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

I've been juggling the idea of switching _back_ to Linux Mint after running Ubuntu on my dev machine for the past year. I used Mint on my main PC a few years back and it was simply terrific - ultra fast and did everything as needed.

Sometimes a change of scenery is great, in this case, this mean mention of Mint makes me want to go back.

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 and that made me feel like a million bucks and I was filled with motivation to improve the tool.

To the Mint guys: thanks! I don't use Mint, but I have in the past, and hundreds(thousands?) of people try it each day. Packaging open source software is a labor of love, and the community appreciates the work you are doing. No one ever says "good job!" when it works, but they raise hell when it doesn't.

Keep doing what you are doing, because while you may not get to perceive it often: people really, really, really appreciate the fruits of your work!

> This creates something that we in Debian call a "FrankenDebian" which results in system updates becoming unpredictable [2].

I believe this comment shows how a condescending communication style in FLOSS hurts goodwill and clogs the virtuous cycle of enthusiasm that fuels FLOSS.

Here's something that's true:

Debian Jessie ships a LTS Firefox for which it grants an exception to its strict package security update policy. That LTS Firefox version has its own support schedule, and its own arch support policy. Both of those skew from Debian's own policy and timeline.

This means that one of the two most popular browsers on Debian doesn't provide the same ARM support that Debian claims to support on its website. It also means that Debian updates Firefox on stable (as well as Chromium on stable) whole cloth. It doesn't backport security updates because Debian does not have the resources to take on such a difficult project.

That means for every Debian box set up as a user desktop, the two most popular packages cannot follow the package security guidelines that the quoted Debian fan/dev would hold up as one of Debian's strengths.

To be clear: when Firefox LTS released an update that worked perfectly fine on all of their supported archs, that release broke Firefox completely on Debian Jessie on ARM. In other words, you can install a Debian called "stable" on an arch they call "supported" and end up upgrading yourself into a state where an official Debian package no longer works.

In short-- all Debian stable packages are potentially "FrankenDebian" for this reason, and-- worse-- for really popular and important desktop packages.

Elementary logic and social skills dictate that the person I quoted should be finding common ground with Linux Mint devs. Say package maintenance is hard. Say security backports don't really scale anymore. Say random number generators are tricky to get right. Pointing out one's own failures and citing sources for the rare successes seems like a winning strategy to me. Or at least one that doesn't threaten to zap all the energy of the people one communicates with/about.

You'd think a project like Debian with its myriad guidelines and processes would have at least one sentence in there like, "Don't treat others like they're teenagers loitering outside your fast-food restaurant," or, "Don't be self-righteous." Or more pointed, "Don't talk down to other distros."

Is there a Debian dev here who agrees with my upshot? There's apparently this whole inculcation process to become a member, so maybe one of those sentences could be part of it.

I'm sure it's not easy, but... 1) a support line offers support to the end user, which is different; I'm talking about filtering out the emotion from the content 2) most people who could do this, do not know that they could, that there is a need, or how one would volunteer to do it 3) the same person would not have to process all feedback, just as much as they have time for; at least some of the pile of feedback would be processed by someone other than a dev 4) the non-technical nature of the person is actually helpful, because that is usually where the originator of the feedback is coming from, and the job of this person would not be to determine the fix, but only to separate content from emotionally motivated criticism