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.

  • deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de
    92·
    8 hours ago

    It’s an old blog post, but this doesn’t look very good for System76. At the same time, GNOME (and GTK) is refusing to implement basic features. Stuff like server side window decorations, because they can’t “tolerate” SSD. The hard enforcing of Adwaita theming might make sense in GNOME, but on devices not 100% in the GNOME ecosystem, libadwaita apps have awful UX. I do not want shit like Zenity to take up 50% of my screen space for 3 words and 2 buttons, yet libadwaita enforces it.