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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.
We see one of these tales of open source developer woe like every other day now. You think maybe it's not open source that's the problem, but the open source developers who have been raised to be told at every turn that they are special, their work is amazing, and everyone would be lost without them?
If the software suits your personal needs better than when you started hacking on the project, then you are your own personal hero. Why do you need hordes of people telling you how great you are?
Real Linux requires writing shell scripts. If you aren't willing to write a shell script to startup an app at bootup, why are you even here? Systemd just makes shit too easy and well documented for everyone. Now newbs are going to be able to do all the shit we do writing shell scripts. Assholes...