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>Yes, you do owe them some basic respect and dignity if you want them to cooperate with you. You only owe people the respect they give you, I guess is the take

>Yes, you do owe them some basic respect and dignity if you want them to cooperate with you. You only owe people the respect they give you, I guess is the take away from that. Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects. Basic respect and dignity, for sure, but that doesn't extend to not criticizing Gnome. Respect can mean treating someone like a person or treating someone like an authority, or a competent subject matter expert. Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate, and on to the point where if Gnome gets sufficient market share they're going to make their own custom extensions and extinguish the competition, or at least make a bunch of extra work for everyone. I don't want a future where Gnome is dominant, I believe that they'll abuse that position. Once again that's subjective, but I don't think it's unreasonable from looking at their past behavior. >If it wasn't that, they'd find something else to be mad and blame GNOME about. Like, my friend, you're doing it now. It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem. It's sad, but it's still Gnome's problem to fix. >Again, this is required by the core Wayland protocol. I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground. To be clear, there are a number of points where I am hopeful about Gnome. Libdecor was an acceptable compromise, and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps, but I'm reserving judgement until I see how it plays out. I'm not a zealot, I can see a handful of things that has caused my respect for the Gnome project to go up. Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this. Makes it every hard to find any common ground. I think we both want open source to succeed, and we should both be on the same side, but that's hard under the circumstances.

QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
>Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects. No. You're confusing a normal disagreement with disrespect. There's nothing disrespectful about saying "no we're not going to implement this." I assume from this confusion that you don't work in this field. If you work as a developer you get used to saying things like that all the time. Most users don't understand code. Why would they? Users come at developers with all kinds of requests, some good and some bad, and it's the developers' job to make a decision to say yes or no. >Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate Cooperate with who? If you want them to cooperate with you, then you need to respect them. That way they'll owe you the respect you give them. That means putting aside all the past anger you might have and practicing forgiveness. Put aside any old opinions you had and start fresh. This isn't related to GNOME by the way, this is for any project that you may have a disagreement with. Just think how this would be if the situations were switched and somebody wanted something from you for free. The ball is completely in your court because they're not the ones going on social media making long posts about how you should write some code for them! >It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem. Unfortunately in this case it's neither. I can name some times when GNOME screwed up communications but this one isn't that. >I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground. There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. I see the problem, what you're not seeing is that the problem isn't fixable in the way you think it is. You still seem to think this is a "stance" or "opinion" that some developer has and not an unchangeable fact of the code. Why? If you can't explain this well then maybe consider that you're not qualified to be commenting on it? >and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps This already happened, have a look at what ElementaryOS is doing. >Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this. I can list a bunch but I don't want to. I don't bother discussing my own opinions about GNOME on HN any more because every time I do, people who hold opinions like yours use it as an excuse to turn it into a GNOME hate-fest flamewar and start harassing the developers, calling them shitty bad people who deserve to get their reputations trashed. That stuff is unacceptable. I'm serious here when I say this. In my opinion it's your attitude that's poisoning the well. And this is why I use a throwaway account to discuss this by the way. For whatever reason the moderators here think it's ok for this to be a place where trolls and conspiracy theorists run amok. I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end.
- traverseda 4y ago
  > I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end. That negativity has been for the most part earned. Obviously "toxic" negativity is a problem, by very definition, but I truly don't think anything in this thread (before you started commenting and things got heated at least) crossed the line into being toxic. You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate. Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate and, while demonstrating an underlying frustration, isn't toxic. Especially in a non-professional setting like this one. That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine. It even uses passive voice! (Note that I attribute a lot of things to "Gnome" as if that was a person, I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name, not because I don't understand that Gnome is an organization composed of a bunch of people) >There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. No, that's a statement of opinion. Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here. XDG-decoration is subjective, and most non-gnome linux DEs have decided to implement it. It's a choice not to. There's a lot of things you're saying are facts that seem to me to be subjective calls by the Gnome team. Adding a dconf setting for typeahead instead of recursive search would be another example of a subjective call. Now their stance may be supported by facts, facts like the wayland spec requires you to implement CSD, or adding more dconf settings goes against Gnome design guidelines, but that doesn't make their conclusion some kind of immaculate fact. It's still subjective opinion, it's just supported by some facts. So this is where it gets tricky, even something like "should gnome prioritize implementing the XDG-decoration spec" is highly highly subjective. When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff. To debate that kind of subjective stuff we need some kind of framework, and if we can't agree on any sort of community standards aside from "I do what I want" we're going to have a hard time with that.
  - QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
    >That negativity has been for the most part earned. No, it hasn't. It's unacceptable for you to make personal attacks calling them "shitty people" because they closed a bug report. It's unacceptable for you to demand that open source developers spend their time addressing your concerns for free. Period. End of story. This isn't up for debate and you're acting like a troll by constantly coming back on this. So I'm asking as person, can you just stop this behavior, please. If you can't agree this is unacceptable, you'll always be a toxic participant in open source. I'm not even exaggerating here. Open source developers will never owe you anything, the entire point of it is it's all voluntary and any contributor can come and go at any time they please. Read this article if you want to know more about why this type of toxic entitlement is always harmful: https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/ https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/ >You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate. And I'm telling you it's not. You're sitting in a place with incorrect information. >Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate First of all, that's not what you said originally. You're walking it back again. I wish you would just be honest and apologize and say you were out of line before. Second of all, they're not doing that. Your statement is incorrect and misleading. GNOME isn't opposed to anyone else implementing server side decorations in Wayland. There's just no point to them implementing it in GNOME. >That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine Well you need to imagine harder because that wasn't passive. You're framing it like GNOME is actively standing in the way blocking someone from implementing server side decorations, when they've never done that. You can put server side decorations in your own Wayland implementation, or use another one like KDE that already has it. GNOME can't "oppose" anyone from doing that. >I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name You already did call them out by name. Again, if you have a disagreement with an individual contributor, you should talk it out with them instead of trash talking them behind their back on social media. Trash talking makes your behavior frustrating to deal with because nobody can trust you not to start fights. >Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here. There's no "opposition," this isn't a fight or a debate and it never was. Open source is a team sport and the other team you play against is the computer. It's not about people vs other people. Either you're helping out the team working on the code or you're not. You're still framing this in needlessly confrontational and combative terms, this needs to stop. >When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff No, there's no debate to be had here. If you were serious about discussing these issues you'd take it up with the GNOME design team. In a sense their decisions are subjective but they don't just make them at random. They're trying to make a consistent system within a particular framework targeted at a particular set of users. And the same things about development apply to them too. Nobody on the design team gets to "win" every debate. Some ideas are just bad and they lose and get thrown out. All the things you're saying have been discussed to death already. Do you think the design team hasn't heard this already in the years previously when these were brought up before? They have, you're not making any new arguments that would ever be convincing. You're just saying "I wish they would implement this" and that's like, ok? All the GNOME designers have about 1000 features they want to implement too, but time is limited so realistically they can only pick a few and they have to throw out the rest.

QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago

>Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects. No. You're confusing a normal disagreement with disrespect. There's nothing disrespectful about saying "no we're not going to implement this." I assume from this confusion that you don't work in this field. If you work as a developer you get used to saying things like that all the time. Most users don't understand code. Why would they? Users come at developers with all kinds of requests, some good and some bad, and it's the developers' job to make a decision to say yes or no. >Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate Cooperate with who? If you want them to cooperate with you, then you need to respect them. That way they'll owe you the respect you give them. That means putting aside all the past anger you might have and practicing forgiveness. Put aside any old opinions you had and start fresh. This isn't related to GNOME by the way, this is for any project that you may have a disagreement with. Just think how this would be if the situations were switched and somebody wanted something from you for free. The ball is completely in your court because they're not the ones going on social media making long posts about how you should write some code for them! >It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem. Unfortunately in this case it's neither. I can name some times when GNOME screwed up communications but this one isn't that. >I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground. There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. I see the problem, what you're not seeing is that the problem isn't fixable in the way you think it is. You still seem to think this is a "stance" or "opinion" that some developer has and not an unchangeable fact of the code. Why? If you can't explain this well then maybe consider that you're not qualified to be commenting on it? >and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps This already happened, have a look at what ElementaryOS is doing. >Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this. I can list a bunch but I don't want to. I don't bother discussing my own opinions about GNOME on HN any more because every time I do, people who hold opinions like yours use it as an excuse to turn it into a GNOME hate-fest flamewar and start harassing the developers, calling them shitty bad people who deserve to get their reputations trashed. That stuff is unacceptable. I'm serious here when I say this. In my opinion it's your attitude that's poisoning the well. And this is why I use a throwaway account to discuss this by the way. For whatever reason the moderators here think it's ok for this to be a place where trolls and conspiracy theorists run amok. I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end.

traverseda 4y ago
> I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end. That negativity has been for the most part earned. Obviously "toxic" negativity is a problem, by very definition, but I truly don't think anything in this thread (before you started commenting and things got heated at least) crossed the line into being toxic. You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate. Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate and, while demonstrating an underlying frustration, isn't toxic. Especially in a non-professional setting like this one. That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine. It even uses passive voice! (Note that I attribute a lot of things to "Gnome" as if that was a person, I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name, not because I don't understand that Gnome is an organization composed of a bunch of people) >There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. No, that's a statement of opinion. Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here. XDG-decoration is subjective, and most non-gnome linux DEs have decided to implement it. It's a choice not to. There's a lot of things you're saying are facts that seem to me to be subjective calls by the Gnome team. Adding a dconf setting for typeahead instead of recursive search would be another example of a subjective call. Now their stance may be supported by facts, facts like the wayland spec requires you to implement CSD, or adding more dconf settings goes against Gnome design guidelines, but that doesn't make their conclusion some kind of immaculate fact. It's still subjective opinion, it's just supported by some facts. So this is where it gets tricky, even something like "should gnome prioritize implementing the XDG-decoration spec" is highly highly subjective. When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff. To debate that kind of subjective stuff we need some kind of framework, and if we can't agree on any sort of community standards aside from "I do what I want" we're going to have a hard time with that.
- QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago
  >That negativity has been for the most part earned. No, it hasn't. It's unacceptable for you to make personal attacks calling them "shitty people" because they closed a bug report. It's unacceptable for you to demand that open source developers spend their time addressing your concerns for free. Period. End of story. This isn't up for debate and you're acting like a troll by constantly coming back on this. So I'm asking as person, can you just stop this behavior, please. If you can't agree this is unacceptable, you'll always be a toxic participant in open source. I'm not even exaggerating here. Open source developers will never owe you anything, the entire point of it is it's all voluntary and any contributor can come and go at any time they please. Read this article if you want to know more about why this type of toxic entitlement is always harmful: https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/ https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/ >You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate. And I'm telling you it's not. You're sitting in a place with incorrect information. >Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate First of all, that's not what you said originally. You're walking it back again. I wish you would just be honest and apologize and say you were out of line before. Second of all, they're not doing that. Your statement is incorrect and misleading. GNOME isn't opposed to anyone else implementing server side decorations in Wayland. There's just no point to them implementing it in GNOME. >That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine Well you need to imagine harder because that wasn't passive. You're framing it like GNOME is actively standing in the way blocking someone from implementing server side decorations, when they've never done that. You can put server side decorations in your own Wayland implementation, or use another one like KDE that already has it. GNOME can't "oppose" anyone from doing that. >I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name You already did call them out by name. Again, if you have a disagreement with an individual contributor, you should talk it out with them instead of trash talking them behind their back on social media. Trash talking makes your behavior frustrating to deal with because nobody can trust you not to start fights. >Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here. There's no "opposition," this isn't a fight or a debate and it never was. Open source is a team sport and the other team you play against is the computer. It's not about people vs other people. Either you're helping out the team working on the code or you're not. You're still framing this in needlessly confrontational and combative terms, this needs to stop. >When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff No, there's no debate to be had here. If you were serious about discussing these issues you'd take it up with the GNOME design team. In a sense their decisions are subjective but they don't just make them at random. They're trying to make a consistent system within a particular framework targeted at a particular set of users. And the same things about development apply to them too. Nobody on the design team gets to "win" every debate. Some ideas are just bad and they lose and get thrown out. All the things you're saying have been discussed to death already. Do you think the design team hasn't heard this already in the years previously when these were brought up before? They have, you're not making any new arguments that would ever be convincing. You're just saying "I wish they would implement this" and that's like, ok? All the GNOME designers have about 1000 features they want to implement too, but time is limited so realistically they can only pick a few and they have to throw out the rest.