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System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 6 Desktop Environment
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this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
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That's honestly a very revisionist version of history. Unfortunately I'm too tired to do a proper rebuttal to it. We have made many upstream contributions to GNOME. There has never been an instance of refusal to upstream anything. There has been instances of upstream not being interested in our contributions though. But that's how things go when you have creative differences with an upstream, or have technical contributions which aren't of interest to upstream's use cases. Keep in mind that just because a downstream makes something cool and interesting, it doesn't automatically mean that creation fits in with upstream's vision for their project. Hence why there's hundreds of gnome-shell extensions that aren't built into GNOME.
It's not revisionist at all? There's proof of all of this.
I never said S76 hadn't made any. I'm sure plenty have been made.
Yes there has.
https://www.tumblr.com/system76/185276928258/system76-news-a-may-with-zing
Sounds good, right? Yeah, it is. Except:
– they didn’t report the bug in launchpad
– they didn’t send their patch/fix to launchpad
– they didn’t get in touch with Ubuntu/Canonical about fixing the issue
These things would've benefited everyone, but S76 chose not to.
But it gets worse. They did an upload in their overlay PPA with the description:
‘ * Backport to Pop!_OS because Ubuntu is too slow.’
Why needlessly shit on another project like that when you could just submit the patch to upstream, or at least file a bug report? Stabbing the back of upstream like that isn't friendly.
There are multiple cases of conduct like this.
Of course, but I never really brought that into doubt. I alluded to it when I said Gnome were sometimes unwilling to compromise.
But don't take my criticism of some of System76's actions as hate. Especially not when the bulk of it comes from one person. I used PopOS for a long while and enjoyed it, and I hope PopOS, Cosmic, and S76 in general succeeds.
Your link demonstrates the exact opposite. GNOME rejected a patch for disabling mouse acceleration profiles, and I then ported that patch to Pop!_OS. It was often the case that I merged third party patches into Pop!_OS that were either rejected by GNOME, or were in an actively-open PR. In all instances where contributions could be upstreamed that we worked on personally, pull requests were given to the appropriate projects. And it is the case that many such instances were merged into GNOME, such as the keyboard settings page redesign. Our team has submitted many contributions to GTK, GNOME, and other projects over the years, so to smear us for not contributing upstream is incredibly deceitful.
Issues with youtube-dl being outdated are constantly reported on Launchpad, and are still an issue to this day because YouTube keeps changing the API. It was reported at that time as well. In fact, I have submitted several patches upstream to Ubuntu through Launchpad over the years, but unfortunately they typically go straight into limbo because developers rarely notice them, and it's difficult to get their attention. It's usually better to go straight to the upstream developer to get those changes merged there, and therefore the issue will be fixed in the next release of Ubuntu when they package the updated software. If Canonical is interested in any of the work we have done in Pop!_OS, they are also free to take from our GitHub repositories. It's all open source, after all.
It speaks to me that you have certain intentions and motivations in your speech to paper over the good we've done over the years to focus on small nit picks. Nitpicking an obscure debian changelog that no one reads and was never presented to the user is a very poor argument. I was frustrated at the time because youtube-dl kept breaking and we kept getting issue reports on it. I was unable to get any response from Canonical, so I fixed it myself in Pop. I haven't written anything in the debian changelog fields since then.
The link doesn't display the exact opposite.
We weren't talking about mouse acceleration profiles. As I am now saying for the third time, I never said S76 didn't try to upstream anything, or that Gnome would accept everything.
It is a fact that in that youtube-dl example, S76 fixed a bug for their own project, didn't alert, raise a bug report, or submit a patch to upstream. It is also a fact that they then, twice, mocked upstream for not having that fix in place.
It is also a fact that that was not the only occasion of this happening.
My point has never been that S76 contributed nothing, or that upstream devs were willing to accept 100% of what S76 would send their way. I feel I made that clear.
Please, let's be civil. Don't put words in my mouth. I'm not saying S76 are bad or evil, I'm not trying to present you or your employer in a bad light. I used PopOS, and I've tested Cosmic a bunch of times because it's interesting, I even wished System76 future success. There is zero hate here.
I was explaining a few of the tension points between S76 and upstream projects that came to public attention.
It's not nitpicking, it was a needlessly hostile remark towards upstream. It doesn't matter if only a small amount of end users saw it, that doesn't mean it's not a petty remark. And end users aren't the only people that matter, I doubt the upstream devs appreciated being ridiculed for an issue they weren't even made aware of.
S76 never contacted canonical. No bug reports or fixes were sent their way. The first they heard of it was when S76 publicly mocked them for not having the fix.
And as I said, there's nothing wrong with fixing it yourself. That's good. It's the not raising a bug report to upstream, then making snide remarks about them not fixing it that I take issue with.
Again, I want to reiterate, because you seem to think I have bad intent: I do not. I like the project. But that doesn't mean I think everyone has always been perfect. People are people. We're human. We make mistakes and it's fine to acknowledge that. Me doing so about a couple of S76 employee's actions is not an attack.
I don't know how you can keep telling me that I never contacted Canonical even though I did. Nor did anyone ever publicly mock Canonical. You are putting words in our mouths. So much contradictory and hyperbolic nonsense here. Let me guess: you read a certain hyperbolic hit piece from a Chris Davis—one of the most prominent libadwaita and stopthemingmyapp developers—whom had a personal axe to grind with us because of many heated online arguments with him over the petition, theming, and libadwaita. He created a hit piece to influence public perception of the company and intentionally used the GNOME blog to reach the widest audience for his vendetta. Even though if you dig through the details his statements are weak, if not outright false. To make matters worse, GNOME never addressed that personal blog post hosted on their website, even though we had been sponsoring and sometimes hosting GNOME events for 5 years prior, and donated a total of $100K. Leading many to conclude that this was the voice of GNOME, even if internally it was not. This is what happens if you only read the story from one side without putting equal weight on the other.
They were never contacted, and they were attacked by S76. There's no need for lies.
You can pretend these things never happened all you want, but they did, and it's easily verifiable, and no amount of denying the facts will change that. Lying like this is indefensible.
It's unfortunate that you're taking this road. I think we'll have to end this here.
I wish you and your project the best.