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Linux Mint 19.2 'Tina' is On the Way, But the Developers Seem Defeated and Depressed (betanews.com)
Brian Fagioli, reporting for BetaNews: Today should be happy times for the Linux Mint community, as we finally learn some new details about the upcoming version 19.2! It will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 and once again feature three desktop environments -- Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon. We even found out the code name for Linux Mint 19.2 -- "Tina." And yet, it is hard to celebrate. Why? Because the developers seem to be depressed and defeated. They even appear to be a bit disenchanted with Free Software development overall. Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, shared a very lengthy blog post today, and it really made me sad.
He wrote, "For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were 'only' users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they're looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they're done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that's part of the reason they're here really." Upon publication of the article, Jason Hicks, Muffin maintainer and member of the Linux Mint team, corroborated the claims made by others.
He wrote, "For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were 'only' users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they're looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they're done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that's part of the reason they're here really." Upon publication of the article, Jason Hicks, Muffin maintainer and member of the Linux Mint team, corroborated the claims made by others.
They should remove systemd! End the slavery to the misbegotten creation of some misanthropic nil-whits and do things yourself again. Feel the power of your mind at work!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Hopefully it's just a morale problem instead of a moral problem.
Freely writing code. Mint isn't a company, it's an old school-style open source project. And people do it for fun. Part of the fun? Happy users saying happy things happily to you.
If people start taking them for granted under the "no good deed goes unpunished" doctrine, then I can understand the despondency. Add in the fact that it seems the people have been working really hard whilst having the tiny detail of the entirety of their outside lives intrude, for instance one person talks about now having to juggle a full time job with a very difficult rewrite of their window manager, well - difficult, you know?
For what it's worth, when I use Linux at home these days it's mostly in VMs and I always go for Mint. So I appreciate the Mint team. I appreciate the cleanness and the fact change is made for good reason, rather than faddish just 'coz, I hope they see this Slashdot article and read it. I hope they see that people like what they're doing, and that they're onto a winner even during the difficult times. The very fact they've taken on this refactoring of Muffin despite the obvious difficulties and tensions it has caused - that's a sign of a team that can do the right thing.
Thanks.
Or maybe idealism drove a bunch of software developers to overwork themselves, and now they are experiencing burnout?
Or maybe after a while of working for free, one starts to feel like one is being taken advantage of?
Maybe software development, like any other kind of work, has a few projects that are fun and self-actualizing surrounded by plenty of tedious grudge work necessary to get anything actually working....and people need some concrete incentives to put up with all the grudge work?
Nah, none of those explanations allow you to sit in moral judgement of people who are laboring on your behalf, in return for nothing from you.
It's a Linux Distro. Seriously. It's not that you had the solution for cancer and then lost it or something.
I get that FOSS devs live off praise (I do too) but sometimes (most of the time actually) most people couldn't care less.
Would the world really be a worse place if Mint weren't around? Didn't think so. And I appreciate your work and you deserve respect and laurels, but, seriously, lighten up, it's just a distro. Based on Debian btw. Like a bazillion others.
Just to put things into perspective: A good friend and a young first mother died last night in Hamburg after a small army of highest profile medical experts fought for 10+ days to save her life after an emergency c-section due to severe acute HELPS-syndrome, after going 100+ blood transfusion, 8+ day long operations and an extra liver flown in from France. The child is alive and well but will grow up without her mom.
*That's* a tragedy.
Mint is just a distro.
And if you're burned out and emotionally exausted from toiling at it (understandable), quit and go find something useful to do. Like, perhaps, taking care of children who lack one or two parents (just suggestion). Oh, and thanks for all the FOSS devs out there making our lives easyer - you *are* heroes.
My 2 cents. ... And what Seneca has to say to this you can read in my sig.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Mint is good for beginners and people moving from windows because a lot of common software is already installed, it also has more visual cues than the standard debian/ubuntu which also helps windows users. Linux mint is more important now than ever before, with support for windows 7 coming to an end soon, and no realistic upgrade for windows 7 users available from Microsoft, linux mint is the next logical choice.