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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

#71

Post by peterwwillis »

dessant wrote: post #32
peterwwillis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get to decide how much support you're going to give, and what kind of access. The easier access people have to you, the more they're going to share their frustrations and start demanding things. My first suggestion is to limit access. Only provide a mailing list e-mail address, so people know their comments are going to be public, and they have to subscribe to it and craft an e-mail. Second I'd suggest you provid…

I agree that this is how it should work. Though in practice issue and feature request templates are usually left there unfilled, and people will find a way to reach out on all of your social media accounts. My experience has been that the lines we draw are regularily disrespected.

More and more projects are turning off GH Issues & PRs and I think it's a good practice.

I think setting the expectations early and visibly may prevent some of the disrespect on social media, but private or pseudonymous amounts may help too. (Maybe all code authors should use pseudonyms, the way book authors do?)

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

#72

Post by rossdavidh »

kingosticks wrote: post #43
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…

In theory it's a great idea but I think in practice very few people want to do that (or anything). In the same way that non-dev users could help with translating documentation etc but very rarely do. As it happens I recently had a guy translate our documentation into Catalan and he's just started on Spanish - but it's the first time I've been offered that sort of help in 6 years.

You are no doubt correct, but I could easily believe that 1% of people would be willing to, but don't know that there is a need, or how to volunteer for it if they did. Also, a system for crowdsourcing this, with "crowd" being minimally vetted volunteers, so that maybe you can't get everything but you could do 5% of the total.

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

#73

Post by JudgeWapner »

bitL wrote: post #21

To all Mint developers: THANK YOU!!! I use Mint for over 5 years as my main OS and it allowed me to make a seamless transition from Windows/macOS to Linux for everyday tasks, on high-end hardware with multiple HiDPI monitors and including games with recent Steam updates (thanks to Ubuntu + Valve as well!). I can't imagine being stuck with Windows 10/macOS these days.

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

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

#74

Post by muthdra »

efqerqe54g545g1 wrote: post #57

Linux Mint MATE is awesome and runs really, really well on older laptops. I have installed it for many newcomers to Linux and it has served these people well.

MATE is the supreme DE but the old i5 4Gb Vaio laptop I'm using runs Lubuntu (both LXDE and LXQt versions) better.

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

#75

Post by JudgeWapner »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #39
z2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who has published a free app for fun, I've learned that due to any mix of entitlement and ignorance, anything you put out there can make some people emotionally angry. I'm still learning how to move on and accept that this is OK, for them and for me.

I assume that human's stupidity is infinite. It helps a lot.

UX stupidity is just as big a problem. Some users are 'stupid' (because they're mere mortals, lacking the towering IQ's of HN posters). Some UX designers and stupid and lazy, and have zero empathy for the way their UX choices enrage and frustrate their end users.

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

#76

Post by _tulpa »

leaf_house wrote: post #59
tannhaeuser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambrian explosion? The main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, RH/Centos, Arch, Mint, Gentoo, Suse, Slackware) haven't changed in like ten years or more, the only relatively recent additions being the Devuan branch of Debian, and Alpine. Or have I overlooked something?

Elementary OS, Void Linux, Deepin, Antergos and Tails are a few notable ones off the top of my head. Void has been around for a minute but has become a lot more popular recently.

Elementary is Ubuntu trying to be OSX. Deepin and tails are Debian. A Tetris is Arch.

Void is it’s own thing and xbps was really good when I used it. But since the thing where the one guy with sole control over their resources disappeared, and then losing their domain, and not having a distinct legal entity/org behind it last I checked... I dunno about longevity here despite the project being 10 years old already.

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

#77

Post by dexen »

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #60

I would like to propose something that has long been simmering in my mind: zero tolerance to toxicity from the open source community at large. Too often I see entitled developers show up in these forums and just hurl abuse at the people who provide these wonderful tools free of charge. I propose that, if the request is anything less than respectful or if they, say DM a maintainer with abuse or what have you, they get…

>zero tolerance to toxicity

That's a straightforward path into irrelevance. Every user and developer has a bad day or two; every user and developer has an obscure subject that riles them up well beyond what's reasonable. Zero tolerance here means they do go elsewhere, where quality of discussion is at maybe 90% instead of 100%, but at least they can partake in the discussion. Lastly, assholes make for effective leaders. Unfair? Maybe, but holds true through ages and cultures.

A perhaps contrived example, but here goes: email spam. We have complex solutions to it, blacklists, whitelists, heuristics, whatnot, spread between servers and mail clients. Some end-users may indeed be running zero-tolerance rules, but by and large the system as whole is elastic. If you ever end up on a spam shitlist, be it due to a mistake or actual malice, there's always a way back. If the system was indeed geared for zero tolerance, it would be close to useless, if for no other reason because it would be pretty easy to get unsuspecting victims on a shitlist, dealing them permanent harm.

Coming to think of it, no system in wider society is truly zero tolerance, except the death penalty - and that one is usually very heavily protested, just as well as guarded against mistakes and abuses by several layers of interleaved protections.

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

#78

Post by m-p-3 »

leaf_house wrote: post #59
tannhaeuser wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cambrian explosion? The main distros (Debian/Ubuntu, RH/Centos, Arch, Mint, Gentoo, Suse, Slackware) haven't changed in like ten years or more, the only relatively recent additions being the Devuan branch of Debian, and Alpine. Or have I overlooked something?

Elementary OS, Void Linux, Deepin, Antergos and Tails are a few notable ones off the top of my head. Void has been around for a minute but has become a lot more popular recently.

Elementary is great, I'm using it on my spare laptop and I have only one complaint and it's the removal of the wingpanel indicator without implementing a proper replacement.

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

#79

Post by xorcist »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #24

Linux Mint seems to take a fairly regular beating from the Linux community at large, and I'm not sure why. It became fashionable after their ISO downloads were briefly compromised in 2016, and a popular LWN post became the script for people to reiterate every time Mint is mentioned in any capacity.[0] I think it's a terrible shame. For all the stuff I wish it did better, it does so much right that I still overwhelmin…

Thank you for that link. The whole discussion was in my eyes (apart from the occasional derailment into vaccines) quite a good example of how to deliver criticism without resorting to personal attacks on anybody.

The background for this seems to be that the maintainer decided to stop shipping security updates for certain packages. One of the people in the discussion put in some work to help rectify these and other packaging problems only have their changes reverted by the lead maintainer.

The project then proceeded to host their downloads with an insecure Wordpress blog. After serving malware, the response was to remove the malware and return to normal. When downloads were compromised a second time, however "briefly", the above discussion happened. In the light of that the discussion is a lot more civil than could be expected.

> I still overwhelmingly consider it the best distro for converting friends and family away from Windows or OSX

Unless the situation has improved significantly in those three years, perhaps you are not doing them a service moving them to more sparse security updates. It's 2019 now and security is not optional.

Entitled users exist, and can be a problem, but the situation here seems to be a lot more complicated than what the author wants to believe.

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

#80

Post by saikatsg »

JudgeWapner wrote: post #73
bitL wrote: post #21

To all Mint developers: THANK YOU!!! I use Mint for over 5 years as my main OS and it allowed me to make a seamless transition from Windows/macOS to Linux for everyday tasks, on high-end hardware with multiple HiDPI monitors and including games with recent Steam updates (thanks to Ubuntu + Valve as well!). I can't imagine being stuck with Windows 10/macOS these days.

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 ;)
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