3w ago

What's it like being a user hearing about developer drama.

88 comments

Me, a new Linux convert, watching all the infighting over minutiae:
- "I love a good sitcom!"
  "Oh, what's your favourite? Friends? Seinfeld? Fesh Pince?"
  "None, it's wayland-protocols"
  
  A sitcom about linux developers who constantly argue about minutia could actually be fun if written correctly. They could borrow a bunch of real life incidents and write them in.
  
  There's a Youtube channel that mostly just follows the wayland bug tracker.
- Be careful:
  And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
- It's almost humanlike

Linux users are peaceful and level-headed.
barring discussions about Wayland, X11's obsolescence, Systemd, Pipewire, Rust in the kernel, or even UEFI at times
- Don’t forget arch btw
  
  It's NixOS and CachyOS these days.
- I tried to use Wayland. My windows flickered to black. I switched to X11. No issue. I'll try Wayland again next year. -casual Linux user
  
  Narrator voice: "Six years later, they still haven't tried it again."
  
  Slic3r doesn't work on it.
  No idea of why. (But I suspect it's about the several monitors thing.) Will probably try again in a year or 5.
  
  Tried it on PopOS and wondered how anyone could use it at all. Installed fedora on a different machine and it's flawless. Probably just the age of PopOS at this point.
- UEFI is OK. Try mentioning Secure Boot.
  
  Even UEFI has its haters, and they're calling for a return to BIOS in the aftermath of the Gigabyte UEFI vulnerability: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTjj1ILCwRs (scroll through the comments)
- you forgot nvidia
  
  there's a debate about NVidia ?
- Do users care about Rust in the kernel? The others all make sense.
  
  You bet. Not many, but they are extremely ~~passionate~~ emotional about it. They mostly grace the anti-intellectual cesspools with their presence (twitter and such).
  I used to be like that, about two years ago, mainly because of some bad experiences with compiling Rust programs from source. Then I realized that I'm literally never going to be affected by it since I never compile the kernel myself. Now I'm learning Rust myself.

It beats the alternative of Microsoft's support forums where thousands comment for weeks straight INCLUDING paid Indian "representatives" who ask for user diagnostic tool output, copy/pasting the same reply eleventeen thousand times a day, on a post from 8 years ago BUT not a single person has ever posted their solution EXCEPT "I reinstalled Windows."
- have you tried running sfc /scannow ?
  
  oh, it succeeded? uh, run dism /online anway, that should work
- This was such a frustrating experience. I could probably count on one hand how many times I found a useful solution that wasn’t just copy paste

I love the drama :3.. gives me a great sense of schadenfreude. Unless the devs whose side im on are losing the debate
- Then it gives me a great sense of rage. Either way, dopamine
  
  In a few decades we'll have Linux rainbow press delivering the newest (partially made-up) drama of Linux celebs and influencers to the senior Linux users sitting in their electric FOSS rocking chairs, talking about the good ol' days with X11, SysVinit and no god damn sandboxing or immutability.

What's great about the drama is you can just ignore it and everything still works.

More like:

That why linux is great, it open-sources its drama so everyone can enjoy it
- We ❤️ drama 🐧

This is the way. "I just use Linux" is what I always say.
- I'm considered tech support for my team at work, their always saying things like "well you're the Linux guy so you know how this stuff works". And then I have to explain "I just use Linux, I don't write the code, plus these are windows machines so it's completely different issues, and lastly I just type the problem into Google read the results and then tell you what I read"
  Them: well you are still tech support because I don't know how to do that.
  Me: wait you don't know how to type into Google.....no you know what fine, I'm tech support, tell management so I can get a raise.
  
  Hi, former tech support (now cybersecurity) here. You /are/ tier one tech support. You handle it pretty much how they do, knowledge base documents and searching for solutions online. If things get really bad they might poke around directly and see if they can find a root cause before they escalate.
  That doesn't mean they can demand you do anything, but it does mean you shouldn't underestimate yourself :)
- What, with all those non-Linux users asking questions and all.

The thing is, one of the big root causes behind those fights is also a root cause of what makes Linux and FOSS so great: The devs care about the software and its users. Their priority is making the right decision for the application and its users. That's a pretty stark contrast to certain other mainstream operating systems where the primary stakeholders are not the devs or the users -- it's some third party a thousand miles away who only cares whether the dev teams' decisions sprinkle a few more dollar bills on top of their cash mountain.
I'm not part of those fights and defending them, btw. I just use Mint and appreciate their efforts!

Fighting means that you care.

Me following the recent bcachefs drama
(Kent is objectively in the wrong & slightly bat shit, if you follow his many discussions in various forums where he defends himself)
- which is so upsetting because dear FUCK does FOSS need a modern FS
  
  I don’t get it, what’s wrong with btrfs? It’s working great for Synology, OpenSuse uses it too
  
  It does, but it doesn't look like Kent will get his shit together. He cannot accept that he might be in the wrong.

I think it's mostly the other way around. The developers are chill while the user base frothing with tribalism
- I think the tribalism is mostly in jest. I've never actually seen two Linux users seriously fighting over their preferred distro or init system or whatever.
  
  Agreed also most of that i think comes from people thinking X is my preference but it comes out X is the best period with the "for me" being implied but not heard by the other party.
  
  Distro? No. Wayland? Yes..
- It's both.
  Christoph Hellwig, a kernel contributor, and a bunch of anti-Rust fossils, were sabotaging Rust-for-Linux projects for using their C APIs for months until Torvalds intervened, and have been actively hostile and abusive against R4L contributors until they left the project. Summary by Aussie Linux Man.
  XLibre, headed by a... shall we say, interesting figure, has attracted a rabid fanbase who are frothing at the mouth and calling Wayland woke DEI garbage that will destroy Linux. The first day of the git repo saw threats of gun violence, the antisemitic (((triple parenthesis))) dog whistle, openly transphobic statements by non-developers, and the owner's commitment to allow all of that under the banner of being "non-political". More context here, in the comments.
  
  XLibre, headed by a... shall we say, interesting figure
  Still better than IBM/Redhat, tbh

I dunno. As a supporter of Asahi from the week the Patreon was launched, I’m pretty bummed that the lead dev got disheartened and dropped off. Kernel devs protecting fiefdoms (by blocking Rust adoption) do not a happy user make (for me).

I love it when old crusty maintainers obstruct the progress of memory safe (read: Rust) code in the Linux Kernel!!!
Then venting your frustrations about that on Mastodon gets you labeled a brigading "maybe you are the problem" by Linus ((:

I'm sure there's drama within any sort of closed source software company too. Although most of that drama will instead be project managers (the evil of this world) forcing their bullshit into the face of developers, until those developers burn out and start a potato farm.