Comment by rossvor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rossvor | Hacker News Reader

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Why such a snarky reply? Some users do find value in having different flavor distributions and them exercising some control on the source, you obviously do not. Yes that means spending resources on this, and that will sometimes cause issues and bugs, same as with any other extra code.

>But hey, you guys keep doing what you're doing and ignoring what potential users want

Both me and the parent users are not "potential" users but actual users. Why we shouldn't count but some "potential" users should? We already have plenty of distributions which don't do patches.

Parent poster didn't mention anything about "Year of the Linux Desktop" so your diatribe about it is completely uncalled for too. Plenty of people are absolutely fine with current trajectory of user base and don't subscribe to prioritizing user growth above serving existing users.

It's a bit lame when a positive well-written article gets the usual negative response about how everyone is doing everything wrong and "Linux desktop is completely broken".

> Why such a snarky reply?

Because at this point I guess I just assume I'm talking to an evangelist about 90% of the time. That seems to be the case with people who insist that the Linux Desktop Experience is "actually pretty great".

> Some users do find value in having different flavor distributions and them exercising some control on the source, you obviously do not.

The fact that Linux Desktop needs hundreds of bespoke distributions to offer those choices is precisely the problem, in my opinion. A well put together system shouldn't require everything to be compiled just-so and all together by an army of volunteers to work properly. You should just be able to use the software you want, as up-to-date or out-of-date as you want, why is that so hard in Linux?

While you see it as problem, lots of people see this as a feature, just different priorities that's all. I do prefer distros which curate the packages they maintain to provide some logic and predictability to the way packages are meant to be used, where and how they store the config files, remove various nonsense from it and so forth. And all the issues you've listed just isn't a problem for me. "Well put together" system isn't an objective measurement and opinions vary.

And anyway your app based view is slowly becoming more prominent, with so much development dedicated to various app based solutions(appImage, flatpak etc). You don't see me complaining about army of volunteers wasting their time. People work on stuff they think is useful to them, nothing to see here or be negative about.

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