Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

When was the last XDG specification published? Most times I see the freedesktop.org domain referenced these days is because systemd is hosted there, for some reason.

In the meantime, the existing standards are being "deprecated" or ignored e.g. notification icons is at this point not supported by 2 out of the 3 largest X desktops. There's still no replacement even when these two desktops have their own version of "notification icons".

But I do not really want to argue about FDO's mission. I just used how quickly its standards are becoming useless to show how library APIs is only a small part of the problem. The bigger problem is the lack of commitment to standards (I'm not saying I'm not part of this problem, too). Ideally, good reason should be provided when dropping support for an existing and approved XDG or LSB standard. Not "it's just that we have a different vision for Linux". Without that, a generic abstraction layer is just infeasible.

> Regarding Client Side Decorations

I do not even dislike CSDs. But it's just yet another way in which _existing_ cross-desktop compatibility is being thrown down the drain for no good reason. I do not know about KDE but there are plenty other DEs out there some of which don't even use decorations at all.

And this compatibility change would not be fixed either by the proposal discussed in the article.

> say shit like "Cascade of Attention Deficit Teenagers problem"

That is not my quote. E.g.
http://blogs.gnome.org/tthurman/2009/07/02/cascade-of-att...