On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Mike Auty <[email protected]> wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > On 10/08/13 23:42, Wulf C. Krueger wrote: >> On 09.08.2013 02:26, Mike Auty wrote: >>> I could be a KDE developer, or a Gentoo documenter, or work on >>> mplayer. All those people are open source contributors and >>> necessary ones, but that doesn't mean that any of them >>> necessarily has the skills or the time to look after udev. Does >>> that invalidate their opinion on the choices of upstream project >>> they rely on? >> >> Yes, it does. > > In that situation then, developers are only developing for themselves? > What's more likely is that they've taken a gamble that most users > will simply accept their changes, which they deem as necessary to move > forward. > > That would be fine if there were alternative options, but as more and > more things are "vertically integrated" the choices made by one > project are knocking over into others. Before I could simply ignore > systemd and choose something else, now I'm having to choose between > using both Gnome and systemd, or neither. > > It is a difficult choice, but just as Gnome has chosen to forsake my > desire for a simplistic init system at the expense of a little boot > speed and some "features" I've never needed in the past, I'm having to > walk away to some other less well developed desktop environment. The > cost of ignoring their users opinions is losing the users themselves. > I don't know how many users they'll have to lose before someone > decides to take the ship in a new direction, but I would like to see > how many they stand to lose, by asking those who care to speak up and > find a way of being heard before the damage is too much to repair...
We have been having this discussion since GNOME 3.0 came out, and some would argue that since GNOME 2.0, or even before. The GNOME project will go where the developers of the GNOME project decide to, period. There is MATE if you really want the old GNOME 2, Cinnamon if you only want something similar to the old interface, or KDE/Xfce/E17 if you want to switch. Arguing with the GNOME developers like they don't know what they are doing is pointless at best, and frankly insulting at worst. They thought deeply about the changes that are being made to the desktop, and they discussed it and reached a consensus about what the direction of the project is; you can usually read about in the mailing lists, Planet GNOME, or even watch the videos from the GUADEC presentations. You can of course disagree with that direction: but acting like they, poor things, don't know what they are doing and need that someone go an tell them so they can know "before the damage is much to repair", is quite condescending. People have been predicting the dead of GNOME since before the 1.0 version came out, but right now it has more contributors than ever in the past, and at least half a dozen companies actually pay money to people to work in it, so perhaps they actually know what they are doing. But even if they don't, there are a couple forks you can try or several alternatives you can switch to if "the damage is too much to repair". And at the end of the day, all that code is 100% Free Software, with public repositories with all the history of the components of the project for all the world to see and use. The GNOME developers already made their decision. The GNOME maintainers in Gentoo followed through (like they have been doing in almost every other distro). Now it's up to each user to decide if she keeps using GNOME (and therefore switches, if necessary, to systemd since 3.8), or if she stops using it. Arguing about it is quite useless. Regards from a (very happy, very proudly) GNOME+systemd Gentoo user. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
