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> I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so use

> I can certainly understand the frustration at having to deal with a community that gets annoyed at anything that changes simply because they're already so used to the garbage pile they have that they now hold the delusion that it's actually not garbage. It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. > In my admittedly somewhat distanced opinion, Wayland's biggest mistakes were not launching with a coherent strategy for replicating functionality like screen sharing, screenshots, and to a lesser extent remote desktop/applications. They just punted and said "that's a compositor problem!" My guess is that it wasn't a deliberate strategy, it just that like anything related to the Linux desktop, the project was underfunded so they had to focus on certain issues. In this case it was focusing on improving from xorg and making sure it doesn't break anything on the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat). Apple and Microsoft can afford to pour billions in their display server/protocol/windowing system. Not so much for Linux.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
well yeah, i just got used to it working a certain way, now i gotta figure it out again. fucking nerds acting like it,s no big deal when shit i use every day is all changed up. do you have any idea how much cognitive load that is for the average user to figure out new ui? and usually for no good reason, just to change shit up so someone can get credit for a project. don,t blame the users for software being shit. it,s shit. it,s built by arrogant emotionally-children with no concern for empathy or quality.
- boudin 6y ago
  The reverse is also true. Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. You make a lot of assumptions there but the reality is often much more nuanced. Everything changes, all the time, that's a rule that is true for absolutely everything in life.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    i,ve been in the software world for 2+ decades, worn all kinds of hats, and obviously been on the user and support side quite a bit too. i know what i,m talking about here. most software changes are unnecessary and are forced on users unnecessarily, and that,s why people hate software.
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    And people wonder why Linux isn't popular outside of industry and hobbyists... Like, sure, maintainers can tell all their users to sod off, but don't be surprised when very few people are left around using your software, and especially don't get confused when companies refuse to invest in Linux ports. All the successful projects Linux users like to talk about nowadays (gaming now a practical thing, new kernel features, Wine getting really good) were all bankrolled by massive billion dollar corps like Valve and Google, because the community itself has no discipline to see things through. At least GNU of the old days was organised enough to know not to break people's workflows - just look at how stable coreutils have been - but GUI software for regular people somehow doesn't deserve to get the same treatment.
    - pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
      > And people wonder why Linux isn't popular outside of industry and hobbyists "Linux"? We're discussing a category that includes Gmail UI changes. Is Gmail not popular?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      Wine was actually pretty damned good even before Valve got involved. I remember playing Half-Life with Wine in the early aughties.
      - throwaways885 6y ago
        I think that's fair, but they have done a good job of bringing much of the industry on board, rather than just being an esoteric hobbyist project.
- RedShift1 6y ago
  I think the biggest problem is software changing from under people's feet. We used to have stable version cycles and when it was time to upgrade, users expected change and having to re-learn some stuff. But now things just change whenever. And sometimes drastically, like buttons that previously had a fixed place and were always there can now only be accessed by moving your cursor in the right place. Very frustrating. I see your comment's flagged, maybe because of the harsh language but other than that it all rings true to me.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    > I think the biggest problem is software changing from under people's feet. We used to have stable version cycles and when it was time to upgrade, users expected change and having to re-learn some stuff. This. I think it's incredibly inconsiderate to do that to a user who never asked for it. As a user, I abhor this mentality, and respond to it by leaving. And if I have to stay, I boycott the nag dialogs and just leave them open, to embarrass the developer in front of anyone who may be watching my screencast. As a programmer, I go out of my way to ensure that my software works the way the user wants, and an upgrade is never demanded. I design for back and forth compatibility, so that I can go back and forward to any version I desire, as long as there's a commit for it. It may not work perfectly going back a year, but if it's a stable version, it should run.
nescioquid 6y ago
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI This seems to point to the general situation of change fatigue. If you pick up a random Android device, what does the "settings" app icon look like? Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done. I don't think there's an easy answer here when the developer needs to make fundamental changes, though.
- gregmac 6y ago
  > Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done. One of the problems is a parity disconnect. A developer/PM often has very different perspective from their users: They see the new changes as they're happening and so they're all small, incremental changes, plus they're closely following development. A lot of users only infrequently update and/or infrequently use certain features, and so for them, all these small incremental features add up to be massive change for the sake of change. This will often manifest as "Every time I go to do x, it's totally different and I have to re-learn everything!". I find a lot of software -- especially FOSS -- also communicates change poorly. Release notes are the primary way to get across changes, yet there are several bad things people do that make it basically impossible to read: * List every change or commit message, especially without categorizing or simplifying the wording * Don't properly highlight feature changes (eg with screenshots and/or reasoning) * Have dozens of betas/pre-releases, but don't consolidate the release notes into a final "here's what's changed since the last main release" document Some examples of exceptionally good release notes: Visual Studio Code [1], Jira [2], Gitlab [3] (though if they only provided their changelog [4] it would be a good example of being overly verbose to the point of unusable). [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_52 https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_52 [2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-release-notes-776821069.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-... [3] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/categories/releases/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/categories/releases/ [4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/CHAN...
pmlnr 6y ago
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. Most of them are too frequent, automatic, plus they are not actual improvements.
- innagadadavida 6y ago
  > Most of them are too frequent, automatic, plus they are not actual improvements. It seems like the developers and product managers want to show progress but the uses just want you to fix boring bugs. It will help if the product folks think of memory, perf and stability as very important features and stop chasing new features for the sake of it.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    I'm sure you know this, but memory perf and stability are secondary to supporting the hard business requirements. For low-cost products intended for mass consumption, a small feature that brings in millions of new users from a new audience is usually going to be more worth it to the business than optimizing for old hardware that doesn't bring in money anymore.
    - ddingus 6y ago
      Those problems have crept up into new hardware, and depending on the product, "old" may be more than a decade, because users do not need new hardware and increasing numbers of them know that. Memory performance is not too big of a deal, IMHO given the last decade of hardware, but stability is. Lost mental state is generally as painful as data is. People hate it viscerally. I have seen 4 figure software get replaced by 5 figure software over that alone. 5 figure stuff runs for weeks to months at a time. 4 figure can crash daily or more often. Stability was a primary selling point for me, and I used to maintain a session for that purpose. "My session has been active for months and 10's of projects, lets open your sample data and walk through it...." Did that on a reasonable, but not great Lenovo. Hibernate, sleep, hibernate, sleep... Win 7 too, lol. I came from IRIX. I would go the better part of a year, apps running, system up, all ready to go. Spoiled. Win 2k was good, Win 7 matched it, and Win 10 is solid, except for forced updates. I would never, ever devalue stability. People who are focused, task intensive, live it, love it, will argue they need and are worth it. Not sure they are wrong.
formerly_proven 6y ago
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. Like you note, this isn't a problem unique to Linux/"free Unixy OSes". In some ways Linux is actually worse than others, consider Gnome/Gtk Updates for example. Or how things like having a library to read a particular image format are quite normal around here; except that library has like half a dozen incompatible but actively used versions and around 1000 released versions. The Linux environment is very volatile and everything constantly changes and breaks. Modern applications bitrot exceptionally fast in Linux, while the community points to "but look this Xchess binary from 1992 still works". That's neat but covers few real use cases. The same community is then bewildered that both people and enterprises opt for distributions which move at a glacial pace and only releases updated software once every five years or so.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  I think a big issue is there's no discipline in the Linux community. The Kernel team has done an amazing job of preserving ABI compatibility through every last byte, but then you look at projects like glib or GNOME which seem to pride themselves on huge, sweeping, changes and don't care if downstream consumers are hurt by the changes. Edit: glib not glibc
  - Conan_Kudo 6y ago
    The Linux kernel team does not preserve ABI in almost all scenarios, just only specifically with the syscall interface. Everything else is not stable. The GNU C standard library has binary backwards compatibility going back 20 years. They take great pains to preserve that. Are you thinking of glib instead of glibc? The former is from GNOME, and the latter is not.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      "Syscall interface" is what most people mean by "$SYSTEM's ABI"
cafard 6y ago
Hah. I greatly prefer the Windows start menu that went away with Windows 8, and had previously configured this Windows 10 machine to use it. Then yesterday I installed patches, and it's back to the Windows 10.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Windows patch auto-revert-settings is cancer. It breaks my bluetooth every time and my setup is very typical so it probably does it to millions of others. Details: Bluetooth headphones with microphones actually show up as 3 sound devices, one high quality output device and a pair of low quality input and output devices. Whenever a microphone is requested, the low quality pair is selected. Output quality goes to shit and any apps that don't get the memo will still send its audio to the high quality output device which has since become an inactive sinkhole. Since many apps request microphone access for non-obvious reasons, the symptoms are that you do something non-audio-related and sound in the rest of the system does some combination of {go to shit, stop working} on a per-app basis. The solution is to disable the low quality input and output devices, which keeps sound output functional and high-quality until Windows Update reverts your settings and sets the stage for the next microphone access to break bluetooth audio again. Ugh.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    > Since many apps request microphone access for non-obvious reasons Interesting. I have what appears to be exactly the same bluetooth headset setup (Bose QuietComfort 35s), and use it all day every day while at work. I have the slightly annoying thing that if I'm in a video conference all normal audio isn't heard (unless I switch the default audio output), but I only get that when actively in a VC. I have never had 'random applications requesting the microphone'.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      Yes, video conferencing does it, but so does slack sometimes at startup, discord does it if you join a voice-enabled room, flash (RIP) used to do it in our HR time tracking app, and at home deviantart.com does it and games do it. However, whether or not a competent and interested nerd can figure out the underlying logic is completely beside the point. Normies don't stand a chance, so they just put up with (from their perspective) randomly broken or low-quality audio, until they can't, at which point they restart, switch devices, or maybe even buy a new device. Any one of {Bluetooth SIG, device manufacturer, Microsoft} could have independently fixed the issue. Every one of them should have forseen it. None of them foresaw it and none of them fixed it, and years later it still lingers. Yikes.
fpoling 6y ago
In case of Gmail many changes were to grab more attention from the user, not to improve anything.
toyg 6y ago
> the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat) But this is a real problem: it's not good that the Linux ecosystem has been reduced to "we shall eat whatever dogfood Redhat cooks for us". Wayland didn't even start as a RH project, iirc, and didn't really gain any traction for ages, but now it's a Big Deal because RH pushes it...?
- icefo 6y ago
  I agree that's not good but redhat seems to be one of the few organization that pays developers to improve parts of the linux ecosystem. So when redhat endorse a project it probably means it tries to address some pain points of the status quo. That's how I see systemd and wayland. For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it. It seems we're going in that direction with wayland but we'll see how it goes.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it. I think the parent comment was alluding to the fact that RedHat has the ability to manufacture consensus. All the distributions use systemd (and pulseaudio and ...) because GNOME and other core components were modified to work only with systemd. So everyone agreed to use RedHat's way because there was no other way. No matter how good RH's creations might be, that's the kind of tail-wagging-the-dog power that is bad for an ecosystem.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      What you are saying is a borderline conspiracy theory and is not true. GNOME still works outside of systemd, and the distributions that want to use it outside of systemd are maintaining the parts that they need, which in reality are pretty small. (I can give some more technical details if you want, but the short answer is: elogind)
      - 6y ago
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. As well it should. Because now things that used to take three seconds will take 15 minutes for a month until you learn the new interface. The designer will respond that yes, but then once you learn the new thing it will take two seconds. And if you save one second twice a day then you'll have made back that 10 hours you spent learning the new thing in less than 50 years! Except that they're going to change it again in less than 50 years. And that's assuming that the new design is actually better and not just different or worse, because also, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950351 Rule of thumb: If the new thing isn't better enough to cause people to switch to it voluntarily without any prodding or the removal of the option to use the old thing, it isn't better enough to be worth it.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  I was working at a large real estate marketplace. Product management came up with a nice new UI for the backend every two months, because that was what they loved to do - also lots of designers hanging around that need to work! Real estate broker - the customers - hated it of course, they only wanted to get their job done, not relearn the UI every two months.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- cortesoft 6y ago
  Your calculation doesn't take into account the time savings for brand new users. Since they don't have to unlearn anything, they start saving the time immediately. Not saying it is right or wrong, but a lot of the upsetting changes for existing users are for the benefit of new users.
  - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
UIZealot 6y ago
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). Nice try Google/Microsoft developer! I'm pretty technical, your sh*t change is still sh*t. I remember a time when updates from gmail, outlook, or excel improved upon the previous version, sadly that was about 15/20 years ago for Google/Microsoft, respectively.
ProZsolt 6y ago
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/

forgotmypw17 6y ago

well yeah, i just got used to it working a certain way, now i gotta figure it out again. fucking nerds acting like it,s no big deal when shit i use every day is all changed up. do you have any idea how much cognitive load that is for the average user to figure out new ui? and usually for no good reason, just to change shit up so someone can get credit for a project. don,t blame the users for software being shit. it,s shit. it,s built by arrogant emotionally-children with no concern for empathy or quality.

boudin 6y ago
The reverse is also true. Don't blame people maintaining software for changing your routine. You make a lot of assumptions there but the reality is often much more nuanced. Everything changes, all the time, that's a rule that is true for absolutely everything in life.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  i,ve been in the software world for 2+ decades, worn all kinds of hats, and obviously been on the user and support side quite a bit too. i know what i,m talking about here. most software changes are unnecessary and are forced on users unnecessarily, and that,s why people hate software.
- throwaways885 6y ago
  And people wonder why Linux isn't popular outside of industry and hobbyists... Like, sure, maintainers can tell all their users to sod off, but don't be surprised when very few people are left around using your software, and especially don't get confused when companies refuse to invest in Linux ports. All the successful projects Linux users like to talk about nowadays (gaming now a practical thing, new kernel features, Wine getting really good) were all bankrolled by massive billion dollar corps like Valve and Google, because the community itself has no discipline to see things through. At least GNU of the old days was organised enough to know not to break people's workflows - just look at how stable coreutils have been - but GUI software for regular people somehow doesn't deserve to get the same treatment.
  - pwdisswordfish6 6y ago
    > And people wonder why Linux isn't popular outside of industry and hobbyists "Linux"? We're discussing a category that includes Gmail UI changes. Is Gmail not popular?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Wine was actually pretty damned good even before Valve got involved. I remember playing Half-Life with Wine in the early aughties.
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      I think that's fair, but they have done a good job of bringing much of the industry on board, rather than just being an esoteric hobbyist project.
RedShift1 6y ago
I think the biggest problem is software changing from under people's feet. We used to have stable version cycles and when it was time to upgrade, users expected change and having to re-learn some stuff. But now things just change whenever. And sometimes drastically, like buttons that previously had a fixed place and were always there can now only be accessed by moving your cursor in the right place. Very frustrating. I see your comment's flagged, maybe because of the harsh language but other than that it all rings true to me.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  > I think the biggest problem is software changing from under people's feet. We used to have stable version cycles and when it was time to upgrade, users expected change and having to re-learn some stuff. This. I think it's incredibly inconsiderate to do that to a user who never asked for it. As a user, I abhor this mentality, and respond to it by leaving. And if I have to stay, I boycott the nag dialogs and just leave them open, to embarrass the developer in front of anyone who may be watching my screencast. As a programmer, I go out of my way to ensure that my software works the way the user wants, and an upgrade is never demanded. I design for back and forth compatibility, so that I can go back and forward to any version I desire, as long as there's a commit for it. It may not work perfectly going back a year, but if it's a stable version, it should run.

nescioquid 6y ago

> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI This seems to point to the general situation of change fatigue. If you pick up a random Android device, what does the "settings" app icon look like? Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done. I don't think there's an easy answer here when the developer needs to make fundamental changes, though.

gregmac 6y ago
> Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done. One of the problems is a parity disconnect. A developer/PM often has very different perspective from their users: They see the new changes as they're happening and so they're all small, incremental changes, plus they're closely following development. A lot of users only infrequently update and/or infrequently use certain features, and so for them, all these small incremental features add up to be massive change for the sake of change. This will often manifest as "Every time I go to do x, it's totally different and I have to re-learn everything!". I find a lot of software -- especially FOSS -- also communicates change poorly. Release notes are the primary way to get across changes, yet there are several bad things people do that make it basically impossible to read: * List every change or commit message, especially without categorizing or simplifying the wording * Don't properly highlight feature changes (eg with screenshots and/or reasoning) * Have dozens of betas/pre-releases, but don't consolidate the release notes into a final "here's what's changed since the last main release" document Some examples of exceptionally good release notes: Visual Studio Code [1], Jira [2], Gitlab [3] (though if they only provided their changelog [4] it would be a good example of being overly verbose to the point of unusable). [1] https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_52 https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_52 [2] https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-release-notes-776821069.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/jirasoftware/jira-software-... [3] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/categories/releases/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/categories/releases/ [4] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/blob/master/CHAN...

pmlnr 6y ago

innagadadavida 6y ago
> Most of them are too frequent, automatic, plus they are not actual improvements. It seems like the developers and product managers want to show progress but the uses just want you to fix boring bugs. It will help if the product folks think of memory, perf and stability as very important features and stop chasing new features for the sake of it.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I'm sure you know this, but memory perf and stability are secondary to supporting the hard business requirements. For low-cost products intended for mass consumption, a small feature that brings in millions of new users from a new audience is usually going to be more worth it to the business than optimizing for old hardware that doesn't bring in money anymore.
  - ddingus 6y ago
    Those problems have crept up into new hardware, and depending on the product, "old" may be more than a decade, because users do not need new hardware and increasing numbers of them know that. Memory performance is not too big of a deal, IMHO given the last decade of hardware, but stability is. Lost mental state is generally as painful as data is. People hate it viscerally. I have seen 4 figure software get replaced by 5 figure software over that alone. 5 figure stuff runs for weeks to months at a time. 4 figure can crash daily or more often. Stability was a primary selling point for me, and I used to maintain a session for that purpose. "My session has been active for months and 10's of projects, lets open your sample data and walk through it...." Did that on a reasonable, but not great Lenovo. Hibernate, sleep, hibernate, sleep... Win 7 too, lol. I came from IRIX. I would go the better part of a year, apps running, system up, all ready to go. Spoiled. Win 2k was good, Win 7 matched it, and Win 10 is solid, except for forced updates. I would never, ever devalue stability. People who are focused, task intensive, live it, love it, will argue they need and are worth it. Not sure they are wrong.

formerly_proven 6y ago

> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. Like you note, this isn't a problem unique to Linux/"free Unixy OSes". In some ways Linux is actually worse than others, consider Gnome/Gtk Updates for example. Or how things like having a library to read a particular image format are quite normal around here; except that library has like half a dozen incompatible but actively used versions and around 1000 released versions. The Linux environment is very volatile and everything constantly changes and breaks. Modern applications bitrot exceptionally fast in Linux, while the community points to "but look this Xchess binary from 1992 still works". That's neat but covers few real use cases. The same community is then bewildered that both people and enterprises opt for distributions which move at a glacial pace and only releases updated software once every five years or so.

throwaways885 6y ago
I think a big issue is there's no discipline in the Linux community. The Kernel team has done an amazing job of preserving ABI compatibility through every last byte, but then you look at projects like glib or GNOME which seem to pride themselves on huge, sweeping, changes and don't care if downstream consumers are hurt by the changes. Edit: glib not glibc
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  The Linux kernel team does not preserve ABI in almost all scenarios, just only specifically with the syscall interface. Everything else is not stable. The GNU C standard library has binary backwards compatibility going back 20 years. They take great pains to preserve that. Are you thinking of glib instead of glibc? The former is from GNOME, and the latter is not.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    "Syscall interface" is what most people mean by "$SYSTEM's ABI"

cafard 6y ago

Hah. I greatly prefer the Windows start menu that went away with Windows 8, and had previously configured this Windows 10 machine to use it. Then yesterday I installed patches, and it's back to the Windows 10.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Windows patch auto-revert-settings is cancer. It breaks my bluetooth every time and my setup is very typical so it probably does it to millions of others. Details: Bluetooth headphones with microphones actually show up as 3 sound devices, one high quality output device and a pair of low quality input and output devices. Whenever a microphone is requested, the low quality pair is selected. Output quality goes to shit and any apps that don't get the memo will still send its audio to the high quality output device which has since become an inactive sinkhole. Since many apps request microphone access for non-obvious reasons, the symptoms are that you do something non-audio-related and sound in the rest of the system does some combination of {go to shit, stop working} on a per-app basis. The solution is to disable the low quality input and output devices, which keeps sound output functional and high-quality until Windows Update reverts your settings and sets the stage for the next microphone access to break bluetooth audio again. Ugh.
- rkangel 6y ago
  > Since many apps request microphone access for non-obvious reasons Interesting. I have what appears to be exactly the same bluetooth headset setup (Bose QuietComfort 35s), and use it all day every day while at work. I have the slightly annoying thing that if I'm in a video conference all normal audio isn't heard (unless I switch the default audio output), but I only get that when actively in a VC. I have never had 'random applications requesting the microphone'.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Yes, video conferencing does it, but so does slack sometimes at startup, discord does it if you join a voice-enabled room, flash (RIP) used to do it in our HR time tracking app, and at home deviantart.com does it and games do it. However, whether or not a competent and interested nerd can figure out the underlying logic is completely beside the point. Normies don't stand a chance, so they just put up with (from their perspective) randomly broken or low-quality audio, until they can't, at which point they restart, switch devices, or maybe even buy a new device. Any one of {Bluetooth SIG, device manufacturer, Microsoft} could have independently fixed the issue. Every one of them should have forseen it. None of them foresaw it and none of them fixed it, and years later it still lingers. Yikes.

fpoling 6y ago

In case of Gmail many changes were to grab more attention from the user, not to improve anything.

toyg 6y ago

> the main use cases of whoever was funding the project (mainly redhat) But this is a real problem: it's not good that the Linux ecosystem has been reduced to "we shall eat whatever dogfood Redhat cooks for us". Wayland didn't even start as a RH project, iirc, and didn't really gain any traction for ages, but now it's a Big Deal because RH pushes it...?

icefo 6y ago
I agree that's not good but redhat seems to be one of the few organization that pays developers to improve parts of the linux ecosystem. So when redhat endorse a project it probably means it tries to address some pain points of the status quo. That's how I see systemd and wayland. For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it. It seems we're going in that direction with wayland but we'll see how it goes.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  For systemd the consensus seems to be that's it's better than the previous init systems as most distributions have adopted it. I think the parent comment was alluding to the fact that RedHat has the ability to manufacture consensus. All the distributions use systemd (and pulseaudio and ...) because GNOME and other core components were modified to work only with systemd. So everyone agreed to use RedHat's way because there was no other way. No matter how good RH's creations might be, that's the kind of tail-wagging-the-dog power that is bad for an ecosystem.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    What you are saying is a borderline conspiracy theory and is not true. GNOME still works outside of systemd, and the distributions that want to use it outside of systemd are maintaining the parts that they need, which in reality are pretty small. (I can give some more technical details if you want, but the short answer is: elogind)
    - 6y ago

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). It really makes people angry when things don't work the same anymore, let alone when it doesn't even work anymore for their use case. As well it should. Because now things that used to take three seconds will take 15 minutes for a month until you learn the new interface. The designer will respond that yes, but then once you learn the new thing it will take two seconds. And if you save one second twice a day then you'll have made back that 10 hours you spent learning the new thing in less than 50 years! Except that they're going to change it again in less than 50 years. And that's assuming that the new design is actually better and not just different or worse, because also, this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25950351 Rule of thumb: If the new thing isn't better enough to cause people to switch to it voluntarily without any prodding or the removal of the option to use the old thing, it isn't better enough to be worth it.

KingOfCoders 6y ago
I was working at a large real estate marketplace. Product management came up with a nice new UI for the backend every two months, because that was what they loved to do - also lots of designers hanging around that need to work! Real estate broker - the customers - hated it of course, they only wanted to get their job done, not relearn the UI every two months.
- deleted 6y ago
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cortesoft 6y ago
Your calculation doesn't take into account the time savings for brand new users. Since they don't have to unlearn anything, they start saving the time immediately. Not saying it is right or wrong, but a lot of the upsetting changes for existing users are for the benefit of new users.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago

UIZealot 6y ago

> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI (not to mention big ones). Nice try Google/Microsoft developer! I'm pretty technical, your sh*t change is still sh*t. I remember a time when updates from gmail, outlook, or excel improved upon the previous version, sadly that was about 15/20 years ago for Google/Microsoft, respectively.

ProZsolt 6y ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1172/ https://xkcd.com/1172/