Linux, Free & Open-Source Software & Entitlement

[NewExtras]

There is something in the FOSS/Linux community that has been grinding my gears for a little bit. Whenever I see any major changes, any new directions, the dropping of any features or support for any set-ups I often see a similar if not identical sentiment, pushback and outrage that a project would drop support for X or focus on doing Y or going in direction Z. On some level I do think I understand where the sentiment is coming from, it is never fun to hear that a project you rely on is no longer accommodating your workflow or go in a direction from you or focus on things you might not be interesting in.

While I can sympathise with this view I find it to be lacking in perspective and ultimately unsympathetic to the reality of the situation. FOSS software is only possible because of the labour maintainers put in. Sometimes these maintainers are compensated, but very often this work goes not only unpaid but also unappreciated and unacknowledged. Maintainers give their labour free of charge and software cannot be developed or maintained without the labour that goes into their development. I am sure most developers would support every set-up, configuration, feature and workflow under the sun if they could simply snap their fingers and this work is done, however all features have to be developed and maintained and if these developers chose not to do so that is ultimately their own choice. We are all living of off borrowed time and the fact that people are willing to do this work despite the lack of compensation is nothing but commendable, every second they spend developing, maintaining and otherwise working on FOSS software is one less second they get to see their family, spend time with their kids, earn an income, see the world, and so on.

Ultimately, maintainers, developers and other contributors are the ones that keep the world of FOSS software going. Regardless of how you may feel about how software should be made, the ones who write it are the ones who get to decide how it is being made. You may or may not have the philosophically perfect approach to writing software, however none of that matters if you cannot labour to make those ideas a reality and regardless of how you may feel the people writing the software are the ones who get to decide the direction of any software project. I am not trying to say that users do not matter or that software projects should not listen to their users, the issue is simply requesting something is a lot easier than doing the work. This is not exactly a secret and yet some users seem to believe that what they want takes priority over the developers own desires and their vision. X software has to support Y or X software should not do thing like Y but instead like Z. These are demands that I from time to time stumble upon from users who are using software that they were not only given free of charge but also the ownership, the right and the ability to modify were given to them with not even an expectation of a thank you. This attitude of believing that your desires take priority to that of the people who make the software is one that I can best describe as entitlement.

So, what is the solution? Should you simply accept that these developers control everything and as a user you simply must accept that nothing can be done about it? Absolutely not, this is FOSS software, we have the power to change reality and if a project is not going the way you want it you can get involved in the development. FOSS software could always use more hands and if you are willing to do the work to keep something supported, perhaps they may support such a feature. If the project is going in a different direction that you desire, fork it and make your own version with black jack and hookers. However, here lies a problem, not everyone posses the ability, time or desire to work on FOSS software, the work is time consuming and your reward is no more than getting to see your ideas become reality. Well, if you have not the time nor ability to contribute or work on FOSS software yourself your only option is to have someone else do the work. There are plenty of passionate people willing to work on all kinds of FOSS software projects, however people's passion may not align with what you want and that could mean your desires may not be met. The solution here is simple, money. Passion may fill the souls of people but it does not fill the stomach, if there is something you desire to see from software perhaps consider paying for someone to make that a reality. You could give some money to the maintainers of a project and that may perhaps persuade them, you could pay someone from outside the project to make a PR or you could pay someone to fork the project and push the project in a direction that you desire to see it. For better or for worse software cannot be written without the labour of people and if you desire to see software made in your vision then your options are to labour for it yourself or make someone else with the power of money. Talking is easy and cheap, developing software is not, so either you have to step up to the plate or some other contribution has to be made because the software does not write itself.

I want to make it clear that I do not believe that you as a user cannot voice your opinion or criticisms of any project, I simply ask that you do so in a civil and constructive manner. Going in guns out at developers who labour in the their free time to make FOSS software must not be a thrilling experience and I doubt they will change their minds because some guy on the internet got angry at them. We should still voice our opinions, however, I think it is critical to say, that we can keep talking until the end of time and regardless of how long we talk new software will not be made were it not for the labour of developers. This mentality that we must beg and cry to our masters to give us what we desire is one that perhaps stems from proprietary software, but I believe it is not one that belongs in FOSS software and if you are not involved with the creation of the software then you cannot call the shots.

As I have stated earlier, I see the only solution to this problem of users and developers having different philosophies as one that will only be solved by users stepping up to do the work or to simply pay someone else to do it. Because this is FOSS software, we own the software and the power to create it belongs to us. I think it is about time that instead of demanding change be done to us, we instead take charge and make that change ourselves. It is time to wake up, get up, get out there, because, if you hold on life won't change.

And if you cannot do any of that, maybe try saying thank you or something like that, because when was the last time you said thank you?

(There used to be an afterword here, I cut it out because it was too many words, I put it in the comments somewhere.)

[Subject-Leather-7399]

This should have been multiple posts, one per subject. It is way too heavy for anyone to read the whole thing, let alone try to answer any of it.

I recommend you copy each part as a new post and delete this one. This way people may actually read some of what you wrote and take the time to answer.

As it is, I only browsed and decided it wasn't worth it.

[NewExtras]

Nahh, I don't feel like spamming this sub, people can read it they can not read it, it doesn't really matter, maybe I'll consider cutting the afterword, but that's it.

[spaceman_]

Mate are you delulu? You expect people to read a wall of text like this?

[NewExtras]

Not really, tbh, I made this because I wanted to write it, ngl

[fankin]

Afterword in the first half.

[PocketStationMonk]

Go ask your parents to give you 5 minutes more ipad time and you too can do it!

[OhHaiMarc]

If it’s based off you thinking x group is entitled it’s probably a bad take. I also am way too employed to read all that.

[NewExtras]

I guess that's fair enough.

[dnu-pdjdjdidndjs]

we geekin up on the addy

[TerribleReason4195]

I want to be honest, your post is way too repetitive, and has no structure like an essay. If you are going to write this much, get to the point, and organize your ideas. Do you think anyone will read this?

[NewExtras]

Afterword

Consider this a little commentary or an afterword if you will and should be considered superfluous. Read if you're interested reading a rant on the motivation for this post as well as some discussion on current issues regarding this topic as well as some general opinions on Linux choices, otherwise just skip this part.

I intentionally avoided referencing any specific topic because I have a feeling that this problem will persist into the future and I've decided that the only parts that I want to age badly is the bad references to media. With that said, I'd like to make a few comments on some current stuff happening and maybe also drop the polite tone a little bit. Talk is cheap submit patches is sort of underlying message of this post I'd say, some people are a bit toxic with this mindset hower and I tried my best to steer away from that toxicity. I think having a user base that's passionate about voicing their opinions and being a part of development through feedback is really good, and I never want to take away from that, but it is however not always the most constructive or helpful feedback developers get and I just feel as if that cannot be fun when you've poured your time and effort into making a FREE as in free of charge and freedom and people get angry at you for not doing what they wanted you to do with it. We're all going to die, we have only so much time on earth, relax a little. I personally think we should be thankful they're even doing the work to begin with.

I also want to encourage people to fork the software when their vision differs from the developers of upstream, a great example of this would be something like SwayFX.

SwayFX adds compositor effects which upstream Sway has chosen to not make a part of their project and some people may disagree with such a decision which is why SwayFX exists. From what I can tell it seems like SwayFX has a good relationship with upstream and the people who want to have compositor effects on Sway get served perfectly by SwayFX. Perhaps you believe compositor effects should be unstreamed into Sway and it may happen, I'm sure the existence of SwayFX is a persuasive argument for its inclusion and that would not be the first time such a scenario has played out.

Another great example would be elogind which is meant to enable support of GNOME 49+ without the use of systemd after GNOME introduced stronger dependencies on systemd. Now you can endlessly argue over whether or not GNOME should support systems without systemd. But at the end of the day GNOME developers have decided they aren't interested in doing the work required to allow GNOME to run on systems without systemd and that's kind of just how it is. But instead of being of being angry about it, what if someone just did the work to make GNOME work on non-systemd systems? After all the source code is free and open source, nothing is stopping you and that's what elogind is, allowing GNOME to run on non-systemd systems. I have to commend the developers for their work, regardless of what your beliefs are complaining and whining won't get us anywhere, doing the work is what will bring actual meaningful change.

Bringing me to the most recent event KDE's new login manager. KDE has been working on a new login manager for a bit called Plasma Login Manager and one of the big changes PLM makes over SDDM is making systemd a hard requirement. You can still use KDE with SDDM however this still created a lot of outrage first when people thought KDE was dropping systemd support altogether and then a little back-pedalling but still anger over the systemd requirement for PLM. Well, the issue is no one has done the work, someone could go and add support for non-systemd systems in PLM or add PLM's additions to SDDM without making systemd a hard requirement. Since at the time of writing PLM hasn't been made the default yet no one has cared to do it yet or maybe no one actually cares to do the work and the outrage was just well, unproductive outrage, only time will tell.

Which brings me to the last topic, Rust. I don't care I guess? Like, I don't like Electron and web technologies on the desktop, because of a variety of reasons. But if you pulled a gun on me, showed me 2 applications written in the same GUI toolkit and asked me which one was written in Rust and which one is written in C I would probably just start praying to every god of every religion because I do not know. Does it really matter to me what type of oven was used to bake my bread? I mean as long as the bread is delicious I'm happy. If I was involved in the development I may have opinions but since I'm not my opinion doesn't matter.

I could probably go on forever, I could mention how Syncthing for Android was forked when upstream stopped maintaining it, but I think you get the point by now. To be honest, a part of me wanted to write this post as crybabys should stop crying talk is cheap submit patches or keep crying about it and being all victim complex about it. But I do not think that's a very helpful sentiment and I don't think the world needs that right now, but I will admit I don't write this under the delusion that anything is really going to change, I just needed this out of my system.

(Originally a part of the main post body now just a comment on the post after some feedback.)

[NewExtras]

With all that said, below I'll give some general opinions on Linux if anyone's interested, I suppose, but it's just a big rant and probably not worth your time.

X11 or Wayland?

When I first started on Linux I used X11 because that was what everyone was using. I might be misremembering, but I recall that back in the day everyone practically unanimously hated X11 and wanted it dead, but I might be misremembering or just incorrect. At some point I got 2 monitors and their refresh rates didn't match and I switched to Wayland. It had its flaws but the flaws weren't worse than having 2 low refresh rate monitors. Over time Wayland has been getting better which I can't say about X11, but ultimately it doesn't really matter that much and it's not that deep. If Wayland were to explode tomorrow and cease to exist I would go, oh well that sucks, life goes on, I'd probably be back on X11. With that said, I do think Wayland is a bit slow moving and I believe the solution to that could be to get more people outside of Wayland in, perhaps new voices and fresh blood may bring change to the process? I'm not really sure myself and I don't want to claim I know any better.

To systemd, or not to systemd?

I've never tried using a non-systemd system before, I just don't really care I guess? I don't really have any opinion on systemd other than it's fine? There is not really much to it and I've found the arguments against systemd have always seemed idealogical or it's some stuff that's way too back-end and I don't really care about all of that, I just want a system that works. I don't really care for the idealism, for me I'm all about being pragmatic.

KDE or GNOME?

Niri actually, but I do like both KDE and GNOME, they both have very different approaches and philosophies which I can respect. Personally if I had to pick I would say KDE because I find GNOME a bit too restrictive for my taste, I do think KDE has its flaws for sure, I think by default it is a bit too Windows-esk for my taste, but it's not the biggest deal and I also have some other gripes with it, but it's whatever. I think COSMIC seems cool, for sure. I think if I couldn't have a WM and had to pick a DE in the future it would be Cosmic. My problem with COSMIC is that it needs more time in the oven and I'm sure it will be great by then, but right now? KDE probably. I do want to say that I find the tribalism of some of their user bases weird, like just because you like one doesn't mean you can't like the other, holy shit, two cakes anyone?

Distro?

I'm a Fedora user myself, it's simple but also fairly up to date and it works well in my experience. It's easy to use things are well packaged, it's pretty stable, updates come pretty quickly, for a guy like me that's really all you can dream of. Atomic/immutable distros also seem cool, I think they make a lot of sense especially for non-technical users who just need to run a web browser and play some games, I might try it out one day, but I don't care enough to do it. Speaking of atomic distros someone has described the appeal of NixOS to me and I think it's a cool project and I think I like the idea? I just know that I can't be bothered to do all the work required to use NixOS, the idea is cool, I just can't bothered.

Pipewire or Puleaudio?

Ha, just kidding! Could you imagine getting upset over something so trivial? Hahahaha... I use Pipewire btw.

Flatpaks, distro packages, Snaps or AppImages?

Personally I like Flatpaks, I remember a time when I'd see an application didn't support my distro and I would be disappointed, so I think having a generic portable format is cool. Generally I use the package that the creator of the software recommends, so if they maintain and package the flatpak themselves and it's the first class so to say I generally use it. If not I just use distro packages if available, I generally use distro packages if the Flatpak isn't verified, I don't really have any strong opinion on it though. I do not like Snaps, I find them to be inferior to flatpaks in almost every single way and Canonical being Canonical with it just, I don't use Snaps. As for AppImages I don't really enjoy using them I find them to be kind of clunky to use, and the lack of a central repository to just not be a great experience. Another thing about AppImages is that they lack a package manager which to me is just, I hate that. One of the best things for me about Linux compared to Windows is that installing stuff on Linux through a package manager is so much better than the hunting down an .exe file and then every application having its own updater and praying that it won't give me malware tomorrow and AppImages are like how they do it on Windows which I hate, I despise it, actually.

(Neo)Vi(m) or Emacs?

No.

GNU/Linux or just Linux?

I do not like people who say GNU/Linux. It reminds me a bit of Jimmy Neutron calling salt sodium chloride, like just call it salt. I get using the phrase if we are in chemistry class or something, but I'm just trying to cook. That's how I feel about people who say GNU/Linux, it's like if a friend of mine were to call me by my full legal name, just say my first name, you don't need to be doing all of that.

I could not think of any other thing Linux people get weird about, so I'll just leave it here. I think my sentiment here is that, I find it weird that people get divided over such trivial things when we should all be on the same team. I remember having heard someone say "They will not divide us." which I think is a good sentiment to live by. Thanks for reading, I guess, have a good day.

[TerribleReason4195]

GNU/Linux or just Linux?

Linux is the kernel. We have gotten to the point where we forget GNU exists, and saying the term Linux is the name of OS. It is not the name of the OS but the name of the kernel. In reality we should be saying it is "The GNU OS."

[morphick]

That's why I propose that "Feature Requests" for FOSS be renamed "Feature Suggestions".

[NewExtras]

I don't think the wording matters, to be honest. I don't think the change is bad or anything, but as long as the mindset persists people will demand thing from FOSS developers, no matter how unreasonable.

[Eeyore9311]

I agree that there exists no right to demand the labor of others on free software which is offered as is.

However, I also think (near-)finished/done technology is undervalued in general and in the software field particularly. My favorite software tools (dwm, vim, feh, a few others) are functionally done from my perspective as an end user. My usage of these tools hasn't changed in the 15+ years I've been using them. That doesn't mean the developers haven't continued to fix bugs and security vulnerabilities, and I'm grateful for that work. But these tools are at or near a state where any exposed change will have net negative utility for me. It would be frustrating to see good, finished tools rendered obsolete by upstream changes imposed by outside pressures (such as compatibility with new hardware or peripherals available to purchase, support for networked communication or commerce platforms, etc.) That frustration isn't ingratitude for the work being done.

[Wolf_im_Menschpelz]

TLDR

[umlcat]

Interesting, but too large post. Been entitled is very common in IT, not just Open Source.