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

    I saw a few cases of those situations happening recently System76 / Pop! OS finds a bug (where ‘find’ often means that they confirm an existing upstream bug is impacting their OS version)

    They write a patch or workaround, include it in their package but don’t upstream the change/fix (or just drop a .patch labelled as workaround in a comment rather than submitting it for proper review)

    Later-on they start commenting on the upstream (Ubuntu, GNOME, …) bugs trackers, pointing out to users that the issue has been addressed in Pop! OS, advertising how they care about users and that’s why they got the problem solved in their OSSystem76 / Pop! OS team, while you should be proud of the work you do for you users I think you are going the wrong way there. Working on fixes and including them early in your product is one thing, not upstreaming those fixes and using that for marketing you as better than your upstreams is a risky game.

    None of you read the article it is impossible on hexbear to expect people to read the original article. angery

    • chgxvjh [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      I read the article. But it’s also not the first time I’ve heard about the story and I don’t think you can go to the Gnome blog for a neutral perspective. There are other sources reporting that popos does upstream fixes.

          • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
            11·
            4 months ago

            Considering how many people have dogshit “takes” on GNOME about how they secretly hate theming and GTK is their personal playground to bully everyone, yeah it did.

            Also I don’t know where you come from, but posting passive aggressive ultimatums against volunteers in developing software is not a good look.

            edit: found the gitlab mr the blog was referring to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/232

            This API may be interesting for developers which do not want to give up support for themes. That’s not my case. The GNOME Files app hasn’t supported themes for a very long time, there is no reason to explicitly opt-in to themes now. As a co-maintainer of a core app, I’m not looking forward to the added support burden. So, my initial reaction to the proposed API addition is that I don’t intend to use it in nautilus.

            (J. Soller from S76)

            do you want nautilus to remain the default file manager for Pop!_OS and Ubuntu?

            okay-okay I love passive aggressiveness on an issue tracker. Truly makes people like you.

            Reposting the tweet here so someone reading this doesn’t get it twisted:

            J soller from S76 tweeted this

            “What we will do instead is replace GNOME components entirely if it becomes too costly to apply our style to them. Come up with a way forward for custom styles, or lose users.”,

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

              Not sure hate is the right word but Gnome sure seems to be getting rid of application theming. That’s what at least half the post is about.

              volunteers IBM employees

              I really don’t get what your problem with sollers question here is. Of course he needs to know whether a compromise can be found with the Gnome project because it takes years to develop replacements. Of course he needs to make the call at some point whether it’s more productive to continue work with Gnome or build something new and if you read the tweets it seems like it takes him fairly long to actually realize that gnome is removing theming, so he probably feels lead on.

              I really don’t understand why you are so upset about the decision of developing replacements after Gnome refused to continue providing theming support for their apps. For a desktop environment being able to theme the file browser seems like a pretty sensible requirement.