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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.
To another site. This is a site about tech and....oh wait did you just say Linux?
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
Do they want a mint ?
I like how mint works so flawlessly, looks clean, and stays out of your way as a desktop. It's just never any surprise when I install it on any of my machines from tiny to large.
But perhaps the main reason I like it is that it both feels intuitive and the software manager takes a lot of the burdens of installing software and custom widgets that are always a pain to find, install, and maintain in Linux.
In short if they are not hearing from me it's because I have no complaints or suggestions.
For me it's the best distribution for getting work done not being a system admin or expert.
In that regard it reminds me of why I also use Mac OS on all my other computers.
Don't get me wrong I've worked with the uggly details of main different systems. Centos and Redhat on server farms. DSL and Slack on small underpowered machines. Raspian. as well as Debian and various flavors of ubuntu. None of these are terrible but Linux mint is the most seemless and least confusing interface.
So I have standardized on it to get work done and not tweak my linux boxes. All my employees use it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'd phrase it as "developers need to feel like their efforts are appreciated" instead of the "heroes" thing. Feeling like nobody cares about the work you do is fairly disappointing and can demotivate you.
Adding lengthy, far reaching CoCs can make things worse because you always feel like you'll get slapped by the CoC if you do something wrong. Living in fear of the CoC is not conducive to organic participation.
I say, put the CoC away!
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?
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.
Just wanted to say I'm a devout Mint 19.1 user. Was a devout 17.x user, as well. I'd dabbled in the Linux world for many years, but it wasn't until Mint 15 or 16 (been a while now) that I finally made the move and dumped Windows. I never looked back. Even Ubuntu in it's heyday saw me dual booting...
;)
I really love the work these people do. I just hope they get as much satisfaction out of using their tools/programs as I do... If Mint died tomorrow I'm not sure I'd ever find another ~ . Sure you can graft Cinnamon on top of another Unix-like, but there's something about the whole software stack that has made it so I can't even consider another OS as a daily driver.
For what little it's worth, I'll hoist one to the Mint devs when I get home tonight. Heck, I might even make a donation
Sex. Drugs, and Unix.
Troubled Guy: I don't know... lately I just don't feel like there's anything special about me.
Booth: You are an incredibly sensitive man, who inspires joy-joy feelings in all those around you.
---
I get it, I really do - you're losing your passion for your project and that's normal. But if you're not building Mint for yourself or if you feel that other distributions do the job better than maybe its time to move on or find someone who is passionate about it.
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
Depression could be the result of coming down off of "Tina". I'm sure the developers or someone involved knows that "Tina" is a slang for crystal meth?
If volunteering isn't fun or satisfying, STOP VOLUNTEERING!
Yeah, it's not like anyone uses Debian or Fedora or any of their derivative nowadays. Systemd is essentially dead on arrival.
I think they should put a small 'like' button on the desktop. And if you press it, an automatic tweet to the developers is generated saying that you really like their product, and please make more.
If Mint hackers are doing it to make a desktop they love, then there's no need for users to tell them they're doing good. If Mint hackers are doing it for any other reason, they should get the fuck out. If volunteer work makes you depressed and you continue to volunteer and then go on the web to complain how depressed you are, you deserve any and all shit that comes your way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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.
A cron job would be less intrusive
Good idea. I think we're getting somewhere.
Manjaro is actually #1 right now, Mint #3.
Morale problems, especially for volunteers, aren't easy to solve. I wish the Clement and Mint developers all the best and this user certainly appreciates their work on making Mint the fine distro that it is.
After being a longtime Ubuntu user, the switch to the gawdawful Unity window manager repulsed me. For awhile I got by with Xubuntu, but once I discovered Linux Mint and Cinnamon, I switched immediately and never looked back. I still plan on sticking with Mint, and will upgrade my old 17.2 box to 19.1 sometime this month.
But having learned my lesson with Ubuntu, it's always good to have a fallback distro in mind just in case one's fav distro takes a turn for the worse. If I had to switch to a non-Mint distro, what would I choose in 2019? Probably Ubuntu MATE. It reminds me of the old GNOME 2 days, and now that MATE is 100% based on GNOME 3.x, it's a fine replacement for Cinnamon. There's growing interest in MX Linux (for what it's worth, its Distrowatch ranking is #2), but until MX includes Cinnamon or MATE as optional window managers, I won't consider it.
MX can be truly fun, the systemd issue aside.
My problem is the characterization. We're used to this Darwinian success motif pushed by VCs, and so when things don't go so well for a while, it's perceived as blood in the water.
Debian is my personal preference, but I use Mint here and there. I grew up with init.d, but systemd is only a minor PITA compared to other problems that distros have.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
What. The.Fuck?!?! You're writing code. If you need to "feel like [a hero]" to be successful at that, you have, umm, issues.
Someone sold them on the notion that they were revolutionaries, part of a movement. The politics/religion of Linux is at work here, unsurprisingly its counterproductive.
Code because coding interests you, is fun to you.
Share code with others because they share code with you, nothing more.
Don't bring political nor religious ideologies into the mix, you'll get farther without it in the end.
I've been using Linux exclusively on my personal desktop systems for nearly 20 years now. For the last several years I use i3 because I realised I stopped using all those extra's that distinguish desktop managers from window managers, and I've disliked overlapping windows since Windows 3.11. What I have now is clean, light and logical and it works like a charm (although it's very different from what most people are used to).
Not ready for the desktop? Dream on.
Amen ... Mint developers using their own product should be evidence enough whether they did a good job or not. They are perfectly capable themselves of judging their work. Feedback is over 10x more likely to be negative than positive, that's just reality, get over it. Accept this and don't take feedback to seriously. Are people using your software or not, after your own opinion, the size of that silent majority is your second point of validation. F*ck the forum whiners, don't take them too seriously. If they point out a legit bug, great. If they offer a useful suggestion, great. But if they are just offering a personal judgement, who the f*ck are they that you should give two sh*ts about their opinion?
It does indeed help to know that your work is appreciated ...
If they are using your software you are being appreciated.
How many think an AC virtue signalling a donation will actually make it?
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In order to be widely deployed on desktops, the OS has to be just an OS, not a community cult.
The question is, can Linux become a widely used desktop OS and still retain a community-oriented user base? Linux Mint's experience seems to suggest the answer is no.
https://images-na.ssl-images-a...
I had been happy with mint for a while... right up until I had to do a presentation and my laptop mysteriously could no longer connect to an external monitor. Every time I tried, it would go into what appeared to be an infinite loop of trying to set the resolution of both built in and external monitors. Didn't matter what I plugged in. Projector. A monitor that had previously worked perfectly fine.
Luckily I had tested things early enough to quickly install LO on a MBP and was able to do my presentation. I found out afterwards that it was an obscure bug that could be solved by a reboot, but I had no way of knowing that at the time, and I didn't have time to troubleshoot. Regardless, the damage was done, and my trust in Mint being a solid product was shattered, and I won't be installing it again.
I can sympathize with developer frustrations, and ${DEITY} knows that dealing with the public is damned exhausting, especially when they're Dunning-Krugering up the wazoo. I could go into a long diatribe about the problems I see with OSS software, etc etc, but in the end the product needs to reliably do what it says on the tin, and everything else is moot.
Mint has been my go-to Linux desktop distro since Ubuntu's default package & DE selection went off the rails into crazytown way back when. A few old computers at the office run it and people who don't know what a Linux is use it without trouble. Looks like success to me!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
They don't need hordes. One happy user every now and then can be enough. But when they look around they're greeted by the acerbic FOSS community, or even worse, silence and crickets.
People voluntarily and silently using your software are often happy users. They are telling you they are happy by using your software. If you need virtual hugs to continue developing software then you likely got into development for the wrong reason. Your primary validation is *your* opinion, your secondary validation are voluntary and active users. Virtual hugs are of far less importance than these two (and other) indicators.
I just want to get paid and be on a development team that isn't sloppy.
I'm dual booting it on iMacs, laptops and using it for ZFS+Samba. Kudos to the dev team! I just wish you'd drop SystemD
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== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
I agree. The mouse wheel sensitivity thing is a strange oversight in the otherwise elegant interface. It's hard to beleive it's not there. Instructions for doing it from the command line exist but they are not simple or something you want to with the finality of command line edits to system resources.
I haven't found one yet but I bet there might be an add-on widget for cinammon that does this. Anyone know?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Just because Ubuntu Mate exists is not a reason to avoid Mint. It's great that people have choices in OS still.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Had no idea that MX Linux had become so well-known (or increasingly so). Thanks for pointing this out! I'm an ex-Mint user (still love what they've done with the distro and Cinnamon) not because there was anything wrong with it but because of performance issues on my admittedly lower-end (aged) laptop. Went through tons of Live CDs. anti-X drew me in (love lightweight OSes) and it was followed by MX Linux.
Been on it for about 6 months. I was just looking for a distro that would breathe new life into my laptop. I happened to get one that is a rolling release (so rare in the Linux world), running on top of debian (access to a rich assortment of programs). Did not really consider other aspects like systemd - was just looking for a performance boost.
Performance has been amazing (at the end of the day... this is the key). Firefox Quantum runs like a champ on a 10+ year old laptop where the chromes fail miserably. Added the FF extension named "h264ify" (plus the usual anti-trackers) and now Youtube Videos don't cause the laptop into meltdown.
At some point I'm going to have to replace my old non-kiosk laptop (with such a great keyboard, tons of ports, massive hard drive, 16:10 aspect ratio, replaceable components) but not today - all because of MX Linux. I think lots of Linux users are in a similar position as me (running older - tried and true - laptops).
Calling it a money grab is a bit too strong, but I'd be more willing to donate if they made it more clear what it's used for. (I did donate a few times.)
It's not clear whether it's a non-profit organization or a company. I have no idea how many person- hours they put in and how much they get paid.
The donations over 2018 totalled about $140k. Other sources of income are not disclosed. - https://linuxmint.com/donors.p... - Is that a lot or not?
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I run Windows on my laptop. Shocking around here, I know.
But there are some tasks that work out better on Linux. Ubuntu is brutal in VirtualBox, or at least it was, when I first went down the Mint path. I think I was following a tutorial for Ubuntu, so I ended up trying Mint.
I still have that VM around and fire it up a few times a year for whatever. Also works pretty well on an ancient laptop I keep around.
It's of course based on Ubuntu, so credit is due where credit is due.
But that said, they made it look and feel better, more inclusive bells'n'whistles for life and fun, and of course everyday use. As an old 10+ year slackware user and a big fan of it, I was at some point going "I'm too old for this fixing the boat, compiling this and compiling that" life, and wanted the comfortable life of windows users without the disk trashing, endless registry garbage, and constant threat of viruses, Now - Linux is by far not free from worms, exploits and viruses, but since there's still not that many using it, it has the "Apple effect" of having very little malware to bother your every day life.
The functionality of Mint Linux is nothing short of amazing. I have boxes that have been going on for years, heck - I just moved my previous Mint linux installation from my older computer to a new one (always updating religiously though), but with completely new hardware, worked straight out of the box, even with the proprietary Nvidia drivers and steam gaming, everything was like before, all installations, years of fun stuff installed - just worked (try that with Windows!)
Mint Linux put the FUN back in Linux, it's still Linux with all the control you'd ever want over your (and yes, I say YOUR) operating system, but without the control of the "man" and "corporate", you're as free as you want to be, and can have all the fun Windows users are having (without the constant crashes and dish trashes).
So consider this a small but humble THANK YOU - to the ENTIRE Mint Linux team, every contributor - thanks a million for your efforts, making our lives so comfortable we almost take you for granted, this is just how GOOD a job you did.
You usually never hear the praise - just all the complaints, once you hear nothing - you can be pretty darn sure your job was insanely well done, because people tend to forget to say "THANKS" when they're just enjoying their experience, but something break? You'll have a queue of complaints, right there at your doorstep.
So again - THANK YOU!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Yeah, I don't really think it was a money grab. It just really struck me that the whole article complains about not being appreciated with thank yous and how the devs are depressed, and then ends with several sentences about sending money. The strong implication is that monetary compensation would be just as good as thank yous. Which is totally reasonable. But it's an obfuscated way of just saying "give me money". Which is also reasonable to do. But putting it at the tail of begging for sympathy is poor taste.
This whole article reads like someone trying to stir the pot and create more stress and tension. For shame.
Perhaps the reason for the huge drop in thankful users was their decision to stop supporting their second most desperate set of users, those running KDE?
While I understand Gnome 2 users are probably their bread and butter due to their forking into Mate, there are plenty of other stable Debian based distros that provided stable Gnone 3 and Xfce based environments that 'just work'. But just like having an up to date Gnome 2 environment makes people EXTREMELY thankful, there really isn't another Debian based KDE distro that 'just works'. So if you prefer a KDE desktop, sadly, you options are to either deal with broken Debian based KDE distros (such as KDE's own Neon distro), abandon KDE, or move to the RPM based OpenSUSE.
While it's obvious from the long delays in Mint roll outs of KDE compared to other environments that KDE has never been a real focus of Mint, I can personally attest to how thankful KDE users are to Mint for all their years of support. Thanks guys!
...stop paying your bills for a couple months.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
I don't use Mint on my own machine, but I have my mom using Mint on her computer as she is (perhaps overly) worried about viruses and malware and we did not have a Windows license for when I built her last PC anyway. She's on 17.3 still right now, but I maintain a second machine of my own with the current release of Mint to evaluate for when it comes time to update her machine. The main reason I have not is there is no real "upgrade" path on Mint from back then. You still had to reinstall from scratch to move to the next major version. That's a hassle there is no reason to undertake when the system is working fine for her now and still under long-term support.
One thing I've noticed is that starting with Mint 18 -- Bluetooth audio actually works. Like I tried it on 17.3 and it didn't really function. It lost the headset, didn't output audio, etc. But with 18 it really functioned properly. And following the blog posts since then, I'm been seeing the progress the developers are making in performance enhancements in Mint in my own usage of the new releases. Their work is certainly appreciated, even if I don't crow about is all the time on the forums.
I used to maintain a few FreeBSD ports...Not nearly the scope of maintaining a full distro, but my experience was similar. One thing they didn't get into that was a big problem for me was feeling like I was responsible for the problems created by terrible OSS projects' awful RE practices...Yes, I'm looking at you, OpenArena. When the majority of the work is dealing with people that run terrible projects in order to figure out what's needed to build their terrible software cause they can't be bothered to put that information anywhere themselves---or even have an idea about it when you ask them---that's a problem that really doesn't have a good solution, yet the people packaging/porting software for individual distributions have to deal with.
See https://slashdot.org/comments.... for back-story of why I'm targeting OpenArena specifically, but know that a *lot* of smaller OSS projects run the same way.
Make a list of how you would like whichever specific people to think, act and talk about you. I'll throw mine in too. No one ever told me I was necessarily going to "get thanks" for my efforts for anything in my life and for whatever reason, I don't expect it. When I get it, it doesn't matter. I'm fine with it, but I don't need it. I'm already doing what I want to be doing. If it wasn't what I want to be doing then I wouldn't do it. If something in your world isn't pleasing to you and it's possible to change it, then that's what a person can do, if they can do it. But never have I thought that I could somehow hope to get others to have a certain attitude towards what I'm doing. Heroes? You mean like Avenger movies? People in your world are not being good enough to you? I suffer from manic depression. I've clawed my life back from the jaws of destruction on several occasions. I've lost everything a few times and struggled back. People don't pat me on the back for that. Those victories belong to me, at least. If someone else wants to know about them, I'm glad to tell them. Defeated? I suspect that the specter of the full force of the feeling of defeat has not been met by what many of the Mint devs. I'm just guessing, but I'm thinking it's not WWI here. Linux Mint is a fantastic OS, but it's niche. I use Windows. I've used almost all the modern PC (Windows, OS2, Linux, NeXT, etc) and Mac and OSX variants out there. I've been doing this for a long time. I use Windows because I want my hardware to work and I don't want to fight too hard to make it work. I want software that has deeply intuitive UI designs which generally make sense and are not Open Source afterthoughts. If a person chooses to work on Linux Mint, a niche OS for people who frankly are fussy about operating systems, then it would behoove them to expect what a person gets when they work on a niche OS. The fact is, statistically, people aren't paying that much attention to Linux Mint. When it comes to user space, the Linux crowd is the pure, the proud, the isolated. They did something great, and that's not enough? I'm sorry people feel bad. That's never good. But I can't shake the feeling like "everyone needs to get a gold star." But, that's not life. Not everyone gets a gold star - whether or not they'd really like one. I knew someone who lost their wonderful son in their early twenties to a horrible accident. I won't tell you the whole story, but suffice to say, the son _suffered_ before he died. My elderly friend John, telling me this story, said, "I learned something from that." I asked, "what was that?" John looked me in eye with a steel gaze and said, "life ain't fair."
That was the issue for me, as well.
Thank you C. L. and everyone else who provides Linux Mint. I had fun playing distro-hop back in the day, but now I'm only interested in using the computer, not playing with it. For the last few years, Mint MATE has been working so well for me, and my wife and I have been enjoying using it as our OS. Don't be sad, you've done a great thing, and we love the work you've done.
I could have written what you wrote, except that my 17.3 install will be my last Mint.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen