iGurublog

>Try not to turn people into strawmen.

As an aside, part of my frustration with talking to you is that specific problem. You're very early to dismiss complaints with things like

> (me) If an outsider does submit patches to scratch their own itch they can expect to at best be held to a much higher standard and at worst be treated quite rudely.

>> (you) This perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source.

Now I can point to at least a few instances of that happening, but I know from experience that the goalposts will likely move again. I can point to a well respected SDL developer saying "this architecture is not how anything else works and will cause significant issues for the SDL project, and therefor many games on linux" and a gnome developer saying "Fix the applications and libraries that claim the support Wayland, but don't do it properly.". Now even if they were right on a technical level (they weren't) that's no way to talk to your fellow open-source developers who were being very polite and explaining why the proposed architecture wouldn't work.

For that particular issue at some point gnome developers did step back and implement CSD.

But regardless, "this perception also grossly misrepresents or misunderstands open source" is completely out of line and where I decided you weren't worth talking to. I can point to multiple specific instances where gnome developers were rude, unhelpful, arrogant, etc, but I'd rather not drag into that. Like I…

Before I started to use Qt in my python projects, I was using GTK. At the time, there was no absolute reason for doing so - it was merely the first thing I tried.

For various reasons (memory is vague, it was a while back), I soon began to get frustrated with GTK.

Then I started reading various articles on the subject of 3rd-party Gnome theme designers getting extremely frustrated because for every point release of Gnome/Gtk, their themes broke in lots of annoying ways. I read about those frustrations, about incredulity that a point release introduced non-backwards compatible changes, about anger at Gnome developer's responses to those frustrations.

A very good article to read is http://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/

Gnome itself.. I stopped using Gnome desktop not long after that - the big push for me was the transition from being a great desktop environment in Gnome 2, to some horrible abomination in Gnome 3. Now, some people like Gnome 3's way of doing things, I don't. For similar reasons I refuse to have anything to do with Ubuntu's Unity.

The Gnome developer response to issues leaves something to be desired... "We know best, shut up!" is the best way I can describe my impression of them. There's something almost, dare I say it, Communist Party in my opinion, of how they do things. It puts me off.

I've been using KDE since then - it presents me with a desktop that's useful to me.

It also led me to try out the Qt library. What a…

> If you're willing to fiddle around, there are a few good themes that don't waste so much space.

The point of this "first impressions" exercise was to explore the happy path.

> It's not just Gnome that does that. There's an entire generation of designers that's cargo-culting mobile designs at the moment. Breeze, KDE's default theme, is equally space-wasting.

I would agree with that sentiment, though I didn't want to get into that flame war today. I think a lot of other people have already written extensively on this subject and I don't feel I can contribute anything new. Here are some relevant articles...

Several of these are about CSDs, which I think are a big point of contention with respect to the design philosophy of GTK/Gnome 3.X. This list does not include much about the KDE/Qt side, which I'm less familiar with.

I would certainly like to expand the side of this list on the "Pro Gnome" side in the interest of a more fair and balanced debate.

Pro Gnome 3.x:

Client-Side Decorations Initiative - https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/CSD

Restyling apps at scale - https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-at-scale/

Introducing the CSD Initiative - https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/01/26/csd-initiative/

Against Gnome 3.x:

Why do we keep building rotten foundations? - https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-building-rotten-foundations/

GNOME (et al): Rotting In Threes -…

Speaking for your opposition whilst misrepresenting their arguments is very dirty pool.

There are numerous long-term expert users and developers of Linux who've spoken against systemd, its design, its behavior, and its developers. Including Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Ted T'so, and Patrick Volkerding

(That's the original developer of Linux, the long-time second in command, the lead filesystem developer, and the Slackware distro's maintainer -- the oldest extant linux distro.)

Mark Shuttleworth, Eric Raymond, and Ian Jackson are notable other critics.

For actual arguments against systemd:

http://without-systemd.org/wiki/index.php/Arguments_against_systemd

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/

The laptop vs server divide:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2837182/linux/back-into-linux-systemd-wars.html

Bad design and bad attitude. One or the other might be survivable. Both are likely not.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2608798/data-center/systemd--harbinger-of-the-linux-apocalypse.html?page=2

Uselessd's observations on misrepresentations by systemd advocates:

http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/

Five troubles:

http://www.draketo.de/light/english/top-5-systemd-troubles

LWN on Debian's debates:
https://lwn.net/Articles/452865/

Wikipedia on Systemd's controversy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#History_and_controversy

I agree that a code of conduct is a great idea but I'm really bummed to read that the Django CoC is going to be adopted by golang.

1. The Django CoC uses very vague language on what it is forbidden and explicitly tells you that "this isn’t an exhaustive list of things that you can’t do" just to be extra vague in what constitutes unacceptable behaviour.

2. It does not define what process will be used to address CoC violations, being ejected from an OS project for violating the CoC can be a serious thing with personal and professional ramifications but an accused is not given the right to face their accuser nor the right to an impartial jury (which would be hard to do anyway since the accusation could be something like "he's making me anxious")

3. It overextends itself "violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them" which means that not only you are under the scrutiny of the kangaroo court when you are posting on golang spaces but everywhere else: ycombinator, reddit, your personal blog, etc. Honestly I feel like just writing this criticism is painting a target on my forehead, talk about safe spaces.

I wouldn't be making this comment if CoCs hadn't already been used in bad faith to attempt to character assassinate OS contributors (for exmaple the Kubuntu debacle or this [1])

[1] https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2015/06/04/

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/tso-and-linus-and-the-impotent-rage-against-systemd/

Yet just two days ago, we see Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux and maintainer of the Linux kernel), launching into a tirade against – yes, you guessed it – systemd developers because of their atrocious response to a bug in systemd that is crashing the kernel and preventing it from being debugged. Linus is so upset with systemd developer Kay Sievers (gee, where I have heard that name before – oh, that’s right, he’s the moron who refused to fix udev problems) that Linus is threatening to refuse any further contributions from this Red Hat developer, not just because of this bug, but because of a pattern of this behavior – a problem for Kay because Red Hat is also foaming at the mouth to have their kernel-based, no doubt bug- and security-flaw-ridden D-Bus implementation included in our kernels. Other developers were so peeved that they suggested simply triggering a kernel panic and halting the system when systemd is so much as detected in use.

The key phrase there is:

a bug in systemd that is crashing the kernel and preventing it from being debugged

Honestly though when you get Linus flaming your behavior you're doing something really wrong.