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.

  • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    There are plenty of reasons why themes are bad. They’re a security risk when downloaded from the internet, they’re often not updated alongside the desktop environment causing bugs, and maintaining support for themes is difficult.

    But what GNOME does is eliminate choice, not themes.

    • boredsquirrel (he)@slrpnk.net
      4·
      2 days ago

      Themes are not a security risk XD executable code, widgets and a lack of standardization resulting in shady install scripts, that is a security risk

      Themes are just colors

      • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        KDE themes are scripts. A coding mistake in one resulted in someone’s file system being erased, it would be quite easy to distribute malware via that method.

        • boredsquirrel (he)@slrpnk.net
          1·
          15 hours ago

          You are talking about global themes which is a bundle of plasmoids (which are executable code), SDDM themes (executable code, they are working on their own login manager to change that) as well as simple files like color schemes, cursor themes, icon themes, splash screens.