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Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

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Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#81

Post by m-p-3 »

umvi wrote: post #44

I wish people would realize that being kind gets you results 10x faster and better than being mean/critical. In my own experience I've had people tell me certain projects on GitHub are complete garbage and criticized all the shortcomings of the tool compared to other tools. It made me feel bad and want to take it down. On the other hand, I've had users praise other projects and excitedly request some missing features…

This is where you can tell them to go fork themselves ;)

Thank you for taking your time and knowledge to provide some open-source tools! There's a lot of users out there that silently appreciate it.

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#82

Post by fjp »

folex wrote: post #35
rossdavidh wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it seems like there is a potential way for a non-dev user to help out with open source, here. Basically, if a person volunteers to be an intermediary, reading the feedback and distilling it down to the relevant content (stripping out the unproductive negativity), that could be useful. It would also be emotionally easier to read harsh feedback, when it's not about _your_ work, just the work of a product you use. M…

While the idea is good and kind, it's not as easy as it seems. That's called a support line, and it requires good understanding of the project by non-dev support. That requires to educate someone about your project, and maintain their knowledge to be up to date. That's not an easy task even in commercial projects with a team of several people, and ability to delegate, and requires a non-trivial skill of leadership. I…

I have help multiple roles that could be called "very technical support" - technical enough to understand the guts of a project, troubleshoot, deflect reports that are just user error, report bugs on behalf of users with extra debugging insight, etc... but not technical enough to contribute meaningfully to the source code.

That job is just as exhausting and unrewarding as any support role. There's no fucking way I would do it for free on open source software that wasn't my own creation. EDIT: Unless it was a definite path to being a core contributor to a project I was very passionate about.

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#83

Post by fjp »

TheCondor wrote: post #16
swozey wrote: post #3

I can't even imagine the stress from public comments that comes from working on an open source operating system. I don't use Mint but I'm hugely sympathetic to the devs who have to deal with the backlash from, of all things, a logo and website design change that they likely had little to no involvement with.

Opensource anything... It’s not completely thankless, but the thanks seem to be mostly direct and private and then you face public ridicule for errors, bugs, missteps or just when people have different aesthetics or taste and don’t like your project. There are so many “behind the scenes” sorts of projects too, stuff that matters and isn’t quite as visible to the common end user. I think of OpenSSL, the big security h…

Almost every python package that I've used seems to have Github "issues" opened where someone asks "Why even do this when there's [insert similar but different thing]". Who cares? Pip uninstall it if it isn't what you want? Fork it if you want something slightly different? Or contribute to a productive discussion about the direction of the project? Do SOMETHING positive.

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#84

Post by ohiovr »

MrTonyD wrote: post #66
ohiovr wrote: post #41

Linux Mint is my main desktop operating system now after abandoning Windows and MacOS. I tried Debian, Ubuntu, Open Suse, but settled on Mint because I was familiar with Ubuntu and Mint feels traditional and polished. Every day I see sad examples of eternal September's march to the written abyss. I had a dream of writing a significant open source project but the reality of entitled user disruption, lack of clear econ…

I ran my own company for a few years just to make money to stop working so I could contribute to open source. By the time I finally made enough to not have to worry about money anymore, I had spent enough years working with open source to realize that big companies get great benefits (I was in meetings with HP, IBM, and Oracle VPs where open source was being supported to transfer responsibility and costs away from th…

Thank you for the story!

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#85

Post by Jyaif »

dessant wrote: post #12

> We can get demotivated, uncertain, depressed even by negative reactions or interactions, and it can lead to developers stepping away from the project, taking a break or even leaving for good. It truly is a struggle. I have a couple of projects with moderate numbers of users, and between the "it doesn't work" private messages (not even mentioning which project) and some abusive and entitled users, I do wonder someti…

> not even mentioning which project

My trick to solve this problem: Include the name of the project in the email address, e.g. dessant+project1@gmail.com dessant+project2@gmail.com etc...

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#86

Post by JudgeWapner »

saikatsg wrote: post #80
JudgeWapner wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THANK YOU. I used it for 7 years, because I was sick of constantly tending to my Gentoo install. I used LM because it Just Worked. I never had to think about the OS, I could just focus on my work. The biggest bug I had in 7 years of using it was my /boot partition filling up because new kernel installs wouldn't delete the old kernels/initrd.img. Other than that, it just worked. Thank you

What do you use now, looks like you don't use LM any more ;)

I use Arch. Kind of complex reasons, I guess. It wasn't that LM was deficient in any way, just figured it was time to really dig in and understand what my OS was doing. Arch has the best documentation, so I decided to switch to it.

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#87

Post by dessant »

Jyaif wrote: post #85
dessant wrote: post #12

> We can get demotivated, uncertain, depressed even by negative reactions or interactions, and it can lead to developers stepping away from the project, taking a break or even leaving for good. It truly is a struggle. I have a couple of projects with moderate numbers of users, and between the "it doesn't work" private messages (not even mentioning which project) and some abusive and entitled users, I do wonder someti…

> not even mentioning which project My trick to solve this problem: Include the name of the project in the email address, e.g. dessant+project1@gmail.com dessant+project2@gmail.com etc...

That's a neat trick, though I only accept bug reports over GitHub, but that doesn't stop people from contacting me through any other email address or social media account they can find.

The problem is not the lack of processes, but that we don't have a good way to enforce them.

Even on GitHub issue templates are often ignored, and there is no option for making them mandatory. Some projects resort to accepting bug reports only through a third-party service such as Google Forms, because that supports mandatory form fields.

GitHub could really step up and offer proper tools for controlling how bugs are reported.

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#88

Post by Barrin92 »

regularfry wrote: post #69
arusahni wrote: post #25

This touches on something I've seen in (some, not all) large open source communities: the language used on a daily basis. The default tone is one devoid of empathy or understanding. > This update is shit. or > [new build gets published, person's pet bug doesn't get addressed] > The devs are lazy. At what point did this sort of tone get normalized? I initially chalked it down to non-native English speakers using verbi…

It's human nature. Literally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

it's a little bit lazy to blame it on nature. Not all communities function like this. As one of the users above points out, the degree to which abrasive language and behavior tends to pop up in OSS / linux communities is definitely grounded in a "usenet" culture.

There's a long history of excusing aggressiveness as honesty and throwing "RTFM" responses around, or turning the smallest disagreement into a flame war. Now that OSS projects are really large and not dominated by in-groups any more, it has become a significant problem. This sort of thoughtless communication only works when the people having the conversation know each other.

Re: Linux Mint's Sobering Update: A Glimpse into the Personal Struggles Devs Face

#90

Post by O1111OOO »

JudgeWapner wrote: post #86
saikatsg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use now, looks like you don't use LM any more ;)

I use Arch. Kind of complex reasons, I guess. It wasn't that LM was deficient in any way, just figured it was time to really dig in and understand what my OS was doing. Arch has the best documentation, so I decided to switch to it.

> Arch has the best documentation, so I decided to switch to it.

Not an Arch user but their documentation is amazing (small sample[0]). I toyed with FreeBSD years ago and have never forgotten just how well documented the entire system was too[1].

Well-written documentation (with plenty of real world examples) is severely underappreciated in modern tech. It's not only empowering but it's just plain fun getting under the hood.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_applications

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/c...

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