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Comment by spindritf | Hacker News Reader

> I had to learn that it is no longer possible to criticize Ubuntu/Canonical for their technical decisions and to disagree with them. There are many users who seem to think that Ubuntu is a religion and Canonical without fail. If you criticize technical decision you are a heretic and the holy inquisition is coming after you to burn you. Ubuntu has lost it's meaning. There is no human kindness in this community any more.

People criticise Ubuntu and Canonical all the time. There are countless posts and comments about the Amazon lens, and many on their decision to go with Mir over Wayland.

This is ridiculously hyperbolic.

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Of course it is possible to criticize Ubuntu or Canonical.

What he means is that it's impossible for a prominent developer to criticize their technical decisions without facing a ton of hateful backlash from Ubuntu fans and Mark Shuttleworth himself. Which he knows, from experience, because he did just that, criticized the design of Mir and said that he wouldn't support it, and he got exactly that backlash.

If Mark Shuttleworth actually followed the Ubuntu code of conduct http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct, we would not have gotten here:

  Be respectful

  Disagreement is no excuse for poor manners. We work 
  together to resolve conflict, assume good intentions and 
  do our best to act in an empathic fashion. We don't allow 
  frustration to turn into a personal attack. A community 
  where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is not a 
  productive one.

Calling people "the Open Source Tea Party", "purely political", "outraged individuals" who have "NIH'd just about every important piece of the stack" is pretty much in pure opposition to the Ubuntu code of conduct; but since Mark does this, other people feel like this kind of behavior is acceptable and pile on the attack.

I thought that was so childish and crass of him. I really dislike the term "Open Source Tea Party". It's just so infuriating on so many levels.

First of all, it's a lazy insult - it's just applying a label (also known as name calling) to put people down without any context. It implies that these people are irrational, inflexible and idealistic, but with a bad connotation. He could have argued that those things are true in a more diplomatic way, and more importantly, by using evidence other than just claiming that mir is "important" or "a huge leap forward for gaming performance...". Instead, he just labels the people who happen to disagree with him as the tea party. Great.

Secondly, I think it's fair to be concerned about what's going on with mir. Maybe he's telling the truth that they just want the best solution... I think everyone, whether you want Wayland or not, would like to move away from X. So maybe mir is the right way to go. However, they failed to make the case for this in a typical open source way. Why not improve Wayland instead of going off and doing your own thing? If the direction of Wayland is awful or wrong, why not point that out? And instead of just claiming that's the case, why not try to use evidence to prove that it's the case? I have been following this closely, but have no idea what the advantages of the two proposed systems is better... but it certainly seems that almost everyone other than Canonical is rooting for and working on Wayland, which isn't really a good sign...

It's very easy to be skeptical because of all the good will they sacrificed by sticking Amazon adds in my god-damned desktop. Honestly, that seems like such a shameless land-grab for clueless users' personal data which really damages their privacy. It wouldn't even have been an issue if it was simply opt in. So, because they made that poor decision, people are skeptical, critical, maybe even a bit irrational. But that shouldn't be surprising. And even if you're being personally attacked yourself, it doesn't make it right to attack other people - many of whom aren't trying to make their contributions a business and are doing their work with pure intentions - unlike Canonical and Mark who clearly have a business angle in all this (which, in and of itself, is totally fine).

Sorry for the rant, guys. I mean, do people really think "open source tea party" is at all fair?

"Sorry for the rant, guys. I mean, do people really think "open source tea party" is at all fair?"

No. If nothing else, it is an insult to the original (Boston) Tea Party. One might remember that those individuals were protesting irrational decisions made by a king who was far isolated from said subjects.

The King had a very rational reason for wanting those taxes. It went quite a bit deeper on the colonial side since they had no say in the matter and expected all the rights of a British citizen.

The implementation of those taxes by using troops and "general warrants" was a problem. Sadly, the formation of thought on that is once again back with us and not imposed by a ruler across the ocean.

As to the modern Tea Party, I guess it depends who you talk to on if they think its an insult.

I am very much rooting for Wayland. It is going to bring features like screen/tmux to graphical programs. Nothing like going to work at home mid day and attaching to the individual programs that you had running on your other machine. This is the reason I currently use terminal programs instead of X ones. Doesn't sound like Mir is providing more over Wayland than just including input, which arguably could be provided outside of the server itself.

Wayland probably isn't going to provide remote display capability, let alone anything like that.

All Wayland really does is hand out framebuffers in local RAM. The Wayland devs consider app display remoting to be a special case used by relatively few users, and outside the scope of the core project.

And now you know why I'm sticking with X for now.

I do not believe that Wayland would provide this functionality, rather that it would provide separation to enable this functionality. This functionality would be implemented in a compositor for Wayland. There is something similar for X, called Xpra. They list porting to Wayland as one of their "project ideas."

http://xpra.org/

Yeah, and the nice thing about Wayland barely doing anything is that almost all issues are someone else's problem. The rendering libraries the Wayland developers suggest applications used are totally broken? Not part of Wayland, stop blaming them. XWayland is in a completely unusable state? Not part of Wayland, stop spreading FUD. I remember both of these actually happening.

I think everyone, whether you want Wayland or not, would like to move away from X.

I'm not terribly eager to move away from X. I'll switch if there's something that runs all my programs, and does everything X does but cleaner and better. A POSIXy version of rio from Plan 9 would be a good start.

But Wayland isn't that and I'm not eager to adopt Wayland. Let alone fucking Mir.

Yeah I guess I don't really know what I'm talking about... but having had to open Xorg.conf a couple of times over the past few months I'd be happy to leave X behind.

http://xkcd.com/963/

I haven't touched it in ages. It automagically detects just about everything, and I use xrandr to wrangle multihead configurations.

He proably means from a position of someone developing/working with guys from Ubuntu.

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