'm honestly not trying to handwave anything away. This is like, literally every open source project. You have to adjust your workflow to use anything, a desktop can't do that for you. If you decide "I hate GNOME/XFCE/KDE/whatever I'm never going to use it" and then switch to something else then you have to adjust your workflow again and then they have to pay the maintenance cost. So I really do not get why there is so much resistance to any particular project pushing a certain workflow, or what you want me to say that would make you happy. I hope you can understand if someone refuses to ever take "no" as an answer to a feature request than it is probably that person who is being unreasonable there, that is going to guarantee that they face disappointment. I apologize if this seems on-the-nose but this started as a response to someone claiming that some behavior is hostile, so I think it is really important to re-adjust the expectations here.

I'm really disappointed to see the thumbnail thing get brought up yet again, it's extremely exhausting to keep having to come back to that issue over and over. None of those patches in your comment appear to have ever been finished for various reasons. We could get into it and try to play the blame game here but also I hope you can understand how that isn't helpful. I know you are posting it in good faith, and if you have something new to add to the conversation that would move it forward and resolve the situation then I'd be glad to listen. But otherwise I have to say I'm sorry, I am not interested to go pick apart 5, 10, 15 year old comments on a bug tracker. Especially if the end goal is just speculating at how we think some developers may or may not have acted like jerks.

Edit: And I don't even work on this stuff, I bet you can imagine how the GNOME people feel after getting brigaded every few months from reddit and 4chan commenters complaining about how something isn't done yet...

It is actually not straightforward to switch the code. In general, you cannot really just swap out a GUI toolkit, that influences the design of the entire program. If there are good security focused libraries that work here, and there is a reasonable upgrade path for them, then I would expect GNOME to also start migrating towards that too.

I personally wouldn't bet on their desktop, in the past few weeks their developers have made a number technical statements that seem very bizarre and confusing to me, and have openly said they don't really have the manpower to keep up with GNOME.