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.

  • ashx64@lemmy.world
    492·
    4 days ago

    Imagine spending 3+ years on staying mad at GNOME to release the most underwhelming software imaginable.

    Shocking, a 3 year old project is not as well established as a 20+ year old desktops. Its feature set is enough to me, but they did release it too early as it is still quite buggy.

    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

    It looks “fine”. I agree that modern Adwaita looks better, but it’s not terrible. The default theme is meh, but themes like Catppuccin makes it look nice. There’s also missing things like drop shadows and animations, which I believe are toolkit limitations.

    They built an entire new desktop from scratch rather than work with GNOME

    Gnome and System76 had different goals and UX ideas that were incompatible. Rather than continually patching Gnome and updating their patches to keep working, they decided to build their own thing, that’s fine.

    I don’t quite get why Gnome people see this as a negative. If System76 is a poor downstream, then System76 no longer being a downstream is beneficial for them.

    rather than work with GNOME or KDE and in that amount of time

    I think that’s a good thing in the long run. Gnome and KDE both have a significant amount of technical debt.

    One of the things I love about COSMIC is how sanely it’s built, following modern programming principles.

    • Rust helps avoid memory issues, helping with security and bugs
    • A lot of things run as their own processes, which would typically all be running under a single process in Gnome/KDE. So even if something does crash, say the power applet or notifications applet, it won’t bring down other components like the shell.
    • Clean layout of configuration, data, and state files. KDE is an absolute mess in this department. Gnome is better than KDE, but COSMIC does even better.

    So while COSMIC is worse now due to its bugs and lack of features, I think it’s built on better foundations. That is, if System76 continues to invest in it. I’m not sure how profitable/unprofitable it is for them. My guess would be unprofitable.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      142·
      4 days ago

      COSMiC has made Iced and Smithay stronger. Now Niri is based on Smithay. I for one are happy they spent their time on something other than GNOME.

      • ashx64@lemmy.world
        6·
        4 days ago

        That’s what the alphas, betas, and user studies are for.

        Pushing buggy software out as stable is a feature of modern corporate software development that should be avoided. It gives a poor impression of the software.

        • MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml
          3·
          4 days ago

          Yeah but more people run a release on a wider range of hardware do the alphas and betas. While your right about the impression it makes, it really boils down to how quickly things are fixed.

          • ashx64@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 days ago

            Hardware/driver bugs are one thing, but COSMIC has plenty of purely software/logical bugs discoverable on any hardware.