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.

  • ibot@feddit.org
    32·
    10 hours ago

    It’s a more than 4 years old blog post.

    I can’t tell much about the things that the writer complains about. But concerning Cosmic: I think a new additional DE is a win. People who like it can use it, others can skip it. More variation means more choice.

    Personally: I find Cosmic still a bit barebone. It is very fast. It think it looks quite good (besides their wallpapers). It’s not yet there, where it needs to be for me to use it as a daily driver, but I find it impressive what System 76 released in their first final version.

    Gnome is the most beautyful DE in my opinion, but I find it’s UX absolut horrible. I hate usining it without quite some extensions and I do absolutely not use it. Look at it, yeah. But using it is not intuitive at all for me.

    Luckily, there are other DE’s I like. That’s the beauty about Linux.

    • illusionist@lemmy.zip
      71·
      10 hours ago

      Extensions are there to be used, just use them. Imagine using kde or firefox without adjusting it. There is a base version that fits for everyone and people can write extenions.

      Yes, many extensions should be in the base version but who am I to tell the GNOME devs what to include? The extension manager should be included by default. It’s the distro’s maintainers fault if it’s not included at this point. They should be easier to discover, but again, I am not really helping to improve the situation either.

      • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        2 hours ago

        I think getting the base DE and ‘adding modules’ (extensions) is great. And some distros like Bazzite add around 10+ extensions by default.

      • priapus@piefed.socialEnglish
        5·
        7 hours ago

        Extensions are there to be used, just use them. Imagine using kde or firefox without adjusting it.

        Except if you use any kind of rolling or semi-rolling distro you will have to deal with extensions breaking every major update. If a different DE offers these features out of the box, it makes way more sense to me to just use that.

      • gustofwind@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        10 hours ago

        Yeah it’s definitely a bit weird to setup but I don’t think I can leave gnome now that I’ve finally made it mine