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.

  • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    4 months ago

    The things some linux users are mad about kinda baffle me. Hostility towards gnome is one of them. I don’t like the default experience but haven’t had any issues with extensions, but I don’t get updates to gnome as soon as they are released. It’s annoying that system76 fed into that to promote their own stuff. Cosmic looks cool for the tiling options, and it would be nice if it’s more efficient, but otherwise it doesn’t seem that remarkable.

    Flatpaks are another area of hated that confuse me. The amount of misinfo about how they work is baffling to me. People will install and troubleshoot arch and act like it’s the easiest thing in the world and then throw their hands up and walk away if they have to open flatseal for some reason. It can be annoying if the flatpak doesn’t work right or is shoddy, but sandboxed apps are good. Having everything installed system wide is a bad practice. Having to use unnofficial repositories if you want a newer version of an app is a security risk. Having app developers have to support every popular distribution and their current libraries is burden they shouldn’t have to deal with.

    • hello_hello [undecided, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      2·
      4 months ago

      The hostility towards gnome comes from the fact that gnome is visible, successful, evolving and innovating (also they are woke). People hate flatpak because flatpak is adjacent to gnome and normalizing the desktop. Also elitist Linux users are terminally online and ramble about the “good old days” or whatever about things nobody cares or knows about or moved past from.

      “There are languages people complain about and there are languages nobody uses.” Type shit.

      People should be mad about the tortured economics of trying to provide a free desktop to people, instead they choose to be mad about software not following the emacs school of software design and “muh Unix philosophy”

      • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        The recent “disable middle click paste by default” thing that just popped up is another example. You’ll get several comments about how users use it all the time and turning it off by default is the next step to disabling the feature altogether and a whole bunch of crap about how user hostile gnome devs are because they’ll have to enter a command in the terminal to re-enable it.

        It blows my mind that people will spend hours tweaking kde or hyperland or editing config files directly, and then act completely flummoxed that they have to download gnome-tweaks to get a gui for advanced customization.