12 ms·

Farewell, Elementary

164 points by rglullis 5y ago

bendbro 5y ago
Cool color scheme. The purple text gets a little weird but I don't know how you'd change it without disturbing the cool color scheme.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  It looks pretty FedEx-y.
627467 5y ago
Whoa: is this the first case of someone being explicitly forbidden from contributing to an open source project? We knew there was a disagreement on how to part ways. But this outcome seems totally unreasonable for an open source project.
- Macha 5y ago
  Not a chance. Plenty of cases of people being kicked out of open source projects from formal CoC decisions to hostile forks to "X was being an asshole so we banned them from the issue tracker/mailing list"
behnamoh 5y ago
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  I... don't think that makes sense? Why can't you release something under the GPL and have it become popular worldwide? Or maybe you're using 'popular' in a sense I'm not accustomed to.
- jandrese 5y ago
  Do you think people only use open source software to be iconoclasts? This statement makes no sense.
ilovecaching 5y ago
The Linux desktop is a lost cause and the author is better off moving to other things. Not only is desktop a dying segment, but it requires the largest amount of work on driver support (why is my six year old off brand printer not working?), is filled with proprietary apps and companies that make money selling software to end customers who have no incentive to port to Linux (Adobe/Serif are why I still have to keep a Windows VM sitting around), and it requires constant work to keep things working on top of every graphics stack, one of which is famously proprietary (NVIDIA please just open source your drivers already) which reduces the incentives of using Linux in the first place. You also have GNOME shipping on Fedora and Ubuntu which most new users are going to download, which can't even get their stuff together enough to put a freaking dock and activity indicator on the desktop without having to completely switch to a different activities screen. Asking for a dock will literally get you hung in the village square as people assert that normal users want to use keyboard shortcuts. Everything on the Linux desktop has to either be old fashion or eclectic and tailored to the tech enthusiasts already using it (one of the things that Elementary was actually solving). I tried getting my dad to use GNOME and he gave up after five minutes to go back to his Mac (I can't even launch an app?). It's a mess. Every other distro is basically being held together by a scrappy group of volunteers that are supposed to compete against millions of dollars of investment and armys of full time employees. I feel bad for Elementary. They made a good product that was actually sane for people coming from MS/A, but they were never going to turn it into something super profitable or even sway companies like Adobe etc. to get their apps running natively on Linux. This isn't doom and gloom about Linux. Linux owns computing. It's more about how Desktop is niche and not even worth getting into at this point, and how the author has much to gain by just walking away and moving on to other ventures. Edit: You can downvote all you want if it brings you catharsis, but you know I'm right. The year of the Linux desktop isn't right around the corner, just like it wasn't right around the corner last year, or the year before that. Linux desktops will always be for enthusiasts, students who want to learn Linux, or people who have to use outdated hardware, which is honestly the way it should be so that Linux keeps its identity and doesn't become yet another replaceable component in a proprietary stack like it is on Android (I'm looking at you Fuchsia). And no, it doesn't matter that you're reading this right now on Sway using lynx and your mother and sister are using Ubuntu that you installed for them. You are on HN. You are not the segment that makes Linux desktops a lucrative business idea. A software engineer needs to know how to think about market segments and the normal user use cases and not be completely self absorbed into how the world works for them.
jessaustin 5y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 The HN discussion on that is more enlightening than the actual item.
xupybd 5y ago
Something sounds fishy. You have to get work else where to allow us to cut costs. Now you have found work you have to quit.
- jdjdjdjdjd 5y ago
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    It is still a pretty unexpected reaction. Cassidy had worked for System76 and did elementary work in his free time before. Sad to see this.
    - rez9x 5y ago
      There was another article posted a month or so back with the other founders perspective. As an outsider, Cassidy seems to be the more reasonable of the two, but I can't know that for sure when viewing the whole situation through a peephole. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=r https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=...
      - CameronNemo 5y ago
        Yeah just read that. Lunduke is apparently purposefully misgendering and dead naming Danielle Foré in that article, which is important context. But the tweets are still good background. My main takeaway: always have a pre-nup.
        caddybox 5y ago
        Lunduke has a long history of using negative clickbait titles (the Linux sucks series and HTTPS is bad) to gain views. I'm not surprised that he has somehow found a way to milk this controversy too!
      - ricardobeat 5y ago
masterof0 5y ago
I wonder if the folks at Elementary targeted businesses with a "Elementary OS Professional" version. Is pretty hard to get regular people to pay for an operating system when they don't need to, either because the competition is fierce (Zorin, Ubuntu, Mint, Deepin, ...), or because they can choose to donate 0 dollars. I have never seen an app in their custom App Store that will attract me enough to pay for it. The OS itself is pretty neat. I think they should have tried to get government entities, schools, or hospitals to use their OS, so they can have a decent income stream.
- twblalock 5y ago
  A business wants business-level support. It looks like the core Elementary team was just two people. The length of time between releases makes me think they were understaffed for a while. A business would rather get support from a larger distro with a larger support team. That market already has a number of established vendors: Red Hat, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu server...
- bodge5000 5y ago
  For me at least, the problem comes in with when you ask for a donation. When I first downloaded Godot, I didn't donate because I had no idea if I'd even use it for long. After a year or so of using it, I came across various reminders to donate, and eventually I did (if I'm completely honest, literally just now). But most people will never come across that prompt again and will forget any need to. Its the same case with Elementary, or any other distro I've tried out. Why pay if I dont know if I'll even use it? That being said, I can't think of any better way of asking without being obtrusive to the user. I guess you could have some really pointless badge or something you unlock by donating which could help prompt users later down the line, but I cant imagine the FOSS community would be a big supporter of that.
  - jll29 5y ago
    I would have happily paid them to add a "minimize window" button. Frankly, that's the only think I was ever missing while using E. on my main Linux laptop for the last two years. It has been a pretty slick experience, and that's remarkable given the general state of Linux on the desktop (admittedly, I may be more of a command line person, but still). So maybe instead of "donate", try "pay for getting your very own feature implemented"?
bodge5000 5y ago
From an admittedly quite outside perspective, the state of FOSS dev seems to be showing some cracks. Spending some spare time developing something useful for others, great. Spending pretty much all your spare time doing so, seems unsustainable but you do you. Having that treated as a given rather than a special committment, with extra demands and workload placed on top, this is a problem. Having to get a second job to support your project, what the fuck is going on. If you do that and you're happy with it, don't let me interfer. But this doesn't seem like such a happy post.
- miloignis 5y ago
  I'm not sure if this applies to this situation - this individual was working on it full time, as a co-founder of a startup. They wanted to continue working on it in their spare time after finding a new job, but their co-founder didn't want them involved anymore. I don't think the open source nature really comes into it, they wished to continue working on their baby, which is totally understandable.
  - bodge5000 5y ago
    Absolutely, if they're happy with their situation (or I guess, were happy with it), I'm in no place to say its wrong. But it does seem to place streinous demands on the people working on it. Afterall, the story does end with him being forced to abandon his own baby, not entirely of his own choice. That doesn't sound like a normal side project to me, but I'm likely out of touch with big FOSS
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    That is not necessarily quite what happened either. I was more convinced by the other developers position previously on this. But that just means we and everyone else but these two people themselves are just picking sides, not necessarily actually seeing and evaluating right/wrong/good/bad/fair/unfair etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 I don't mean to say I agree with that article. (Well, most of it is just reporting which is fine, but there are a few small added conclusions at the end) My own comment on that article was that I read it and arrived at an opposite conclusion from the author. And someone else supplied some enlightening background about history between these two and the author.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I wonder how much innovation in the US is constrained by the fact that people need health insurance, and it is generally expensive as hell. I interviewed with a finance startup a few years back and everything was great until we got down to benefits. That's when they broke the news to me that even though they were being financed by a cadre of millionaires and billionaires with long histories in the finance and banking system, they didn't have enough money to offer benefits. LOL. No.
- rgrmrts 5y ago
  This seems like an outlier. Every startup I’ve seen offers at least basic health insurance. I agree with your sentiment, I’d never work for a place that didn’t offer a basic package.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Why? I'd much rather unbundle and just get additional cash comp and buy my own.
    - rgrmrts 5y ago
      Fair point, I guess. The benefit generally accounts for ~$18,000/yr out of pocket so getting ~$30,000/yr in additional comp is fine. These numbers assuming $1500/mo for good coverage (which is what I paid in the past when I was funemployed), and a higher comp accounting for taxation. All that said, I think employers are required by law to provide healthcare? In a perfect world, basic coverage would be part of what you get for paying taxes by the government.
      - sneak 5y ago
        In a perfect world nobody would be forced with violence to make nonconsensual payments to anyone else, so there would be ~0 tax revenue from which to fund such a thing.
- kjs3 5y ago
  WOW. That's a special sort of asshole right there. I'm reminded of the time years ago talking to a couple of "VC" (really, smalltime angels) dudebros with Rolex's and Mises Institute wristbands who spent the whole pitch talking about how to make sure the startup employees got shafted on equity and how the wait staff at the restaurant didn't deserve tips because they were 'too stupid' to go to a 'real school' and get 'real jobs'.
xorcist 5y ago
Here are two things I feel I don't understand about a number of quite similar "desktop distributions". One, what's the target user? Is it really every type of desktop computing? In that case you're competing with not only KDE but also GNOME, even if we confine ourselves to Linux based desktops. Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market. I totally get doing something for friends or for the joy of it, but any semi-commercial endeavour pretty much needs to outcompete them both. It's not like GNOME's problem is too slow development which some healthy competition can fix. Seriously, I don't think I am a completely atypical user when I value most importantly my desktop to stick around for the next decade, and work with whatever new hardware changes that comes around without annoying me too much along the way. Two, are you developing a desktop environment or a Linux distribution? In the latter case, you're competing with massive projects like Debian and Fedora. The testing required to release a general Linux distribution on just one architecture is enormous. Security response must bascially never sleep if users should be kept from risk. If the answer is "both" I don't know what to say really. I'm not saying there should never be any more Linux distributions, or that the computing desktop is perfect as it is. Far from it. I'm just saying that competing with the established projects here is realistically going to take a decade or more, and maybe finding a niche other than a general desktop for everyone might be a good start.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  The Linux world generally seems devoid of product-thinking people, and that is probably the main reason it hasn't taken over the desktop space IMO. Plenty of focus on technical matters, but not much thought given to whole user stories or holistic coordination happening.
  - 29athrowaway 5y ago
    Sounds like someone who does not use Linux. Installing Linux is the easiest experience among operating systems on supported hardware. Updating Linux software is the easiest as well. Using a desktop environment like Gnome is straightforward too.
    - 5y ago
shirro 5y ago
Elementary is interesting in the use of Vala to write apps. Most of the small number of tutorials and docs on the lang seem to come from there. Gnome and gtk are all written in c with their own language independent object system and reference counted memory management. Writing Gnome code using language bindings can be a bit awkward if your language has its own concept of objects and memory management. Vala looks kind of like c#/java and the gobject stuff is baked in and it emits c. The language never took off. People would rather use the language they know like Python or Rust I guess. Learning a language like Vala, Swift or Dart just for UI does seem kind of weird but with gnome/gtk perhaps it made sense. Not sure if Vala is still used much elsewhere or what sort of future it has.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  I haven’t used it much but Vala seemed like a very nice language on top of C, it’s a shame it hasn’t really gotten much use.
- rstat1 5y ago
  Much of GNOME Shell is actually JS, and a number of the default apps that ship with GNOME are written in Vala
  - TingPing 5y ago
    I believe 0 gnome core apps are Vala. Some community ones exist but it never was heavily adopted.
    - rstat1 5y ago
      The "Clocks" app ships with GNOME and is written in Vala. Also "Boxes". But you are correct in that it doesn't appear to have been widely adopted.
Shank 5y ago
> As a result, Dani has asked me to resign and completely step away from elementary. This was not my intention when seeking out another position, but Dani has been adamant. In the end, I have decided that the best course of action is indeed for me to move on; I’m giving up on my decade-plus passion for elementary, and have accepted an offer for Dani to be the sole, 100% owner of elementary, Inc. I’ve signed my resignation and as of today, she now owns the entirety of the company shares and responsibility. I wish her the best in continuing its legacy. > In line with Dani’s wishes, I will no longer be involved in any way at elementary. This seems just shy of a hostile takeover. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable in running an OS or supporting a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project. Is there something I’m missing here? I would expect this if there was some huge scandal, but out of the blue this seems like it’s just toxic behavior from a cofounder?
- kenferry 5y ago
  Mm, suspect we’re hearing one side of this. If my cofounder took a full time position elsewhere, yes, I’d want to buy them out too.
- dmurray 5y ago
  > a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project. I've no idea about this particular situation or what Dani's motivation was, but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more).
  - Shank 5y ago
    > but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more). I suppose that's a fair interpretation of the situation. In my opinion, though, if the company is heading downwards in revenue enough to suggest sacrificing salaries, the ownership stake isn't worth much in the moment. The value might be earned by working on the project, but I personally value the shares of a company that can't pay its employees exceedingly low.
8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago
Can we stop naming products in lowercase? elementary is already a word. So is node. Add a damn capital. It's a noun.
- lokedhs 5y ago
  They can write their name any way they want, but people writing text that includes the name is under no obligation to follow that. I've noticed that that in English speaking media it's common to comply with companies wishes for weird ways of writing names, while in Sweden for example, media usually writes Iphone, as that is the correct way to write a name in Swedish (which also capitalises names)
subjectsigma 5y ago
An interesting observation: until now Elementary OS == Cassidy James. I'd never even heard of this other person. Every commit I looked at, every app I downloaded, every blog post I read, every Tweet, etc all had Cassidy's name on it. Even now I'm not even sure what this other person does. I haven't used Elementary OS in some years but I've always kept an eye on it. So to me at least, elementary OS is functionally dead, even if it's not technically dead. I don't care about the drama or who said what or who owed what person what money - the person who did all the work left, and I expect to stop seeing news about elementary OS soon. That simple.
- gurkendoktor 5y ago
  If you look at some PRs on elementary's GitHub, you will see that neither Cassidy James nor Danielle were cranking out mountains of code at any point in time. Both were involved in reviews and UX decisions, Cassidy seemed a bit more in charge of communications lately, but the majority of elementary OS code has come from volunteers for as long as I've followed its development.

164 points by rglullis 5y ago

Cool color scheme. The purple text gets a little weird but I don't know how you'd change it without disturbing the cool color scheme.

Hamuko 5y ago
It looks pretty FedEx-y.

627467 5y ago

Whoa: is this the first case of someone being explicitly forbidden from contributing to an open source project? We knew there was a disagreement on how to part ways. But this outcome seems totally unreasonable for an open source project.

Macha 5y ago
Not a chance. Plenty of cases of people being kicked out of open source projects from formal CoC decisions to hostile forks to "X was being an asshole so we banned them from the issue tracker/mailing list"

behnamoh 5y ago

JasonFruit 5y ago
I... don't think that makes sense? Why can't you release something under the GPL and have it become popular worldwide? Or maybe you're using 'popular' in a sense I'm not accustomed to.
jandrese 5y ago
Do you think people only use open source software to be iconoclasts? This statement makes no sense.

ilovecaching 5y ago

The Linux desktop is a lost cause and the author is better off moving to other things. Not only is desktop a dying segment, but it requires the largest amount of work on driver support (why is my six year old off brand printer not working?), is filled with proprietary apps and companies that make money selling software to end customers who have no incentive to port to Linux (Adobe/Serif are why I still have to keep a Windows VM sitting around), and it requires constant work to keep things working on top of every graphics stack, one of which is famously proprietary (NVIDIA please just open source your drivers already) which reduces the incentives of using Linux in the first place. You also have GNOME shipping on Fedora and Ubuntu which most new users are going to download, which can't even get their stuff together enough to put a freaking dock and activity indicator on the desktop without having to completely switch to a different activities screen. Asking for a dock will literally get you hung in the village square as people assert that normal users want to use keyboard shortcuts. Everything on the Linux desktop has to either be old fashion or eclectic and tailored to the tech enthusiasts already using it (one of the things that Elementary was actually solving). I tried getting my dad to use GNOME and he gave up after five minutes to go back to his Mac (I can't even launch an app?). It's a mess. Every other distro is basically being held together by a scrappy group of volunteers that are supposed to compete against millions of dollars of investment and armys of full time employees. I feel bad for Elementary. They made a good product that was actually sane for people coming from MS/A, but they were never going to turn it into something super profitable or even sway companies like Adobe etc. to get their apps running natively on Linux. This isn't doom and gloom about Linux. Linux owns computing. It's more about how Desktop is niche and not even worth getting into at this point, and how the author has much to gain by just walking away and moving on to other ventures. Edit: You can downvote all you want if it brings you catharsis, but you know I'm right. The year of the Linux desktop isn't right around the corner, just like it wasn't right around the corner last year, or the year before that. Linux desktops will always be for enthusiasts, students who want to learn Linux, or people who have to use outdated hardware, which is honestly the way it should be so that Linux keeps its identity and doesn't become yet another replaceable component in a proprietary stack like it is on Android (I'm looking at you Fuchsia). And no, it doesn't matter that you're reading this right now on Sway using lynx and your mother and sister are using Ubuntu that you installed for them. You are on HN. You are not the segment that makes Linux desktops a lucrative business idea. A software engineer needs to know how to think about market segments and the normal user use cases and not be completely self absorbed into how the world works for them.

jessaustin 5y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 The HN discussion on that is more enlightening than the actual item.

xupybd 5y ago

Something sounds fishy. You have to get work else where to allow us to cut costs. Now you have found work you have to quit.

jdjdjdjdjd 5y ago
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  It is still a pretty unexpected reaction. Cassidy had worked for System76 and did elementary work in his free time before. Sad to see this.
  - rez9x 5y ago
    There was another article posted a month or so back with the other founders perspective. As an outsider, Cassidy seems to be the more reasonable of the two, but I can't know that for sure when viewing the whole situation through a peephole. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=r https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=...
    - CameronNemo 5y ago
      Yeah just read that. Lunduke is apparently purposefully misgendering and dead naming Danielle Foré in that article, which is important context. But the tweets are still good background. My main takeaway: always have a pre-nup.
      - caddybox 5y ago
        Lunduke has a long history of using negative clickbait titles (the Linux sucks series and HTTPS is bad) to gain views. I'm not surprised that he has somehow found a way to milk this controversy too!
    - ricardobeat 5y ago

masterof0 5y ago

I wonder if the folks at Elementary targeted businesses with a "Elementary OS Professional" version. Is pretty hard to get regular people to pay for an operating system when they don't need to, either because the competition is fierce (Zorin, Ubuntu, Mint, Deepin, ...), or because they can choose to donate 0 dollars. I have never seen an app in their custom App Store that will attract me enough to pay for it. The OS itself is pretty neat. I think they should have tried to get government entities, schools, or hospitals to use their OS, so they can have a decent income stream.

twblalock 5y ago
A business wants business-level support. It looks like the core Elementary team was just two people. The length of time between releases makes me think they were understaffed for a while. A business would rather get support from a larger distro with a larger support team. That market already has a number of established vendors: Red Hat, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu server...
bodge5000 5y ago
For me at least, the problem comes in with when you ask for a donation. When I first downloaded Godot, I didn't donate because I had no idea if I'd even use it for long. After a year or so of using it, I came across various reminders to donate, and eventually I did (if I'm completely honest, literally just now). But most people will never come across that prompt again and will forget any need to. Its the same case with Elementary, or any other distro I've tried out. Why pay if I dont know if I'll even use it? That being said, I can't think of any better way of asking without being obtrusive to the user. I guess you could have some really pointless badge or something you unlock by donating which could help prompt users later down the line, but I cant imagine the FOSS community would be a big supporter of that.
- jll29 5y ago
  I would have happily paid them to add a "minimize window" button. Frankly, that's the only think I was ever missing while using E. on my main Linux laptop for the last two years. It has been a pretty slick experience, and that's remarkable given the general state of Linux on the desktop (admittedly, I may be more of a command line person, but still). So maybe instead of "donate", try "pay for getting your very own feature implemented"?

bodge5000 5y ago

From an admittedly quite outside perspective, the state of FOSS dev seems to be showing some cracks. Spending some spare time developing something useful for others, great. Spending pretty much all your spare time doing so, seems unsustainable but you do you. Having that treated as a given rather than a special committment, with extra demands and workload placed on top, this is a problem. Having to get a second job to support your project, what the fuck is going on. If you do that and you're happy with it, don't let me interfer. But this doesn't seem like such a happy post.

miloignis 5y ago
I'm not sure if this applies to this situation - this individual was working on it full time, as a co-founder of a startup. They wanted to continue working on it in their spare time after finding a new job, but their co-founder didn't want them involved anymore. I don't think the open source nature really comes into it, they wished to continue working on their baby, which is totally understandable.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Absolutely, if they're happy with their situation (or I guess, were happy with it), I'm in no place to say its wrong. But it does seem to place streinous demands on the people working on it. Afterall, the story does end with him being forced to abandon his own baby, not entirely of his own choice. That doesn't sound like a normal side project to me, but I'm likely out of touch with big FOSS
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  That is not necessarily quite what happened either. I was more convinced by the other developers position previously on this. But that just means we and everyone else but these two people themselves are just picking sides, not necessarily actually seeing and evaluating right/wrong/good/bad/fair/unfair etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748 I don't mean to say I agree with that article. (Well, most of it is just reporting which is fine, but there are a few small added conclusions at the end) My own comment on that article was that I read it and arrived at an opposite conclusion from the author. And someone else supplied some enlightening background about history between these two and the author.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

I wonder how much innovation in the US is constrained by the fact that people need health insurance, and it is generally expensive as hell. I interviewed with a finance startup a few years back and everything was great until we got down to benefits. That's when they broke the news to me that even though they were being financed by a cadre of millionaires and billionaires with long histories in the finance and banking system, they didn't have enough money to offer benefits. LOL. No.

rgrmrts 5y ago
This seems like an outlier. Every startup I’ve seen offers at least basic health insurance. I agree with your sentiment, I’d never work for a place that didn’t offer a basic package.
- sneak 5y ago
  Why? I'd much rather unbundle and just get additional cash comp and buy my own.
  - rgrmrts 5y ago
    Fair point, I guess. The benefit generally accounts for ~$18,000/yr out of pocket so getting ~$30,000/yr in additional comp is fine. These numbers assuming $1500/mo for good coverage (which is what I paid in the past when I was funemployed), and a higher comp accounting for taxation. All that said, I think employers are required by law to provide healthcare? In a perfect world, basic coverage would be part of what you get for paying taxes by the government.
    - sneak 5y ago
      In a perfect world nobody would be forced with violence to make nonconsensual payments to anyone else, so there would be ~0 tax revenue from which to fund such a thing.
kjs3 5y ago
WOW. That's a special sort of asshole right there. I'm reminded of the time years ago talking to a couple of "VC" (really, smalltime angels) dudebros with Rolex's and Mises Institute wristbands who spent the whole pitch talking about how to make sure the startup employees got shafted on equity and how the wait staff at the restaurant didn't deserve tips because they were 'too stupid' to go to a 'real school' and get 'real jobs'.

xorcist 5y ago

Here are two things I feel I don't understand about a number of quite similar "desktop distributions". One, what's the target user? Is it really every type of desktop computing? In that case you're competing with not only KDE but also GNOME, even if we confine ourselves to Linux based desktops. Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market. I totally get doing something for friends or for the joy of it, but any semi-commercial endeavour pretty much needs to outcompete them both. It's not like GNOME's problem is too slow development which some healthy competition can fix. Seriously, I don't think I am a completely atypical user when I value most importantly my desktop to stick around for the next decade, and work with whatever new hardware changes that comes around without annoying me too much along the way. Two, are you developing a desktop environment or a Linux distribution? In the latter case, you're competing with massive projects like Debian and Fedora. The testing required to release a general Linux distribution on just one architecture is enormous. Security response must bascially never sleep if users should be kept from risk. If the answer is "both" I don't know what to say really. I'm not saying there should never be any more Linux distributions, or that the computing desktop is perfect as it is. Far from it. I'm just saying that competing with the established projects here is realistically going to take a decade or more, and maybe finding a niche other than a general desktop for everyone might be a good start.

ironmagma 5y ago
The Linux world generally seems devoid of product-thinking people, and that is probably the main reason it hasn't taken over the desktop space IMO. Plenty of focus on technical matters, but not much thought given to whole user stories or holistic coordination happening.
- 29athrowaway 5y ago
  Sounds like someone who does not use Linux. Installing Linux is the easiest experience among operating systems on supported hardware. Updating Linux software is the easiest as well. Using a desktop environment like Gnome is straightforward too.
  - 5y ago

shirro 5y ago

Elementary is interesting in the use of Vala to write apps. Most of the small number of tutorials and docs on the lang seem to come from there. Gnome and gtk are all written in c with their own language independent object system and reference counted memory management. Writing Gnome code using language bindings can be a bit awkward if your language has its own concept of objects and memory management. Vala looks kind of like c#/java and the gobject stuff is baked in and it emits c. The language never took off. People would rather use the language they know like Python or Rust I guess. Learning a language like Vala, Swift or Dart just for UI does seem kind of weird but with gnome/gtk perhaps it made sense. Not sure if Vala is still used much elsewhere or what sort of future it has.

saagarjha 5y ago
I haven’t used it much but Vala seemed like a very nice language on top of C, it’s a shame it hasn’t really gotten much use.
rstat1 5y ago
Much of GNOME Shell is actually JS, and a number of the default apps that ship with GNOME are written in Vala
- TingPing 5y ago
  I believe 0 gnome core apps are Vala. Some community ones exist but it never was heavily adopted.
  - rstat1 5y ago
    The "Clocks" app ships with GNOME and is written in Vala. Also "Boxes". But you are correct in that it doesn't appear to have been widely adopted.

Shank 5y ago

> As a result, Dani has asked me to resign and completely step away from elementary. This was not my intention when seeking out another position, but Dani has been adamant. In the end, I have decided that the best course of action is indeed for me to move on; I’m giving up on my decade-plus passion for elementary, and have accepted an offer for Dani to be the sole, 100% owner of elementary, Inc. I’ve signed my resignation and as of today, she now owns the entirety of the company shares and responsibility. I wish her the best in continuing its legacy. > In line with Dani’s wishes, I will no longer be involved in any way at elementary. This seems just shy of a hostile takeover. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable in running an OS or supporting a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project. Is there something I’m missing here? I would expect this if there was some huge scandal, but out of the blue this seems like it’s just toxic behavior from a cofounder?

kenferry 5y ago
Mm, suspect we’re hearing one side of this. If my cofounder took a full time position elsewhere, yes, I’d want to buy them out too.
dmurray 5y ago
> a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project. I've no idea about this particular situation or what Dani's motivation was, but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more).
- Shank 5y ago
  > but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more). I suppose that's a fair interpretation of the situation. In my opinion, though, if the company is heading downwards in revenue enough to suggest sacrificing salaries, the ownership stake isn't worth much in the moment. The value might be earned by working on the project, but I personally value the shares of a company that can't pay its employees exceedingly low.

8n4vidtmkvmk 5y ago

Can we stop naming products in lowercase? elementary is already a word. So is node. Add a damn capital. It's a noun.

lokedhs 5y ago
They can write their name any way they want, but people writing text that includes the name is under no obligation to follow that. I've noticed that that in English speaking media it's common to comply with companies wishes for weird ways of writing names, while in Sweden for example, media usually writes Iphone, as that is the correct way to write a name in Swedish (which also capitalises names)

subjectsigma 5y ago

An interesting observation: until now Elementary OS == Cassidy James. I'd never even heard of this other person. Every commit I looked at, every app I downloaded, every blog post I read, every Tweet, etc all had Cassidy's name on it. Even now I'm not even sure what this other person does. I haven't used Elementary OS in some years but I've always kept an eye on it. So to me at least, elementary OS is functionally dead, even if it's not technically dead. I don't care about the drama or who said what or who owed what person what money - the person who did all the work left, and I expect to stop seeing news about elementary OS soon. That simple.

gurkendoktor 5y ago
If you look at some PRs on elementary's GitHub, you will see that neither Cassidy James nor Danielle were cranking out mountains of code at any point in time. Both were involved in reviews and UX decisions, Cassidy seemed a bit more in charge of communications lately, but the majority of elementary OS code has come from volunteers for as long as I've followed its development.