The GNOME Calendar maintainers bring up the fact that Linux Mint ships a nearly 2 year old version of GNOME Calendar to its users and still keep the GNOME branding and support links.
The Linux Mint team don’t see an issue with shipping old, unmaintained software and would rather ignore the issue and pretend it doesn’t exist. The recent releases of Linux Mint have downgraded several pieces of software to their older GNOME 3 versions which re-introduce fixed bugs and removes newer features. This was done to support their theming engine, despite the fact that their theming is already several releases too old for GNOME apps.
In addition, they utilize several old GNOME related system components that apps rely on such as GNOME Calendar so even installing a newer version of Calendar wouldn’t be enough.
This ties into a much larger issue of “Long Term Support” desktop operating systems where software can be pulled back for nearly 5 years (or even longer under a contract). Necessary fixes that are too complicated to be patched back in (or count as features) are then missed by users. Users end up using years-old flagship desktops (GNOME and KDE) and get their first impression of those projects from versions that none of the upstream maintainers support.
It’s a shitty situation all around: I personally think it’s incredibly important to use the latest release of software that’s supported by upstream. GNOME does not actively support older versions of its app and shell from more than a release ago and distributions shipping these older GNOME releases can only cause damage to GNOME’s reputation.
If this isn’t possible, then I don’t think it’s right to still keep the branding and trademark of the application, much less keep the original support links intact.
I wish there was a distro that was as conservative as Debian for major dependencies, but delivered user-facing software as appimages of whatever the most up-to-date thing is.
You can accomplish this yourself by using whatever base you want and installing everything possible as either flatpaks, appimages, or through Homebrew. That’s essentially the philosophy of atomic distros like Bazzite/Bluefin/Aurora. There’s also PikaOS that is trying to be CachyOS but Debian.
Stuff like this is why I’ve been telling people not to use Mint or Debian or whatever when they’ve talked about switching to Linux on Hexbear. Fedora has a fine release schedule that doesn’t usually break things as long as you wait 2 weeks to upgrade to a new major version every 6 months. Though they are not immune, as the other linked article shows in their back and forth with OBS. Fedora flatpaks were always bad.
People are missing out on improved software and bug fixes, newer mesa drivers that can significantly boost game performance and compatibility, new kernel improvements that increase overall speed, wayland support, etc. You can pin packages on your own or use containers if you’re someone who actually needs your software to stay on a certain version. Both Bazzite and CachyOS, two of the more popular gamer options, have LTS kernel boot options by default too. I don’t think there’s a lot of good reasons the average person who is relatively tech literate should be using LTS distros, even if they don’t play games at all.
Someone else mentioned it in relation to Duckstation, but there’s been plenty of situations like this before. Someone releases an app that they only distribute as flatpak, appimage, whatever. Someone else makes their own unsupported package for it and doesn’t do anything to direct issues away from the main developer. Main developer gets loads of issues and complaints they have to keep shutting down from people who don’t understand the difference. Developer gets rightfully annoyed. Same as it ever was.
Fedora seems technically strong but the association with Red Hat and its governance making iffy decisions seems like a longer term risk. And Red Hat are a big MIC contractor.
Opensuse tumbleweed is basically the only alternative to fedora which I used to be happy running but zypper is a single threaded slow as fuck pile of poo which makes updating the OS a chore. If they sorted that it would be a strong fedora contender with a cuter logo
There’s also KDE Linux, PopOS (though Cosmic is basically still beta software), etc. Just anything that actually uses updated packages. They all have pros and cons but I think the cons of most of them are significantly less than the situation described by this post.
Fedora flatpaks are such a baffling choice I dont even know why they exist.
Users get Gnome via their distributions, always have. Distributions have been shipping old software since forever. This is not new, a Gnome dev must understand this is how this works, they knew what they were getting into.
This discussion isn’t new either, this pops up every now and again. People have quite good reasons for wanting to run LTS distros, so you’re not going to get rid of them. I will argue that upstream devs should want their software to be included in LTS releases, certainly Gnome would lose massive amounts of users if it wasn’t included in LTS. I certainly would not want to rely on or recommend any software that can’t be included in Debian stable for example, even if I were not using Debian stable on my laptop a the moment. Just the knowledge that I might want to run it on an LTS and it then being a pain in the ass to manually install would make me avoid it.
Upstream should accept that this the reality of how a large part of their users get their software, and want to get their software. I certainly do. I trust Debian a lot more about acting in my interest than I do pretty much any upstream. Distros usually do not hurt upstream either (quite the opposite), not in terms of reputation nor by wasting their time. They certainly aren’t trying to. The distro maintainers do important and often tedious work. Upstream can either be hostile to this situation or try and accommodate it, I know which way I would prefer.
Upstreams have in the past tried to force a rebrand by way of trademark law. I’m not a fan of this, this is confusing to users and extra work for downstream, and rather hostile. Imagine if every upstream did this.
I do however think distros should point their users at their own bugtrackers and such of course.
I heard of this situation on R*ddit the other day and the comments were mostly the usual “GNOME BAD!!11! GNOME DEVELOPERS SUCK!!!111!11” which I have been weary off ever since I saw some better discussions of GNOME stuff here. Good thing there were a couple of good comments highlighting that Mint was in the wrong for several reasons.
I don’t even use GNOME, I’m a KDE person, but it’s always good to be up-to-date on this stuff.
I don’t like gnome cause their icon is a foot and I’m not into feet.
The responses from the lead Linux Mint developer (Clement Lefebvre) are also pretty insulting:
Let me be a little bit insulting as well, since you’re so aggressive. I’m not expecting you to be reasonable. You placed a link in your app you don’t want people to click on. It’s not rocket science. The more obnoxious you are in the way you talk to us the less we’ll be willing to help you.
“Aggressive” doing a lot of work to shut up a trans woman who has been one of the key reasons GNOME Calendar is accessible. She’s literally asking you to replace a support link.
The more obnoxious you are in the way you talk to us the less we’ll be willing to help you.
Says guy who was already refusing to help under any circumstances. Textbook defensive bullshit.
Aw hell yeah, Tesk article.
The issue itself was originally calm and straight to the point. Half a year passed by and there was no response. Then, the packager was pinged, they chimed in, and changed the subject immediately. The tone shifted, and they took the easy way out by locking the issue and misleadingly stating that this is an upstream problem for choosing the wrong license.
In other words, you have two choices:
You kindly ask, and nothing happens apart from your own time and energy getting wasted for a considerable amount of time, with constant red herring or silence.
You start acting like a ‘dick’, and now they use this as an excuse to no longer communicate with you, all the while still refusing to address the underlying issue.
Sounds like they’re the ones acting like a ‘dick’ to me… This does make me think of Stenzek, though, which near as I can tell the Stenzek/AUR stuff was a similar-ish thing.
Stenzek actually did change the license of duckstation to a nonfree license but it didn’t stop anyone from redistributing duckstation because people started saying that they’re shipping a build script to download duckstation from the Internet and not duckstation itself and then he started going to war with Arch Linux (and later NixOS lmao because they used the same reason).
You can’t stop the Linux G@ymer
I’m generally pro distributions-steamrolling-upstream but this is a solid counter-argument. If you’re going to make substantial ham-fisted modifications to a piece of software you’re distributing, you have to own it. You can’t claim it is upstream’s product when you are deliberately ripping out all the improvements they’re making and undermining their work. There is a long precedent for this too. For many years, Debian distributed long term support versions of Firefox, and Mozilla was not happy about their branding being used on these packages (versions they no longer supported themselves), so Debian re-branded it to IceWeasel. (Eventually this conflict was resolved with the introduction of Firefox-ESR).
It could be better for upstreams to better communicate what versions they actively maintain in a clearer way it’s also up to distributors to take collective ownership of the things they use and not to dump them on users who aren’t expected to know better. I suspect that the Linux Mint team is going to struggle hard with the GTK3 apps that they now have to maintain in-house when upstream has fully moved on.
Fedora has been the only distribution to me that seems to take this seriously: 6 month release cadence with an extra 6 months of security updates before EOL and software updates are permitted mid-release when they’re needed. It strikes the perfect balance between those who need longer term support and also following upstreams.
At this point, it isn’t even clear what Mint’s purpose is. The thing which made their distribution unique is now an albatross of technical debt. It sounds like they have already dug their own grave.
Okay so Mint devs are insufferable. Also I really don’t know why Mint thinks it’s a good idea to go so hard on theming. They could just make some things green and ship vanilla GNOME and it would look way better.
Looking forward to a day when GNOME has so thoroughly optimized accessibility that it’s easier to theme though.
