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The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

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Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#81

Post by ilyt »

asoneth wrote: post #64
ilyt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inertia and being "good enough" is massive factor. Average user don't give a shit frankly

It is certainly possible that GNOME is only popular because of legacy inertia, and that it will eventually be surpassed by other desktop environments as, by definition, inertia doesn't last forever. But it's worth acknowledging that it's also possible that a large number of people simply disagree with you and actively choose it on its own merits.

The second factor is being "good enough". Not many people will move DE if they are 5, 10, even 25% better. The complaints are also mostly from power users

Especially now where most of stuff you do is "switch between few full screen apps" so as long as access to the basics is not obstructed I'd imagine most users wouldn't care

Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#84

Post by ilyt »

asoneth wrote: post #62
ilyt wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that easy, you will be tied to GNOME just by fact this or that app (for which there might not be replacement) picked GTK for its interface, so you have to at least go thru configuring it to look the same as the rest of your desktop. No matter which DE you chose you will be under GNOME's malady of design decisions. > They have a vision and stick to it for years. I'm happy they don't just feel offended by post…

> Honestly GNOME is there because of inertia more than quality of the changes. I have heard this explanation before for why GNOME is so popular despite the fact that so many people vocally dislike it. It's certainly possible, but I find it implausible. For one thing, this would imply that we see a slow downward trend in GNOME usage which does not seem to be the case. For another thing, Linux users in particular seem…

> I have heard this explanation before for why GNOME is so popular despite the fact that so many people vocally dislike it. It's certainly possible, but I find it implausible.

It's also a default for few prominent Linux distributions. Ubuntu, Debian and the Red Hat variants all come with GNOME since forever (aside the Ubuntu's Unity endeavour

> I think it's worth considering an alternative hypothesis, that many people have evaluated multiple options and legitimately prefer GNOME to the alternatives on intrinsic merits such as design, stability, extensions, etc.

Or that just most people use GNOME so distros pick it as default and so most people use GNOME.

Why most people use bash while it can be argued that zsh is wholly better replacement ?

Also "better" doesn't matter if improvement is small enough that it doesn't improve your workflow, or small enough that it is not worth the effort to re-learn everything.

GNOME isn't really "bad" as much as "a bunch of developers changing shit that worked just fine for mostly imaginary gains (or just plain old "generating work to stay employed")", which just pisses off people that were entirely fine with it and now got a bunch of annoyances to re-learn after updating their machines.

> For another thing, Linux users in particular seem less likely than most to just "go with what everyone else uses" since that would mean not using Linux in the first place.

Right but the fact it's higher on average doesn't mean that on average majority will still just use Ubuntu with whatever default DE it is coming with.

> Programs written for one Linux desktop environments typically work with only minor aesthetic issues in others, so that should not be a major impediment to distro-hopping.

I mean I use i3 and it has been a bit of a PITA to have both KDE and GNOME side to not look shit (especially with dark theme... altho that part became a bit easier) without installing the entirety of both environments just to change settings, so dunno about that.

Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#85

Post by ilyt »

chpatrick wrote: post #47
ilyt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The remaining 5% know how to use git

Git has nothing to do with discussion and issue tracking.

The comparison is not "git to github" but "mailing list + git" (aka. Linux Kernel development model) vs "github". As. You know. The thread is about mailing lists ?

Technically there are git based issue trackers and code review systems but that's unrelated note

Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#87

Post by laserdancepony »

teekert wrote: post #3

I love Gnome, they piss some people off by making radical choices, but slowly they keep iterating and coming up with something nice over a long term. They have a vision and stick to it for years. I'm happy they don't just feel offended by posts like yours and act like short term pleasers. It's foss, you can fork it, you can use KDE. you can switch to Windows if you want. That's what free as in freedom is. Personally…

Because we are able to fork it we are not allowed to criticize it? Warped worldview.

Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#88

Post by laserdancepony »

malermeister wrote: post #56
simion314 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GTK was a GUI toolkit, it was DE agnostic and also cross platform (though it looked like shit). But as we can see from your comment GTK was captured by GNOME to be a GNOME exclusive project, if a change broke XFCE , GNOME people pretended they do not know what an XFCE is.

GTK has long been under the GNOME umbrella. The XFCE folks are welcome to fork GTK to support their own use cases.

Nice, the now popular dev worldview "break things, and break things often". Just for the sake of breaking. I love it, why didn't we stumble earlier over this magnificent piece of discovery.

Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#89

Post by e3bc54b2 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #74
sleepydog wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases, you can send to a mailing list without subscribing, and people will include your email when they respond. I've filed multiple bugs this way. It was as easy as sending an email and attaching a patch.

Whenever I tried interacting with mailing lists in the last five years, I always needed to subscribe or wait for days for someone to moderate the spam queue. Anti-spam measures are a large part of what made using MLs so annoying. From a moderation side, MLs are more work for that reason as well - Github and Gitlab at least get rid of spambots shilling shady cryptocurrencies, weenie enlargeners or questionable quality…

My personal experience has been very opposite.

All the relevant mailing lists for my interest projects have web interface/archive, I can selectively reply/participate in any or no ongoing threads, and stop at any time.

Re: The Gnome Project is closing all its mailing lists

#90

Post by e3bc54b2 »

robert_foss wrote: post #11
e3bc54b2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who formerly used to be in no-ML camp, I am proudly converted. Mailing Lists are decidedly democratic, and have least barrier to entry. It is also technically superior in providing unified interface to patches, communication, bug reports and everything adjacent. Compared to that any fancy service provides lock-in under thin veil of "friendly interface".

I think most developers would find it easier to contribute to a github/gitlab/gitea project than a ML one. Besides, there are definite downsides to like MLs, like CI integration and pulling patches to local trees. Now, there are strengths too. Like being archived easily & having threaded conversations integrated.

CI can definitely done on mailing lists. The interface is bit worse than PRs, but I'm sure with enough imagination that can be overcome.

Pulling local trees has been absolutely better IMO with mailing list. I can literally with single keybinding apply patch to relevant repo, something that takes much longer route with Github. (convert URL to raw.github/whatever, copy and paste to apply, or do clicky-clicky in the Github app or whathaveyou)

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