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.

  • ibot ( ibot@feddit.org ) 
    38·
    10 months ago

    It’s a more than 4 years old blog post.

    I can’t tell much about the things that the writer complains about. But concerning Cosmic: I think a new additional DE is a win. People who like it can use it, others can skip it. More variation means more choice.

    Personally: I find Cosmic still a bit barebone. It is very fast. It think it looks quite good (besides their wallpapers). It’s not yet there, where it needs to be for me to use it as a daily driver, but I find it impressive what System 76 released in their first final version.

    Gnome is the most beautyful DE in my opinion, but I find it’s UX absolut horrible. I hate usining it without quite some extensions and I do absolutely not use it. Look at it, yeah. But using it is not intuitive at all for me.

    Luckily, there are other DE’s I like. That’s the beauty about Linux.

    • illusionist ( illusionist@lemmy.zip ) 
      6·
      10 months ago

      Extensions are there to be used, just use them. Imagine using kde or firefox without adjusting it. There is a base version that fits for everyone and people can write extenions.

      Yes, many extensions should be in the base version but who am I to tell the GNOME devs what to include? The extension manager should be included by default. It’s the distro’s maintainers fault if it’s not included at this point. They should be easier to discover, but again, I am not really helping to improve the situation either.

  • IrritableOcelot ( IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org ) 
    13·
    10 months ago

    tl;dr (understandable, to be honest): on a technical level, modern GNOME prioritizes polish at the expense of flexibility, and COSMIC is focused on customizability. Bad communication aside, they have fundamentally different goals and audiences.

    Acknowledging that this is a 4-year-old article, I think it’s important to read this as a very one-sided perspective. However, I am certainly not defending System76, as it does seem like some pretty poor behavior if the article is to be believed.

    I’m going to look past the issues over communication and behavior, as others have already addressed that in this thread. Other than that, it seems that the main issue is arguing over the role of GNOME in the software ecosystem. How I see this is that:

    • System76 is arguing for backwards compatibility and and more customizability.
    • GNOME is arguing for “bulletproof” theming of apps by restricting user choice and modularity.

    Honestly, I think this is pretty reflective of how the current state of the respective DEs.

    GNOME is the cleanest, most polished Linux desktop environment, if you use it exactly as the designers of GNOME envision. If you want any options outside the extremely limited set GNOME provides by default, you need to rely on extensions, which are less stable and less polished, and may or may not be updated to new DE versions.

    COSMIC is a clean-sheet implementation designed around modularity. It’s really the main thing they talk about. It has the advantage of being Wayland-only, and (supposedly) pretty much every element of the DE is modular, and there is a pretty substantial amount of customization available even in the fairly barebones 1.0 implementation.

    In terms of COSMIC “just being GNOME with extra color options”, I disagree. I really like the UI design concept of GNOME, and ten versions ago I used it all the time. However, over the last few versions it’s become very locked-down into only supporting one narrow way of using the desktop, and I need features outside that (e.g. system tray, options for window tiling, etc.). Even with ten extensions modifying the behavior – which causes stability issues when I get a new GNOME version – I still find things which bother me and are only fixable with manual dconf editing, which means I just can’t daily-drive GNOME.

    I think that’s who COSMIC is really for: someone who wants less windows-y, more intentional UI design than KDE, but with good customizability. It sucks if the creators of a pretty neat new DE were not effective participants in their previous DE, so I really hope they don’t make the same mistake with COSMIC, and manage it properly as an open source project.

  • deadcade ( deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de ) 
    10·
    10 months ago

    It’s an old blog post, but this doesn’t look very good for System76. At the same time, GNOME (and GTK) is refusing to implement basic features. Stuff like server side window decorations, because they can’t “tolerate” SSD. The hard enforcing of Adwaita theming might make sense in GNOME, but on devices not 100% in the GNOME ecosystem, libadwaita apps have awful UX. I do not want shit like Zenity to take up 50% of my screen space for 3 words and 2 buttons, yet libadwaita enforces it.

  • bonegakrejg ( bonegakrejg@lemmy.ml ) 
    9·
    10 months ago

    I was not thrilled with Cosmic after upgrading Pop! but switching DEs on Linux is very easy so it wasn’t a huge issue. I think Cosmic could be cool given more development, it just needs time. Though Pop! making it their default seems like a bad idea for them, its one of the beginner friendly distros that always gets recommended to new Linux users and now that’s going to be their first impression.

  • boredsquirrel (he) ( boredsquirrel@slrpnk.net ) 
    2·
    10 months ago

    Edit: after reading the post, the below is not really relevant to the blog post

    Interesting one

    I guess it is fair that nobody wants to deal with GNOME and their reluctance of theming. I like theming and despise “light” (white) themes or not well readable dark themes (that dont save any energy on non-OLED displays).

    I am on KDE, using GNOME at work (it is okay but worse in like 20 aspects I regularly use). Tried COSMIC on lower end hardware and it was not great.

    I like that they support theming but agree, their desktop is pretty ugly.

    Tho I use GNOME with dash-to-panel and blur-my-shell as well as the breeze cursor. The default theme is kinda weird (not blurring wastes potential) and the macOS like top bar is worse to use and wastes screen space (most importantly on Laptops).

    GNOME is way worse than KDE, COSMIC has a couple of nice things but is worse than GNOME still for my use cases. No surprises.

    I have to stress though that statically linked binaries are not good. Many distros shipping COSMIC use those, wasting RAM, optimisations and potentially vendoring outdated dependencies.

    I also believe people when they dislike C++ and say KDE has a messy codebase. So I very much hope that COSMIC (with a substantial theme) can replace KDE for me. But I highly doubt that.

    More importantly is, how old DEs make the transition from C and C++ to Rust, Zig, Go or whatever else you prefer.

    With Windows going all in on Javascript you can see how not to do it XD