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> I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don

> I've been down this road a lot with FOSS software: "I don't use it because it doesn't do what I need", "sure it does!", "no, it really doesn't", "well you don't need that anyway!"... Just recently (I was on a Fedora box temporarily) I was trying to figure out how to get Nautilus to stop starting a search whenever I typed something, and instead highlight the nearest match in the current directory, y'know, like pretty much every other file manager in existence. Eventually I found a thread where the core Gnome contributors were saying "it sounds like you don't want this feature, what you really want is a better search function". They probably should never have enabled "reactions" on their bug tracker since it was piled 100's high with negative reactions - yet they still doubled down and said it's not something they're going to support (despite having supported it in the past, and Ubuntu even bundling patches to make it happen up until recently). It's a frustrating trend in FOSS that contributors feel like "we're doing this for FREE don't you know, so whatever we say is lore and since you're not paying, we don't have to listen to you". Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made.

foldr 6y ago
> Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.
- barrkel 6y ago
  They can; but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints. Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product. For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.
  - foldr 6y ago
    >but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints. This seems to be the dominant culture, but it's actually pretty toxic that people feel entitled to whine about software created by people who owe them absolutely nothing. Constructive feedback is useful, and appropriate if the creator indicates that they want it. Whining and ranting is a waste of energy. It makes people feel bad and leads to no beneficial change. I don't think Drew DeVault wrote this because he's received lots of useful constructive feedback.
    - betterunix2 6y ago
      "people who owe them absolutely nothing" What makes you think people owe nothing to each other in the open source ecosystem? I maintain a package for Fedora, I have submitted a few patches to the Linux Kernel, and I regularly report bugs. Do the Wayland developers not benefit from any of the above? Even my mother, who is not very technical, has managed to identify bugs here and there which I report on her behalf. Do the Gnome developers not benefit from that? We cannot all be contributors to every package we use, but we are all part of an ecosystem and we all have the right to ask for changes by others in that ecosystem. You call it whining, but you know what? When developers break use cases, users have the right to complain about it. If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.
      - foldr 6y ago
        Giving a project feedback does not impose any obligation on the maintainers of that project to help you – even if they find the feedback useful. In general, it's rude (and ineffective) to try to unilaterally impose non-trivial obligations on people without getting their prior agreement. Actual contributions are another matter. If you contribute to a project, then sure, you should get a say proportional to the size of your contribution. And I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions? An important point here is that it's up to the maintainers to evaluate the value of your contributions from their point of view. If you don't respect this, you're again trying to impose obligations unilaterally. That is, offering help that may not really have been wanted in the first place and then expecting something in return. >If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on. This seems way off base to me. I hope this attitude is not pervasive because it seems like it's a huge discouragement to people who want to write useful software. (If you succeed to any degree, millions of people are automatically entitled to shout at you whenever they experience some inconvenience.)
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you. People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything. Yes, people who do the work have the most say, but sometimes they really use that to do stupid things with the code. I don't know how to correct that though. Commercial software is no better about this.
  - foldr 6y ago
    >People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything. They're not pretending. I'm afraid you're laboring under a misconception. Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.
    - betterunix2 6y ago
      "Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project" Nothing, until users flee and they stop receiving bug reports, patches, donations, and so forth. Moreover, because of what Gnome is, if they drive users away it will also negatively impact other projects, because for a lot of those users leaving Gnome means ditching open source software entirely and switching to e.g. OS X.
      - growse 6y ago
        If the users aren't willing to fork, then having them run away to osx (where, by the way, everything is also imposed on you) doesn't seem that great of a loss. Part of the joy of open source are the freedoms it gives you, including the freedom to fork a project that doesn't meet your needs and make it so that it does. This works as it should pretty often - look at the gnome2 forks, the systemd-less distros etc. There's plenty of choice out there, and plenty of opportunity to get involved. If you're unwilling to exercise those freedoms, then you're just whining about the stuff you're getting for free.
pjc50 6y ago
> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it. It's not as if it's bound to the hardware (Apple) or shipped with the machine (Windows). It's not a SaaS that may vapourise or change underneath you. There's no way to force consensus in situations like this. The best you can do is force out those maintainers you don't like with a harassment campaign.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  "The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it." If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if they were busy making changes to Wayland or the Kernel or whatever else. Worse, in my experience, Gnome developers will turn down patches that do not align with their ideas about how things should work. I have had it happen to me, I have seen it happen to others -- even when we find time to change something, we cannot commit to maintaining our own private fork, and dealing with merge after merge or trying to keep up with a project that has as much activity as Gnome or Wayland. Obviously some patches need to be rejected, but in the case of Gnome I have found that rejection often comes down to their notorious "less configurability is better" attitude. As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? At some point you wind up having to ditch an entire distribution, with all its infrastructure and maintainers, just to get one use case to work. In some cases you are left with a choice between a project that has the features you need but has received no updates (including security updates) in years, or a project that does not have the features you need but is actively maintained. More often than not people will just give up on their use case, which in some cases means giving up on open source software entirely since that use case was the reason they were using open source in the first place. Some might think that is fine, users have the freedom to choose what software to run, but the fact is that fewer users means fewer contributors (including many people who make only the small but very important contribution of reporting bugs) and a less robust open source ecosystem.
Miraste 6y ago
In my experience Gnome is the worst major FOSS project for this. Ever since Gnome 3 the design philosophy of all of their projects seems to be "find out what the users want and do the opposite."
- Lammy 6y ago
  Case in point: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/msg00110.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/m... "Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design."
- dancek 6y ago
  I've heard this from a couple of power users before. But maybe GNOME does not optimize for power users?
  - 72deluxe 6y ago
    I remember following the GNOME blog for some time and finally decided I'd never go back after the article on how gEdit was being "improved" by completely hiding the menubar, the toolbar and basically any usable controls. It was written such that "focus" and "distraction-free" computing was the ultimate goal and that UI controls were somehow "distracting".... The file open/save dialog involves multiple clicks before it is usable because obviously a path edit box is WAY too distracting... I don't ever remember cursing my Windows 3.11 machine that the scrollbar and toolbar icons were distracting in File Manager, nor do I crash my car when the speedometer changes and wish that the distraction of the speedo and rev counter was removed. I remember using GNOME2 and loving it. I often wonder constitutes a "power user" - someone who wants to actually get stuff done and not fight the UI to discover things?? I wonder when iOS became the ideal - blindly fumble around whitespace to see if some text is actually a button or if there is some unfathomable control hidden that you need a magic incantation to discover (swipe left on a list control is delete - my mum still doesn't know this)? Is a "power user" someone who has learned all the different ways of interacting with a modern user interface? You used to learn: click, double-click and scrollwheel. Now every interaction with a control is different and impossible to learn or discover simply by using it. Absymal.
zabzonk 6y ago
> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. It doesn't - you are completely free to roll back those changes, or make different changes of your own.
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  Hot take: Maybe, if you're building something (or especially changing something) as a SME that many people use, and you fuck it up in a way most people don't like, you're still a jerk. Maybe. I think the discussion should happen. Because I don't think "I wrote it, if you don't like it, you write it" is a 100% defense to hordes of upset users.
  - dancek 6y ago
    When you have enough users, any change will make hordes of them unhappy, just because 0.01% is already a horde.
  - ohgodplsno 6y ago
    Hot take: As a software engineer, or absolutely anything else, don't owe these people anything. I'm building software in the direction that I want to bring it. If they're unhappy, they're free to leave. But to have them come on public forums and call you a jerk, that's just comical.
  - tylersmith 6y ago
    There's no defense needed; nobody is on trial. These hordes of users can start paying for developers if they want certain work done.
    - unethical_ban 6y ago
      You got me! The word defense is, in fact, only used in courts of law.
dancek 6y ago
> dictatorial power over 100s of users GNOME has tens of millions of users. I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork. FLOSS maintainers are a rare breed. We as a community need to find ways to not burn them out. Even if you have millions of happy users, just a couple of really toxic ones can make it feel not worth it.
- lewispollard 6y ago
  > GNOME has tens of millions of users. I was referring to the hundreds of users who "reacted" to the bugzilla thread on this issue, but I'm sure it effects many many more. > I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork. Generally I don't use GNOME, on this occasion I was working on a laptop supplied by an employer. The frustrating thing isn't that they don't support a feature that I want, it's that they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted.
  - dancek 6y ago
    Yes, obviously there's no way to tell what proportion of users think the same way. > they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted. I'm under the impression that GNOME strives for similar UX to macOS. This behavior sounds just like Apple to me, so maybe it's just the correct way to do it. I've used both macOS and GNOME as daily drivers and got frustrated with both. I'd certainly get frustrated if an employer forced me to use unsuitable equipment (and some have in the past). But that's not the fault of GNOME developers.
ohgodplsno 6y ago
> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. Those hundreds of user are: 1. A vocal minority, most likely. People happy about it don't go on bug trackers to support devs. 2. Not making the software, not part of the decision making process. Don't like the end result ? Fork it if you have the ability. Give constructive criticism if you want and you think the team is receptive to it (or even cares about it. Sometimes, I just don't want your genius idea). So, yes. They're doing this for free. Don't like it? Fork it, or don't be an ass. If you can't do either of those, the third option is to fuck off.
- Null-Set 6y ago
  Why are these people not part of the decison making process?
- akho 6y ago
  They are (predominantly) not doing this for free. They are employed by RedHat.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    Then they should pay for a RHEL subscription. That includes personal support.
    - akho 6y ago
      RHEL 8 is on Wayland by default. If you complain about any issues whatsoever, the personal support tells you to use X.Org.
vidarh 6y ago
It gives them dictatorial power because it's their project. I don't use Gnome because I don't like the direction they've taken it in. But they have absolutely every right to do with it as they please. And I have every right to insist it's totally not fit for my purposes and refuse to use it. The same way I have no (current) interest in using Wayland because it'd be too much hassle to try to replicate my workflow with it. But they're free to ignore me the way I ignore them.
michaelmrose 6y ago
Imagine if you asked what makes Steven Spielberg dictatorial power over all our screens! Not even paying him money gives you a veto on his casting choices. What you are experiencing is the expectation of continuing to receive a benefit, useful software, interpreting no longer receiving the same quality software as a loss, and intuiting that you have a rights to avoid that loss. You don't because the benefit was unearned in the first place. This doesn't mean you don't have a right to discuss or critique and discuss and if appropriately fork or write you own.

foldr 6y ago

> Yes, I understand how amazing it is that this software is truly free and created by volunteers, no, I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.

barrkel 6y ago
They can; but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints. Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product. For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.
- foldr 6y ago
  >but they shouldn't expect a life free of complaints. This seems to be the dominant culture, but it's actually pretty toxic that people feel entitled to whine about software created by people who owe them absolutely nothing. Constructive feedback is useful, and appropriate if the creator indicates that they want it. Whining and ranting is a waste of energy. It makes people feel bad and leads to no beneficial change. I don't think Drew DeVault wrote this because he's received lots of useful constructive feedback.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    "people who owe them absolutely nothing" What makes you think people owe nothing to each other in the open source ecosystem? I maintain a package for Fedora, I have submitted a few patches to the Linux Kernel, and I regularly report bugs. Do the Wayland developers not benefit from any of the above? Even my mother, who is not very technical, has managed to identify bugs here and there which I report on her behalf. Do the Gnome developers not benefit from that? We cannot all be contributors to every package we use, but we are all part of an ecosystem and we all have the right to ask for changes by others in that ecosystem. You call it whining, but you know what? When developers break use cases, users have the right to complain about it. If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.
    - foldr 6y ago
      Giving a project feedback does not impose any obligation on the maintainers of that project to help you – even if they find the feedback useful. In general, it's rude (and ineffective) to try to unilaterally impose non-trivial obligations on people without getting their prior agreement. Actual contributions are another matter. If you contribute to a project, then sure, you should get a say proportional to the size of your contribution. And I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions? An important point here is that it's up to the maintainers to evaluate the value of your contributions from their point of view. If you don't respect this, you're again trying to impose obligations unilaterally. That is, offering help that may not really have been wanted in the first place and then expecting something in return. >If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on. This seems way off base to me. I hope this attitude is not pervasive because it seems like it's a huge discouragement to people who want to write useful software. (If you succeed to any degree, millions of people are automatically entitled to shout at you whenever they experience some inconvenience.)
phkahler 6y ago
>> To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you. People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything. Yes, people who do the work have the most say, but sometimes they really use that to do stupid things with the code. I don't know how to correct that though. Commercial software is no better about this.
- foldr 6y ago
  >People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything. They're not pretending. I'm afraid you're laboring under a misconception. Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    "Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project" Nothing, until users flee and they stop receiving bug reports, patches, donations, and so forth. Moreover, because of what Gnome is, if they drive users away it will also negatively impact other projects, because for a lot of those users leaving Gnome means ditching open source software entirely and switching to e.g. OS X.
    - growse 6y ago
      If the users aren't willing to fork, then having them run away to osx (where, by the way, everything is also imposed on you) doesn't seem that great of a loss. Part of the joy of open source are the freedoms it gives you, including the freedom to fork a project that doesn't meet your needs and make it so that it does. This works as it should pretty often - look at the gnome2 forks, the systemd-less distros etc. There's plenty of choice out there, and plenty of opportunity to get involved. If you're unwilling to exercise those freedoms, then you're just whining about the stuff you're getting for free.

pjc50 6y ago

> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it. It's not as if it's bound to the hardware (Apple) or shipped with the machine (Windows). It's not a SaaS that may vapourise or change underneath you. There's no way to force consensus in situations like this. The best you can do is force out those maintainers you don't like with a harassment campaign.

betterunix2 6y ago
"The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it." If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if they were busy making changes to Wayland or the Kernel or whatever else. Worse, in my experience, Gnome developers will turn down patches that do not align with their ideas about how things should work. I have had it happen to me, I have seen it happen to others -- even when we find time to change something, we cannot commit to maintaining our own private fork, and dealing with merge after merge or trying to keep up with a project that has as much activity as Gnome or Wayland. Obviously some patches need to be rejected, but in the case of Gnome I have found that rejection often comes down to their notorious "less configurability is better" attitude. As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? At some point you wind up having to ditch an entire distribution, with all its infrastructure and maintainers, just to get one use case to work. In some cases you are left with a choice between a project that has the features you need but has received no updates (including security updates) in years, or a project that does not have the features you need but is actively maintained. More often than not people will just give up on their use case, which in some cases means giving up on open source software entirely since that use case was the reason they were using open source in the first place. Some might think that is fine, users have the freedom to choose what software to run, but the fact is that fewer users means fewer contributors (including many people who make only the small but very important contribution of reporting bugs) and a less robust open source ecosystem.

Miraste 6y ago

In my experience Gnome is the worst major FOSS project for this. Ever since Gnome 3 the design philosophy of all of their projects seems to be "find out what the users want and do the opposite."

Lammy 6y ago
Case in point: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/msg00110.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/m... "Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design."
dancek 6y ago
I've heard this from a couple of power users before. But maybe GNOME does not optimize for power users?
- 72deluxe 6y ago
  I remember following the GNOME blog for some time and finally decided I'd never go back after the article on how gEdit was being "improved" by completely hiding the menubar, the toolbar and basically any usable controls. It was written such that "focus" and "distraction-free" computing was the ultimate goal and that UI controls were somehow "distracting".... The file open/save dialog involves multiple clicks before it is usable because obviously a path edit box is WAY too distracting... I don't ever remember cursing my Windows 3.11 machine that the scrollbar and toolbar icons were distracting in File Manager, nor do I crash my car when the speedometer changes and wish that the distraction of the speedo and rev counter was removed. I remember using GNOME2 and loving it. I often wonder constitutes a "power user" - someone who wants to actually get stuff done and not fight the UI to discover things?? I wonder when iOS became the ideal - blindly fumble around whitespace to see if some text is actually a button or if there is some unfathomable control hidden that you need a magic incantation to discover (swipe left on a list control is delete - my mum still doesn't know this)? Is a "power user" someone who has learned all the different ways of interacting with a modern user interface? You used to learn: click, double-click and scrollwheel. Now every interaction with a control is different and impossible to learn or discover simply by using it. Absymal.

zabzonk 6y ago

> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. It doesn't - you are completely free to roll back those changes, or make different changes of your own.

unethical_ban 6y ago
Hot take: Maybe, if you're building something (or especially changing something) as a SME that many people use, and you fuck it up in a way most people don't like, you're still a jerk. Maybe. I think the discussion should happen. Because I don't think "I wrote it, if you don't like it, you write it" is a 100% defense to hordes of upset users.
- dancek 6y ago
  When you have enough users, any change will make hordes of them unhappy, just because 0.01% is already a horde.
- ohgodplsno 6y ago
  Hot take: As a software engineer, or absolutely anything else, don't owe these people anything. I'm building software in the direction that I want to bring it. If they're unhappy, they're free to leave. But to have them come on public forums and call you a jerk, that's just comical.
- tylersmith 6y ago
  There's no defense needed; nobody is on trial. These hordes of users can start paying for developers if they want certain work done.
  - unethical_ban 6y ago
    You got me! The word defense is, in fact, only used in courts of law.

dancek 6y ago

> dictatorial power over 100s of users GNOME has tens of millions of users. I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork. FLOSS maintainers are a rare breed. We as a community need to find ways to not burn them out. Even if you have millions of happy users, just a couple of really toxic ones can make it feel not worth it.

lewispollard 6y ago
> GNOME has tens of millions of users. I was referring to the hundreds of users who "reacted" to the bugzilla thread on this issue, but I'm sure it effects many many more. > I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork. Generally I don't use GNOME, on this occasion I was working on a laptop supplied by an employer. The frustrating thing isn't that they don't support a feature that I want, it's that they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted.
- dancek 6y ago
  Yes, obviously there's no way to tell what proportion of users think the same way. > they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted. I'm under the impression that GNOME strives for similar UX to macOS. This behavior sounds just like Apple to me, so maybe it's just the correct way to do it. I've used both macOS and GNOME as daily drivers and got frustrated with both. I'd certainly get frustrated if an employer forced me to use unsuitable equipment (and some have in the past). But that's not the fault of GNOME developers.

ohgodplsno 6y ago

> I don't understand how that gives you dictatorial power over 100s of users who don't like the changes you've made. Those hundreds of user are: 1. A vocal minority, most likely. People happy about it don't go on bug trackers to support devs. 2. Not making the software, not part of the decision making process. Don't like the end result ? Fork it if you have the ability. Give constructive criticism if you want and you think the team is receptive to it (or even cares about it. Sometimes, I just don't want your genius idea). So, yes. They're doing this for free. Don't like it? Fork it, or don't be an ass. If you can't do either of those, the third option is to fuck off.

Null-Set 6y ago
Why are these people not part of the decison making process?
akho 6y ago
They are (predominantly) not doing this for free. They are employed by RedHat.
- majewsky 6y ago
  Then they should pay for a RHEL subscription. That includes personal support.
  - akho 6y ago
    RHEL 8 is on Wayland by default. If you complain about any issues whatsoever, the personal support tells you to use X.Org.

vidarh 6y ago

It gives them dictatorial power because it's their project. I don't use Gnome because I don't like the direction they've taken it in. But they have absolutely every right to do with it as they please. And I have every right to insist it's totally not fit for my purposes and refuse to use it. The same way I have no (current) interest in using Wayland because it'd be too much hassle to try to replicate my workflow with it. But they're free to ignore me the way I ignore them.

michaelmrose 6y ago

Imagine if you asked what makes Steven Spielberg dictatorial power over all our screens! Not even paying him money gives you a veto on his casting choices. What you are experiencing is the expectation of continuing to receive a benefit, useful software, interpreting no longer receiving the same quality software as a loss, and intuiting that you have a rights to avoid that loss. You don't because the benefit was unearned in the first place. This doesn't mean you don't have a right to discuss or critique and discuss and if appropriately fork or write you own.