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
    1·
    4 months ago

    As the blogpost states, GNOME didn’t do anything to theming that couldn’t be received gracefully by downstreams like Ubuntu.

    It really is just a case of people leaning on GNOME for so long that they feel that they’re entitled to the decision-making process.

    • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      4 months ago

      I’m not really sure that’s true. After Gnome 2 got deprecated we saw a lot of new desktop environments appearing, with their own sets of default apps. Canonical famously tried it’s luck with Unity too.

      Pop OS building their own DE from the ground up isn’t people leaning on Gnome too much. It’s the second release in a row that makes Gnome less satasfactory for distro integration. We saw similar developments when Gnome 3 came out.

      Of course GTK apps are still a pain, and even more of a pain with GTK 4, to integrate. I don’t really have the feeling that the Gnome guy is speaking for application developers as much as he claims to. A lot of app developers stuck to GTK 2 to the bitter end and younger devs don’t even consider native widget systems any more, it’s all electron apps, if there is a desktop app at all. I think that’s a missed chance (of course also not centrally styleable).