System76: A Case Study on How Not To Collaborate With Upstream
blogs.gnome.org
Preface: the following post was written in the context of the events that happened in September. Some time has passed, and I held off on publishing in the hopes we could reach a happy ending with System76. As time has passed, that hope has faded. Attempts to reach out to System76 have not been productive,...

Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

System76 is best known for spreading misinfo and lies about GNOME and other upstreams, selling overpriced re-branded clevos, “being made in America”, loving rust and hyping on twitter and mastodon.

Most of the “backlash” against GNOME comes from the a community that has more opinions than users or just straight up misinformation and spite.

COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone. They basically created the caricature of GNOME’s adwaita but now you can paint your windows in whatever barf-inducing color you want.

They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time, literally every issue that sparked that redesign was resolved upstream in both aforementioned desktops.

  • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
    121·
    4 months ago

    You can pin files on your sidebar. The COSMIC designers didn’t realize how inefficient this is compared to just a starring/labeling system. The sidebar should be for bookmarked directories, pinning files makes no sense.

    Also menu bar items combined with symbolic icons on window title-bar is just so unappealing, it’s like they decided to do the opposite of GNOME just for kicks and not understanding why those design decisions were made in the first place.

    Imagine having a desktop that is just gnome extensions speed-dont-laugh

    • Edie [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      10·
      4 months ago

      Also menu bar items on window title-bar is just so unappealing, it’s like they decided to do the opposite of GNOME just for kicks and not understanding why those design decisions were made in the first place.

      Lmao. They decided to have a GNOME like appearance, but not even follow the design decisions. I might like KDE more, but if you’re going to go with GNOME-esque don’t do that shit.

      ⓘ This user is suspected of being a cat. Please report any suspicious behavior.

      • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
        3·
        4 months ago

        They really went and invented their own desktop just because they got mad that they had to spend an evening or two every 6 months to port their gnome extension.

        There is a schadenfreude I feel now that they’ve decided to take on a job that nobody wants: making a desktop for a userbase with more complaints than users.

    • Saapas@piefed.zipBanned from communityEnglish
      4·
      4 months ago

      But if it is so inefficient then why not just… not pin files there? I dunno it doesn’t seem like it takes anything from you to have that option lol