GNOME != Fedora [LWN.net]

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 0:01 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: GNOME != Fedora by clump
Parent article: Rawhide gets GNOME Shell for all display types

I think I already wrote about this kind of thing, but the problem isn't that users getting something for free won't do anything - frequently, they will offer a number of things, not least time and energy in reporting bugs and regressions - but that their contributions may not be welcome anyway.

And I can see how people get frustrated. If their preferred software becomes unmaintained, they have to step up and maintain it, which is what we all expect. But then, they might also need to step up and maintain various dependencies, which is why the Trinity people have to also maintain Qt 3, for example. And on top of all this, if their preferred OS distribution decides that such software isn't welcome any more, they also have to find a distribution they can live with or maintain their own variant.

So from the end-user perspective, it goes from having a stable and dependable environment one minute to having to maintain large tracts of the software stack the next. Sure, they should "pitch in", but you can't blame them for complaining about it.

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GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 19:44 UTC (Sat) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

One minute? We've delayed GNOME 3.x by 1+ year and provided live usb images for most of that period. This aside from loads of blogposts, announcement and conferences.

I still find it logical that most users are not aware. But people on LWN, well, no, I find that odd.

And I don't mind arguments. So if I find something strange in someones argumentation, I like a discussion. Don't mind changing my mind in the process (discussion is pointless otherwise anyway).

GNOME != Fedora

Posted Nov 5, 2011 22:54 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Well, "one minute" might be an exaggeration, although to an end-user it can be a bit like the sequence of events leading up to Arthur Dent finding out that his house is going to be knocked down to make way for a bypass. Even people who are forewarned might be in a position where none of the choices available are particularly appealing, and so they end up doing the most natural thing: putting off doing anything until they absolutely have to. Then it is a "one minute to the next" situation, although there are admittedly fewer excuses available to the person doing the complaining.

Of course, not everyone follows the mailing lists, and there is a class of end-user that not only won't be following the lists, but also won't have any power to dictate what they will be running in future. Those people have been mentioned a few times in discussions around this topic, presumably by people whose jobs are made more uncomfortable if they impose sudden changes on this particular class of end-user, but I can imagine that there are environments where sudden changes are imposed and the end-users just have to live with it.

All this works its way into the matter of open source adoption. If the end-users get too upset because things keep changing in ways they can't understand or didn't ask for, it becomes very easy for people to start claiming that "we would never have had this problem with Windows" even if that is a lie. Sadly, not everyone is enthusiastic about radical change, and those who don't want it don't seem to have a convenient way of supporting (or, more precisely, bankrolling) measures to avoid it.