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.

  • Avicenna@programming.dev
    81·
    4 days ago

    I did too have a look at the post for the same reasons and did visit some of the links given there. Honestly it looks more to me like tribalism than anything, see for instance comments and discussions here:

    https://blogs.gnome.org/seb128/2019/06/27/system76-pop-os-team-should-learn-to-work-with-their-upstreams/

    or

    https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/c67pkm/comment/es6p3zq/

    I think by now both groups are so entrenched in their position that they convey things from a strongly biased position and don’t have any desire to find a common ground.

    • LostWanderer@fedia.io
      11·
      4 days ago

      Yeah, tribalism does happen in a lot of tech related spaces in addition to anywhere else in life. I think that GNOME devs and System76 will remain separate FOSS tribes that can never know peace between them. In a lot of cases, I feel that System76 started the hostility. However, GNOME seems fairly entrenched in their own ideas. I don’t find GNOME bad by any means, it’s just a REALLY opinionated DE that I can tolerate in little doses. I much prefer KDE for the flexibility it grants without installing a lot of extensions.