On 6/20/22 00:44, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
There's a curious phenomenon going on in the Free and Open Source world. Whenever something reaches a state nearing perfection, the developers/maintainers toss it out and start again from scratch. Remember the transition from GNOME 2.32 to 3.0? Remember the upgrade from the latest KDE in the 3.x series to 4.0? Red Hat's implementation of KDE was one of the cleanest I've ever seen. So clean that they decided to ditch it completely and go for GNOME (meh).
Chuckling so hard I almost fainted.... Oh lord, you are singing to the choir. Most of my rants on this list have been about just that point. Yes, we lived through 11.0 with KDE 4.0.4a as the default desktop, and 200+ bugs later it wasn't much better. And don't even get me on my Gtk soapbox -- the general toolkit that became a basic library for Gnome, the 1000s of developers that had relied on the general nature of the toolkit be damned. But beyond the details, from a desktop standpoint, it all boils down to "Can I just get work done?" or do I have to spend an hour of my day collecting data and authoring a bug report for something that broke or doesn't work correctly. I'd much rather just use fluxbox or icewm and just work than fight with a file-manager that used to work perfectly but now can open up twice looking the same way it did the last time I opened it, etc.., etc... Your paragraph captures the program concisely. Imagine 10,000 person business that had committed to the Linux desktop in 2006 and trained all its employees to use a spectacularly good KDE3. And then less than two years later, after a long weekend for their IT team, they sit down to KDE 4.0.4a. The only thing worse would be if you had been a gnome theme writer for the past 15 years only to have what you tediously wrote today broken by the next (and almost every) minor version release of Gtk since (with planned continued breakage until 4.14 I think I read). There is a reason Gimp still has parts of Gtk+2 in it -- they deprecated the rulers in Gtk+3, despite the whole damn toolkit originating as the Gimp Tool Kit... (go figure) So in short, I feel and share your pain. The problem can be summarized as this. Projects used to go to great lengths to be community oriented (what's good for the community), and now we see that being replaced by what's expedient for the project. Linux isn't the same as it was 20 years ago, and that's a shame. But at the same time, it still fills a very important space for users around the globe (as well as being profitable for the parent companies). It brings the "means of creation" (be it documents, graphics, video, IT infrastructure, etc.) to the masses. The basic bargain is still the same, we will give you the means of creations, but please give back and help make it better. And while I may not agree with all the decisions various parts of the desktops or toolkits have taken over the last 20 years, the basic bargain is still the same. One other area I feel and share your pain is HEAT. I live in Texas, and yes we are used to HOT, but this June has shattered records all over the state. And that's a whole additional soapbox ... one no matter how bad we want to fix it -- we may be beyond the point where we can make any difference. Pleasant thought... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.