I hear you on this, thinking about it I'd like to ask you what would be a
solution to this rather recurrent issue/problem we're facing from the Linux
side of the spectrum? What would be a solution or a framework that could
somehow negate most of the effects of this particular problem?. I grew up
tired as well from this bs that clearly affects OpenBSD appeal to the
masses. But, in life I've learned to make decisions, and no decision is
free and I just pay the bill and live peacefully away from bullshit and bad
software.
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 1:38 PM, Marc Espie es...@nerim.net wrote:
Basically, we have a pattern, mostly observed with kde (and a bit with
gnome) which is really harmful for us.
Those vendors say we're not in the distribution business, distribution
problems will be handled by OS vendors. We can break compatibility to
advance, and not think about it, this is not a problem.
This is a mindset we need to fight, and this has to be a grass-roots
movement.
The main effect of THAT attitude is to *HURT* the opensource community,
big time. It's as harmful as the patent portfolio of big business.
Basically, it precludes smaller players from playing on a level field.
As soon as you're different enough (and that's mostly NOT linux these
days), you can't keep up. Those distribution problems are LARGE.
They occupy a few people in our team FULLTIME with respect to gnome,
they're
the reason we still DON'T have a full kde4 in our tree (hopefully to be
addressed shortly), and they're the reason why sometimes we do drop old
stuff (like killing gtk+1, and people really wanting to kill some gtk2/qt3
stuff).
It takes a lot of manpower to address complex distribution issues. If you
don't have tens of people, it becomes more and more of a losing battle,
actually...
It's also quickly turning Posix and Unix into a travesty: either you have
the linux goodies, or you don't. And if you don't, you can forget anything
modern...
in some cases, you even have some people, who are PAID by some vendors,
agressively pushing GRATUITOUS, non compatible changes. I won't say names,
but you guys can fill the blanks in.
I'm pretty sure there's a lot of good intention behind the progress in
recent desktops. But this is turning the field of OS distributions into
a wasteland. Either you're a modern linux with pulseaudio and pam and
systemd, or you're dying. So much for the pionneer spirit of opensource,
where you were free to innovate and do cool things, and more or less have
interesting software able to run on your machine...
