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.

  • N.E.P.T.R@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    3·
    7 hours ago

    I actually really like GNOME and haven’t had problems yet with extensions. I have it the way I like it, and no matter what I do, I haven’t found features that are half-implemented or broken like on KDE (eg. theme search missing/hiding 90% of themes, desktop effects broken after install, weird crashes, freezing when accessing system apps or app menu). I think Qt is ugly (personal preference) and I prefer libadwaita GTK4 apps for their stability. People are going to hate, but there is no such thing as a perfect project that fits everyone’s needs. I am not saying GNOME is perfect or that it isnt opinionated (i wish app status indicators were supported, ability to modify Flatpak app permission in the system settings, and support for dock/panel), but GNOME is solid and (dare I say it) is a good DE.

    Btw I love KDE and it is the DE i am currently using. I also love GNOME. There aren’t really any DEs I hate except maybe Deepin. Any DE that doesn’t support Wayland (or doesn’t plan on it) is not something thst I ever plan on using because security and stability are BIG requirements for me, I don’t like technical debt or legacy cruft.