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.

  • boredsquirrel (he)@slrpnk.net
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Interesting one

    I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise “light” (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

    I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

    I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

    Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

    GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

    I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

    I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

    More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

    With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD

    • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      4 hours ago

      There are plenty of reasons why themes are bad. They’re a security risk when downloaded from the internet, they’re often not updated alongside the desktop environment causing bugs, and maintaining support for themes is difficult.

      But what GNOME does is eliminate choice, not themes.