System76: A Case Study on How Not To Collaborate With Upstream
blogs.gnome.org
Preface: the following post was written in the context of the events that happened in September. Some time has passed, and I held off on publishing in the hopes we could reach a happy ending with System76. As time has passed, that hope has faded. Attempts to reach out to System76 have not been productive,...

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7224516

Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

System76 is best known for spreading misinfo and lies about GNOME and other upstreams, selling overpriced re-branded clevos, “being made in America”, loving rust and hyping on twitter and mastodon.

Most of the “backlash” against GNOME comes from the a community that has more opinions than users or just straight up misinformation and spite.

COSMIC is very poorly designed, it might be written in the “memory-safe programming language” but it’s clear that they don’t have a design backbone. They basically created the caricature of GNOME’s adwaita but now you can paint your windows in whatever barf-inducing color you want.

They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time, literally every issue that sparked that redesign was resolved upstream in both aforementioned desktops.

  • LostWanderer@fedia.io
    0·
    1 month ago

    The fact this came from hexbear.net immediately raises some mental alarms in my head. So, before forming an opinion on this matter…I read the GNOME blog post and processed the presented information before deciding: hexshitpost or no. I found the blog post to ultimately be built on a strong foundation of knowledge/sources; written in a neutral and non-combative tone that calls out System76 without being incendiary or unnecessarily cruel. The case being lain out about System76’s many incidents of spreading harmful misinformation about GNOME makes me understand why GNOME does have some haters these days in the Linux space…

    It’s curious that instead of polishing COSMIC before pushing it out in the world, they released a broken version of what should’ve been something cool! I agree, perhaps working with GNOME and KDE would’ve been better if System76 wasn’t going to meaningfully invest in COSMIC’s stability before release. I’m sure they’ll fix it in post launch updates. From my brief experience with COSMIC, it did have the bones for a good DE, however, the polish was lacking. It made me sad and switch to Bazzite.

    • алсааас [she/her]@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      0·
      1 month ago

      If you actually interact with Hexbear, you fill find meaningful and balanced interactions from an actually leftist & progressive perspective, just FYI.

      Don’t believe all the slander you hear BTW.

      • Rusty Shackleford@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 month ago

        “Leftists” who love the CCP, Vladimir Putin, Mao Zedong, <insertAuthoritarianBullyHere>, etc.

        The denizens of HexBear are temporarily inconvenienced dictators in waiting.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    01·
    1 month ago

    While I dislike the look and GNOME’s approach to things (“we know better what the user wants than they do” aka the crApple approach), I do appreciate that they do provide an alternative for crApple users. They also write a lot of libraries and software that are undeniably good and useful. No one is forced to use GNOME so I’m glad they exist.

    Of course this blog post only has one view of the issues and I’m not going to spend a morning going down the rabbit hole to make an opinion on it. But if System76 really does have a problem with upstream for whatever reason, they are free to fork their stuff and cut all communication. Since they did write COSMIC, it looks like that’s their goal. Good on them. It may just decrease the drama and make GNOME developers’ lives easier.