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.

  • onlinepersona@programming.dev
    32·
    5 days ago

    While I dislike the look and GNOME’s approach to things (“we know better what the user wants than they do” aka the crApple approach), I do appreciate that they do provide an alternative for crApple users. They also write a lot of libraries and software that are undeniably good and useful. No one is forced to use GNOME so I’m glad they exist.

    Of course this blog post only has one view of the issues and I’m not going to spend a morning going down the rabbit hole to make an opinion on it. But if System76 really does have a problem with upstream for whatever reason, they are free to fork their stuff and cut all communication. Since they did write COSMIC, it looks like that’s their goal. Good on them. It may just decrease the drama and make GNOME developers’ lives easier.