> I cannot remember that I have ever been insulted in public, in fact I'm not used to getting insulted at all. And if people normally are able to say sorry. I and many others asked Mark to withdraw his comment and post an apology instead.
Ok, see here's the problem. The developer community, and especially the FOSS portion of the developer community, love to tout the fact that the community is a "meritocracy". But what does that mean? Certainly, insulting individuals (as opposed to their work product) is not in the spirit of a meritocracy.
...but neither is asking for an apology.
Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have made a technical decision. If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, the fate of their products will be determined by the merit of those decisions. That they also spilled so many vitriolic words in the direction of the "competition" should matter not at all.
If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, then the appropriate reaction would be to continue making the best decisions possible, producing the best products possible, and ignoring anything anyone says that does not speak to the merits of those decisions or products.
...if this is a meritocracy.
Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.
It's a little ironic to see this guy complaining about people insulting him. In porting Google Chrome to Linux we encountered a bug running under kwin, and my colleagues tracked the issue down to a bug in kwin and even wrote a patch that fixed the bug only to be met by rudeness from him.
(To be clear, it's fine with me if someone disagrees with some other software's UI decisions, but it's another thing to call those other people "stupid" when those decisions are to make use of an API you explicitly implemented, or call their code "broken" when the bug is demonstrably yours. Quoted words are his.)
"Is there any valid reason to change the code except Chromium? In general I am against changing our code to fix broken applications and Chromium is broken. They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."
Saying that a program and its behavior is stupid, is not a personal insult. For example, I think my gnome3 fallback menu bar is stupid for crashing when loading its icons for a particular sub menu (running unstable). I do not however think that gnome3 developers are stupid.
No I have not. On Debian Unstable, I always give the bugs a few months to sort themselves out. Could be a problem in the packages recent dependencies, graphic driver regression, or who knows.
I also want to do some preliminary debugging of the issue before sending in a bug report.
I know people are prone to take such remarks personally, but it's directed at the action, not the person. "You did something stupid" is not "You are stupid".
> I just have to use Chrom* because Opera committed suicide.
12.16 still works nicely (apart from Google+, which takes up unreasonable amounts of CPU time, but unfortunately there are some people there worth reading).
Being really clear that some suggestion is not right at all is totally different than getting personal. He's German and really direct regarding technical suggestions. Doesn't make him personal or rude.
"Is there any valid reason to change the code except Chromium? In general I am against changing our code to fix broken applications and Chromium is broken. They should just use the system titlebars and not do their own stupid things."
Recommending that they should not do their own stupid things describes the things that they are doing as stupid. I am not interesting in debating how many angels can dance on the head of this particular pin any further, I don't even have a dog in this bloody fight.
It's true for KDE in general. When KDE4 was being made, many many users implored them not to break things for the heck of it. But they went ahead and did it anyway. This ended in them calling their users are stupid and having no clue.
TBH, most people have moved away from KDE. There are very few people using KDE. Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity. They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.
Interesting. Please provide empirical evidence indicating that fewer people use KDE now than 10 years ago. Thanks.
> Everyone I know uses Ubuntu/Unity.
> They may not like Unity but KDE4/Plasma is worse.
I'm surprised that people who prefer Ubuntu would dislike a desktop environment that is highly configurable and allows knowledgeable users to take greater control of their computing experience.
> Interesting. Please provide empirical evidence indicating that fewer people use KDE now than 10 years ago. Thanks.
I'm one of the people that moved from KDE to Gnome after the fuck-ups with KDE 4.x. Plasma taskbar became unreadable after a few hours use and they kept blaming nvidia drivers when in fact plasma had a pixmap leak. I moved on and never looked back.
I would be interested in empirical evidence of the contrary too.
It seems likely that the percentage of linux users using KDE has shrank, while probably the total number went up, but I'd be very curious to get hard data.
KDE 4.0 was released almost 6 years ago, and I wish people would get over it. 4.11 is not the same software. It's very fast and stable, and if you develop for it, you can count on long-term compatibility. It's GNOME and Unity that break backward compatibility with new releases now. They certainly have the right to do that, and I respect their desire to move their desktop forward, but it means software like qtcurve no longer works for GTK because some developers don't want to have to rewrite for every GNOME release.
Well, it was very fast and stable. For the last few KDE major releases plasma-desktop has been segfaulting on a regular basis for me. I looked up the backtrace a few versions back and found a bugreport where a lot of people were experiencing the same issue; the developers confirmed it and reckoned that it was probably a bug in some new Qt functionality they'd moved to that they couldn't do much about.
Looks like it was fixed on 10/28, which is definitely a long turnaround since it was first posted 10 months ago. I suppose it took so long because it was a pretty specific situation (removing a notification while inserting one while hitting a 10 minute timer) but still, that just goes to show two things: the latest KDE has fixed a ton of bugs, even unusual ones like that, and KDE still needs more people looking at bugs so things like this can get a faster turnaround in the future.
If anyone does find something like this that isn't getting enough attention on the official bug reports, I'd suggest just mentioning it to a developer friend who uses KDE.
Funny thing that I actually moved away from ubuntu several years ago, and from gnome a little bit before that and
I wonder where you got your data, the 2013 /r/linux survey found out: "Just like last year, there is a lot of variety in what /r/Linux is using as it's graphical environment of choice with "Other" being the top category. The top three are KDE 4, Gnome 3, and XFCE. (...)
KDE 4.x was third last year. This year it moved up to first place.
For the second year in a row Unity wins "Most Hated Environment" of /r/Linux, followed by GNOME 3, KDE 4, and then KDE 3.
And gnome is well known for telling their users they're stupid and clueless, but I don't remember reading such a thing from kde in the ten years I've been using it.
> Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.
A thousand times this. Being a participant in various FOSS things and other projects I have come to learn that the idea of a meritocracy is a thought terminating cliche. It is perpetuated by the nerd culture around FOSS that can program beautiful stuff day in and day out but has a chronic deficiency in social ability.
I know it's kind of a worn-out point by now and I will probably gather downvotes for it, but that's the sad truth of the matter. As nerds, we like to reduce our reality to technicalities, those pesky old meat space constraints only hold us back! And that works well for a couple of years when one quarter of the community awakens to their social core, realizing the community around them in horror while another quarter of the community doubles down and goes borderline sociopathic. Then those two sides fight a bitter fight and the whole community suffers.
To me, all this comes down to one problem: centralization. If you don't reduce your scope and humble your ambition, you will fall by it. Happens. Every. Time. Canonical always aspired to be the Linux distro but to achieve that, it had to accept a cost to the community in form of collateral damage.
It's human constraints holding back FOSS. Ambition in the misguided few (sadly, mostly people who aspire to and assume leadership positions), carelessness and sheep behavior in the idealistic many.
There is no technical solution to this and technical solutions is what the majority of FOSS participants come in for. Only to find that - surprise! - the FOSS community has the same meat space constraints as every other goddamn thing on this planet. Until we put more emphasis on not letting social skills atrophy in this atrophy-enabling climate, this history will simply keep on repeating itself.
KDE and Ubuntu are different projects, with different objectives and managed by different people. Besides they have a very specific relationship: KDE is upstream and Ubuntu is downstream. I can't really see why there's a problem with meritocracy here as we're talking about different communities.
To put it simple: Canonical proposed a patch for KWin and KWin didn't accept it. Now Canonical can maintain that patch or not. End of the story.
That's why forks happen and that's one of the beautiful things of open source (if KWin doesn't meet Ubuntu needs: customize it!).
I think this post is about communication between upstream and downstream. If you ask me, I wish there was more Jono and less Mark. Canonical is trying to influence some external projects and it doesn't look like things are working as smooth as they could. "Open Source Tea Party"?
That's not how you make upstream accept your changes.
At the end I think Canonical will maintain any patch that upstream can't or doesn't want to accept, say KWin, Intel, or whatever. Eventually, if MIR is the future of Linux desktop, upstream projects will include support for it.
There sort of is. We're talking about a meritocracy regarding things that aren't done yet. X.org vs Wayland vs Mir... You tell me which one has better merits; other than X, I've only read blogs and seen some screenshots and block diagrams.
You could maybe base the merit on the process, but I think they'd all lose.
Feelings don't preclude a meritocracy, but the snippet I quoted implies that Martin's decision to disavow Ubuntu is (at least in part) a reaction to the lack of an apology. That is, he has made a decision based not on the merits of any technology or decision, but rather based on emotion. Hence, not a meritocracy...
Why? He's kwin maintainer based on merit. He'll continue to make decisions the way he did before.
What you're suggesting is that insults are acceptable. And if you read his posts correctly, he already explained that his decisions were based on technical merit. However, if the other side totally fails to be able to handle being judged on technical merit, then too bad for them.
My theory is that, with all the low hanging fruit already picked, technology gathering bigger crowds, innovation slowing down, the community is increasingly guided by politics. Maybe developers are tomorrow's lawyers.
> I cannot remember that I have ever been insulted in public, in fact I'm not used to getting insulted at all. And if people normally are able to say sorry. I and many others asked Mark to withdraw his comment and post an apology instead.
Ok, see here's the problem. The developer community, and especially the FOSS portion of the developer community, love to tout the fact that the community is a "meritocracy". But what does that mean? Certainly, insulting individuals (as opposed to their work product) is not in the spirit of a meritocracy.
...but neither is asking for an apology.
Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have made a technical decision. If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, the fate of their products will be determined by the merit of those decisions. That they also spilled so many vitriolic words in the direction of the "competition" should matter not at all.
If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, then the appropriate reaction would be to continue making the best decisions possible, producing the best products possible, and ignoring anything anyone says that does not speak to the merits of those decisions or products.
...if this is a meritocracy.
Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.