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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.
The beatings will continue until moral improves.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
First rule of fixing computers. Start by a reboot. Then complain and lose trust in your suppose product. I don't see the problem with your mistrust of Mint when you just have to reboot and it fixes a problem. To me thats not a bug at all.
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).
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.