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> collaboration with GNOME and KDE Free software, or "why do anything once when you can do it twice for twice the cost and half as good?"

lightdot 9y ago
If you want to make a committee and decide for everybody what should or shouldn't be worked on, by all means, go ahead. Or agitate against projects online, that works too. Should be a fun for you and funny for most others. Or you could just contribute to a project you find suitable, for whatever reason. Should be fun for everyone.
- hedora 9y ago
  This startup isn’t going to prevent things from being worked on by others, but if they can’t decide basic things like which gui toolkit to use, then they’ll burn through their (extremely limited) funding well before they have a working, let alone competitive, product. The mistake of “support every option in the community for version 1.0” has happened before. I suggest reading an OpenMoko postmortem (especially if you are somehow involved with this project). For this product to succeed they need to minimize the amount of time and resources they spend getting to a phone that works as a daily driver. Someone else can port qt/gtk/elightenment/etc to it after that happens. Otherwise, there will be no sustainable hardware platform to port those things to.
andrepd 9y ago
Yeah, who needs choice! Let's appoint someone to decide for everyone. Are you available?
- mangecoeur 9y ago
  Not that this singular comment is going to help reform free software culture anytime soon, but this business of choice needs to be examined a bit. Simply adding more choices is not an advantage by itself. Have 10 choices which are all bad is not better than having 1 bad option. In the case of free software, there is a limited resource of people's time and skills. Adding more choices means spreading that resource more thinly - you basically make things worse by having more choices. Sadly the community is more fractious even than most political landscapes, so the probability of convergence and de-duplication of effort is basically zero and the linux desktop will always be a bit half-baked.
  - davidcuddeback 9y ago
    > Have 10 choices which are all bad is not better than having 1 bad option. But having 10 good choices is clearly better than having 1 good choice, and that's closer to what my experience with FOSS has been.
    - drdaeman 9y ago
      > But having 10 good choices is clearly better Not exactly. tl;dr: Even if separate Lego pieces are really good by themselves, it's no good if you can't stack them together effortlessly. ------ The problem I see with GNU/Linux ecosystem is incompatibility issues. There are many ways to do one thing, but all of them are incompatible (completely or to a significant extent) with each other. This is how modern GNU/Linux desktop is a Frankensten's monster made from ton of software pieces somehow glued together with duct tape and compatibility adapters. No consistency, every app works differently etc etc. There are higher-tier projects that try to unify different lower-level modules (e.g. NetworkManager or PulseAudio), but then something still relies on something else, like distro-specific stuff like ifup or netctl or wants raw ALSA, etc etc. Really, it's a mess, and even though I like GNU/Linux as my desktop it's sometimes quite painful to make it "just work", hoping for some sane levels of consistency. I know, this is not about desktops but it's just most visible there. The actual point is, too many different incompatible implementations lead to integration fatigue. Or frustration because you have to make sacrifices (get either this or that but not both). This problem is by no means unique or specific to GNU/Linux or FOSS, but it's most visible there.
      - davidcuddeback 9y ago
        > Even if separate Lego pieces are really good by themselves, it's no good if you can't stack them together effortlessly. I think that's unnecessarily splitting hairs. Compatibility factors into being a good choice. You can cherry-pick counter-examples, and no one's denying that those exist. My experience (almost 20 years) with FOSS has been overwhelmingly positive.
    - mangecoeur 9y ago
      In general there is plenty of good FOSS software, but there is also plenty of bad FOSS software. Specifically though, when it comes to user interfaces and linux desktop in particular, that is something that needs intensive work, extensive testing, and a strong design vision. These are all lacking, because they are difficult and expensive and if you spread what people you have between different projects you're not going to get the resources you need. Case in point - every company that's tried seriously to build consumer-friendly linux products has basically had to re-build the interface themselves (Nokia/Jolla, Samsing Tizen, PalmOS, Google).
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Having a 'choice' of GUI toolkits is going to lead to a shitty experience for everyone. As a user, now I have to see if a particular app works with my chosen toolkit, or if I have to deal with a substandard experience, or something that prevents me from using it properly. As a developer, now I have to decide which one I take, or spend twice as long and have twice as many bugs to use both.

lightdot 9y ago

If you want to make a committee and decide for everybody what should or shouldn't be worked on, by all means, go ahead. Or agitate against projects online, that works too. Should be a fun for you and funny for most others. Or you could just contribute to a project you find suitable, for whatever reason. Should be fun for everyone.

hedora 9y ago
This startup isn’t going to prevent things from being worked on by others, but if they can’t decide basic things like which gui toolkit to use, then they’ll burn through their (extremely limited) funding well before they have a working, let alone competitive, product. The mistake of “support every option in the community for version 1.0” has happened before. I suggest reading an OpenMoko postmortem (especially if you are somehow involved with this project). For this product to succeed they need to minimize the amount of time and resources they spend getting to a phone that works as a daily driver. Someone else can port qt/gtk/elightenment/etc to it after that happens. Otherwise, there will be no sustainable hardware platform to port those things to.

andrepd 9y ago

Yeah, who needs choice! Let's appoint someone to decide for everyone. Are you available?

mangecoeur 9y ago
Not that this singular comment is going to help reform free software culture anytime soon, but this business of choice needs to be examined a bit. Simply adding more choices is not an advantage by itself. Have 10 choices which are all bad is not better than having 1 bad option. In the case of free software, there is a limited resource of people's time and skills. Adding more choices means spreading that resource more thinly - you basically make things worse by having more choices. Sadly the community is more fractious even than most political landscapes, so the probability of convergence and de-duplication of effort is basically zero and the linux desktop will always be a bit half-baked.
- davidcuddeback 9y ago
  > Have 10 choices which are all bad is not better than having 1 bad option. But having 10 good choices is clearly better than having 1 good choice, and that's closer to what my experience with FOSS has been.
  - drdaeman 9y ago
    > But having 10 good choices is clearly better Not exactly. tl;dr: Even if separate Lego pieces are really good by themselves, it's no good if you can't stack them together effortlessly. ------ The problem I see with GNU/Linux ecosystem is incompatibility issues. There are many ways to do one thing, but all of them are incompatible (completely or to a significant extent) with each other. This is how modern GNU/Linux desktop is a Frankensten's monster made from ton of software pieces somehow glued together with duct tape and compatibility adapters. No consistency, every app works differently etc etc. There are higher-tier projects that try to unify different lower-level modules (e.g. NetworkManager or PulseAudio), but then something still relies on something else, like distro-specific stuff like ifup or netctl or wants raw ALSA, etc etc. Really, it's a mess, and even though I like GNU/Linux as my desktop it's sometimes quite painful to make it "just work", hoping for some sane levels of consistency. I know, this is not about desktops but it's just most visible there. The actual point is, too many different incompatible implementations lead to integration fatigue. Or frustration because you have to make sacrifices (get either this or that but not both). This problem is by no means unique or specific to GNU/Linux or FOSS, but it's most visible there.
    - davidcuddeback 9y ago
      > Even if separate Lego pieces are really good by themselves, it's no good if you can't stack them together effortlessly. I think that's unnecessarily splitting hairs. Compatibility factors into being a good choice. You can cherry-pick counter-examples, and no one's denying that those exist. My experience (almost 20 years) with FOSS has been overwhelmingly positive.
  - mangecoeur 9y ago
    In general there is plenty of good FOSS software, but there is also plenty of bad FOSS software. Specifically though, when it comes to user interfaces and linux desktop in particular, that is something that needs intensive work, extensive testing, and a strong design vision. These are all lacking, because they are difficult and expensive and if you spread what people you have between different projects you're not going to get the resources you need. Case in point - every company that's tried seriously to build consumer-friendly linux products has basically had to re-build the interface themselves (Nokia/Jolla, Samsing Tizen, PalmOS, Google).
s73ver_ 9y ago
Having a 'choice' of GUI toolkits is going to lead to a shitty experience for everyone. As a user, now I have to see if a particular app works with my chosen toolkit, or if I have to deal with a substandard experience, or something that prevents me from using it properly. As a developer, now I have to decide which one I take, or spend twice as long and have twice as many bugs to use both.