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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.
I don't know about Linux Mint, but Linux in general is driving a huge part of our economy, but Linux developers aren't rich. They should be. The friggin secretaries at Uber and Lyft are going to be rich and much of their infrastructure runs on Linux. Linux developers are not appreciated enough.
Hope some developers are reading. Using an older version, 17.3 Cinnamon.
I've used a ton, everything from total bootstraps Linux From Scratch to handholding Ubuntu and all that in between, including tangent OSes BSD and Plan9. Linux Mint is where I can forget about the OS and just do work.
That's about the best compliment I can give. It exceeds commercial OSes like Mac and Windows by a country mile, those are horrid in the meantime and never let me forget them as they try to put me in a straightjacket into their way of bullshit, whether it's procedural or upselling.
Thank You. I haven't expressed it enough. I will donate a $100 to you guys now because it deserves that a minimum. Use it as you want.
thirded!
I am a big mint user and have been for many years.
but I'm seeing less of a diff from ubuntu, these days. I can install mate (etc) to ubuntu so I don't have to deal with unity anymore and they stopped with their 'lens' crap, so that's one less thing to hate ubuntu over.
I don't see a lot of diff anymore between mint and ubuntu.
drop systemd, put some WORK into making it happen and you'll have a brand new following.
make mint different again ;)
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yes! Coming rather late to the Linux-as-the-primary-desktop-OS party, I started with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was quite happy with it and converted all my machines to Linux soon after that, but then found too many unwelcome changes in Ubuntu Mate 18.04 when it came out (which even made it stop working well enough to be usable on some slower machines), then tried a few other Linux distros including other Ubuntu flavours which all were ok somehow but all had something I disliked enough to make me continue the search, then tried Mint 19 with xfce on slower machines and Cinnamon on more recent hardware, and I immediately kept it and now that's where I hope to be staying for the foreseeable future.
Beside it being arguably one of the best-maintained and most solid distros around, one of the things I find incredibly nice in Mint is that even the different flavours (Cinnamon and xfce in my case) have been successfully made to look and feel very similar, so that changing between machines which user different flavours is really easy on my nerves.
Fourthed!
Seriously - what did they think was so broken with the old-school rc rigging in the first place? More precisely, what did they think was so broken that they decided a massive obfuscated spaghetti-coded wreck like systemd was somehow necessary?
I do recall that there were a few things that rc couldn't do, but honestly, there has got to be a better, more elegant way to accomplish such improvements. Build that, and you could change the course of many, many things.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Well precisely because you have to hassle with installing Cinnamon. Then you have to hassle with unsupported tweaks and widgets for cinnamon. Tweaking isn't productive. Linux mint is simple to get working and maintain and customize. Their sofware manager is more of a wizard than synaptics detailed approach, and is in effect far superior to synaptic. But they also have synaptic available too for custom stuff. Personally I find that if I want to sweat the details I'll just go to the command line with Apt-get.
the obsession with mint is, like apple, it just works. When was the last time anyone said that about Linux?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In other words, this development cycle wasn't fun and the devs feel too little appreciation in return.
Good thing their paychecks cleared the bank ... oh wait.
More seriously, this is the advantage of commercial software and corporate directed FOSS projects. Paychecks are how the non-fun parts get done and projects completed. Getting volunteers to diligently work on the non-fun parts of a project can be a major hurdle to overcome.
fwiw, I work on embedded systems where users will NEVER be allowed to login or install stuff to this system. its very static and industrial.
what is our init system?
systemd.
sigh ;(
it was not done that way because smart guys set our system up. likely, it was LAZY guys who didn't understand enough about what EMBEDDED means.
we've been stuck with systemd in our embedded system for over 3 years now. I am trying to make it change, but only a handful of us at my company 'get it' and its an uphill battle, for some strange reason.
systemd may be ok for when users will install random apps and the startup tree needs to be smarter. but who, here, would truly recommend systemd for static embedded systems?
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This is just one example of a wider problem though. It goes way beyond just Mint.
Hobby software projects can be fun, but tend to go one of two ways. Everyone loses interest and it dies, or it gets really big and working on it becomes a chore. The only solution anyone has found is to go commercial, to pay people to work on the project.
Most Linux contributed code is written by people being paid to do so. Kicad was languishing until CERN started pumping in development effort. Ubuntu is a Canonical product. Compilers, Webkit, Firefox, Blender, LibreOffice... I could go on.
There are counter-examples but there is a definite trend. Maybe Mint should think about becoming a non-profit, and bringing the rewards in-house.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
On an embedded system you should not care how/what the init system is. ... your uphill battle sounds rather stupid to me.
You flash the device and thats it
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Modern uptime for data centers is measured in hours. Sure, the background host OS holding the dozens to thousands of guests may have an uptime of years, but guests that come up and go down all the time are by far the most common use case nowadays. As such, extremely fast boot times should be the modern priority for any distro targeting a dada center, unless it's specifically targeted at the much smaller segment of bate metal machines.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.