Two views on the Linux Mint case

Last week, in the monthly news from the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre hI made a series of comments that caused alarm in the community. I want to share with you two views on the Linux case Mint. One is that of Jason Evangelo from Forbes. The other of Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols by ZDNet.

Jason has an optimistic view. For Steven It's Not Just About Linux Mint, It's The Linux Desktop That Is In Trouble. In my opinion both are wrong and both are right. But let's start at the beginning, explaining what Clement Lefebvre said.

Clement Lefebvre's post

In the usual post where he tells the evolution of the project, Clement Lefebvre took the opportunity to vent:

Personally I haven't enjoyed this development cycle until nowto. Two of our most talented developers have been out. Increasing performance in the Muffin window manager has not been, and still is not, easy.

Feedback on the new website and logo brought a great deal of uncertainty.and. We will still have a great release at the end and get a lot of improvements (we did that to some extent already), but we need to be strong and stay confident and it's not easy when you spend so much time on something and then a month later it's not ready, Either it causes other problems, or it may please some people but not others.

For a team to function, developers must feel like heroes. They want the same as users, they are users, they were "just" users to begin with. At some point they decide to get involved and start investing time, efforts and emotions to improve our project. What they seek the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they finish implementing something they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that's part of the reason they are really here.

The role of users and developers

He then discussed the roles of users and developers in the project.
Sometimes we feel a division between "users" and "developers", as if they were different people, as if the users were not developers and the developers were not users and that is ridiculous.

The notion that an empowered developer cannot understand something that is clear to everyone else it is something we see in the streets, in politics. It is a populist notion in which empowerment is corrupt and the street tastes best. This is not how it works here, there is no difference between a user and a developer apart from their level of involvement within the project. Anyone can and should contribute in the best way possible to address the problems of which they are aware.

Feedback is something we should love, not something we should fear. It is what fuels our project and our development. When developers get it right, the changes they commit make users even happier. When users do things right, the feedback they give makes developers even more motivated.

Everything is alright

Knowing what this post was going to generate, he tried to bring peace of mind to users

We are very careful not to frustrate users with code changes (sometimes necessary). It is important that our community does not demotivate those who within it became the so-called developers.

I hope it didn't sound like a moralizing speech. Things are going very well. Georges's post (N of A, a GNOME Calendar developer who shared his experience) brought up the subject and I think it's good for us as a community to bring it up as well. I also feel the need to clarify my position on this, as I am involved in the moderation of this blog, I often look for quality comments, detailed information that can help us improve and keep the motivation and fun as high as possible for all involved.

The optimistic opinion of Jason Evangelho

Jason, a columnist for Forbes, PCWorld and Computer Shopper, finds there is no cause for alarm:

There is an undercurrent of hope and confidence in Lefebvre's blog post, and I think the team's decision to introduce alpha testing (a ppa repository with experimental software) is a clear indicator that they are motivated to have an even better product.

As for the depressive tone of some of Lefebvre's paragraphs, Jason thinks that it is not so bad:

On a deeper level, Lefebvre could be alluding to something that many creators struggle with, whether their medium is music, the written word, or code: the imposter syndrome. It is a psychological phenomenon (note: not a disease or disorder) experienced by many successful people. Internally, they sometimes feel like frauds, unworthy of their success despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols and the danger to the Linux desktop

The ZDNet columnist on open source topics doesn't think the problem is the distribution.

I am a big believer in the Linux desktop. I used to have a site called Desktop Linux. And I think, as Microsoft keeps moving Windows to a Desktop-as-a-service model, Linux will be the last traditional PC desktop operating system standing. But that does not mean that he is blind to his problems.

Steven quotes a report to Linus Torvalds in which he complains about the fragmentation of the Linux desktop and asks to take as a model a Chromebook or Android that have a single desktop experience for different computers.

Then mention something that coincides with an article I wrote (You guys apologize, but it always gives a bit of reassurance that a prestigious columnist thinks the same as you)

None of the major Linux distributors; Canonical, Red Hat, SUSE, are really interested in supporting the Linux desktop. They all have them, but they focus on servers, containers, the cloud, and the Internet of Things (IOT). After all, that's where the money is.

It is true that the general strokes of Linux desktops are painted primarily by Canonical and Red Hat, but the desktop is far from their top priority. Instead, much of the building blocks of the current generation of Linux desktops are established by the vendor-related communities: Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE's openSUSE, and Canonical's Ubuntu.

The unhappiness of the developers

Unlike Jason, Steven does not believe that Clement's words can be taken as something positive. He chooses these two paragraphs:

It is not always easy to achieve what we want, sometimes it is not even easy to define what we want to achieve. We can have doubts, we can work very hard on something for a while and then question it so much, that we are not even sure that we will send it. We can be unmotivated, insecure, depressed even from negative reactions or interactions, and this can lead to developers walking away from the project, taking a break, or even leaving for good.

This is Muffin [Linux Mint's default window manager] at the moment. We are trying to make it smoother, to make the windows feel lighter ... radical changes and refactoring occurred, it is time consuming and we are chasing regressions to the left, right and center. It is a very tough exercise, it creates tensions within the team, but the potential is there, if we can make our window manager more eye-catching, it is worth the hassle.

Another developer not too happy

It seems that Lefebvre is not the only one upset with Muffin. The ZDNet columnist also quotes Jason Hicks, another Linux Mint developer:

I also have a life outside of open source work. It is not mentally healthy to put the hours that I have put in the composer. I was only able to do what I could because I was unemployed in January. I am now working a full time job, and trying to keep up with bug fixes. I've been spending every night and weekend, basically every spare moment of my spare time trying to fix things.

There has also been tension because we are one or two months away from a release. We've had a contentious debate about input latency, the effects of certain patches, and ways to measure all of this. Other team members are going through their own equally difficult circumstances, and it's an unfortunate amount of stress that happens all at once at the wrong times. We are human at the end of the day

How does Steven interpret this?

I've heard this before. There have been many Linux desktop distributions over the years. They tend to last five or six years and then real life gets in the way of what is almost always a voluntary effort. The programmers walk away, and the distribution then, too often, refuses to be replaced by another.

My take on the two views on the Linux Mint case

In my opinion, both Jason and Steven are right and wrong.

Jason is right that Clement Lefebvre's post should not be dramatized. Simply took advantage a post that he found interesting to comment on how Linux Mint developers feel and how much they need the collaboration of users. For its part, STeven is right that companies are not interested in the desktop. Me I said almost the same some days ago.

For my part, cI think that what it is about is that there is not much left to do on the desktop. To remain interested in a project, a person needs economic stimuli or challenges. It is difficult to get financial incentives in community projects. As for challenges, there aren't too many left. Except to introduce improvements that the user will not notice, or to release a new version of things that already exist.

Linux Mint is not in immediate danger, but its participants will find new horizons in which to put their passion.