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Operating Systems Programming Linux

Linux Mint 19.2 'Tina' is On the Way, But the Developers Seem Defeated and Depressed (betanews.com) 269

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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linux Mint 19.2 'Tina' is On the Way, But the Developers Seem Defeated and Depressed

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  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:04AM (#58371138)

    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!

    • by Megane ( 129182 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:12AM (#58371182)
      Seconded! The best way to be a hero is to fight the system... er... DEE!
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        thirded!

        I am a big mint user and have been for many years.

        but I'm seeing less of a diff from ubuntu, these days. I can install mate (etc) to ubuntu so I don't have to deal with unity anymore and they stopped with their 'lens' crap, so that's one less thing to hate ubuntu over.

        I don't see a lot of diff anymore between mint and ubuntu.

        drop systemd, put some WORK into making it happen and you'll have a brand new following.

        make mint different again ;)

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Penguinisto ( 415985 )

          Fourthed!

          Seriously - what did they think was so broken with the old-school rc rigging in the first place? More precisely, what did they think was so broken that they decided a massive obfuscated spaghetti-coded wreck like systemd was somehow necessary?

          I do recall that there were a few things that rc couldn't do, but honestly, there has got to be a better, more elegant way to accomplish such improvements. Build that, and you could change the course of many, many things.

          • by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @10:14AM (#58371652)

            fwiw, I work on embedded systems where users will NEVER be allowed to login or install stuff to this system. its very static and industrial.

            what is our init system?

            systemd.

            sigh ;(

            it was not done that way because smart guys set our system up. likely, it was LAZY guys who didn't understand enough about what EMBEDDED means.

            we've been stuck with systemd in our embedded system for over 3 years now. I am trying to make it change, but only a handful of us at my company 'get it' and its an uphill battle, for some strange reason.

            systemd may be ok for when users will install random apps and the startup tree needs to be smarter. but who, here, would truly recommend systemd for static embedded systems?

            • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

              On an embedded system you should not care how/what the init system is.
              You flash the device and thats it ... your uphill battle sounds rather stupid to me.

              • You flash the device...with what? The things he has to write? Maybe *that* is why he cares, perhaps?
                • With a kernel and an image of the software ... why would he need to interfere with systemd? Oh, you mean that single line of text he would need to write in any init system that starts his software, if it is not embedded in the kerner?

          • It is called vandalism. Sometimes people don't want to have nice things as much as they want to take away nice things from others.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:20AM (#58371234)

      I think I'm beginning to see the problem.

      If you maintain a distro, you are under constant bombardment from complete fucking lunatics who hate systemd.

      • by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:45AM (#58371414)
        ...And completely sane users who also hate systemd.
      • by postbigbang ( 761081 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:45AM (#58371418)

        Doing a distro is tough work, largely thankless. A few grumpy posts appear, and bored journalists start sniffing for blood.

        Dev is tough. Herding devs is double tough. Keeping up a pace like LeFebvre does is a soulful mission. Tie it to the waffling that Ubuntu does, and it's a wonder he's not bald from tearing his hair out.

        Let the Linux-Desktop-Is-Dead crowd crow like they usually do. The rest of us plough ahead.

    • by Billy the Mountain ( 225541 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:44AM (#58371404) Journal
      Being on Slashdot, I too had shared the anti-systemd sentiment. All it took to turn me around was watching one Youtube video.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      Caution: if you want to continue to happily rant about systemd on Slashdot, don't watch that video! You have been warned!
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Slick_W1lly ( 778565 )

        I watched that video when it first appeared [somewhere]

        I continue to happily rant about systemd despite the assertations that 'it's all me' from some bsd dude...

        It's not me. It's utter shit. Great for a laptop or some desktop machine I'm sure, but it has no place in a data center server where uptimes are measured in months and no-one sticks a fucking USB stick into your box.

        • Modern uptime for data centers is measured in hours. Sure, the background host OS holding the dozens to thousands of guests may have an uptime of years, but guests that come up and go down all the time are by far the most common use case nowadays. As such, extremely fast boot times should be the modern priority for any distro targeting a dada center, unless it's specifically targeted at the much smaller segment of bate metal machines.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            Bullshit. We routinely have months of uptime and so do many of our customers. Oh, of course, I know what your issue is! We do not do "toy" computing.

            • Oh, of course, I know what your issue is! We do not do "toy" computing.

              It's called "cloud computing", maybe you heard about it? You know, firing up and shutting down guest OS instances as demand increases and decreases? At very slow times you may be running five or ten instances. At peak activity times you may be firing up a new full stack guest OS once per second at several data centers at once. And those guest OS boot ups and shutdowns must be FAST.

              If your application requires a set of servers running non-stop, good for you. Different use cases, different optimizations, diff

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Bro, it is 47 fucking minutes long. I am NOT wasting that much time for a "payoff" that is not likely to occur.

        Yes, systemd solves some problems. Yes, in some ways and from some perspectives, systemd is "better" than other init systems.

        But, systemd is not just an init system and it doesn't play well with others since it is a silo. This is NOT the ideal init system and is so far from the ideal init system that this line of reasoning is a non-starter regardless of any other benefits or positives that systemd

    • The beauty of it is also because I don't need to know anything about systemd. Based on my limited experience, the day2day use, the installation, hardware compatibility is just unmatched, let alone performance vs Windows on the same machine. I have 2 machines for kids, with one on mint and other macos. I think none of them knows what 'linux' is nor they care which machine to use. Thank you guys. Will donate.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    To another site. This is a site about tech and....oh wait did you just say Linux?

  • by Revek ( 133289 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:08AM (#58371162)

    The beatings will continue until moral improves.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Hopefully it's just a morale problem instead of a moral problem.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      The beatings will continue until moral improves.

      I think that's part of their code of conduct.

  • Do they want a mint ?

  • by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:12AM (#58371180)

    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.

    • by demon driver ( 1046738 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:52AM (#58371470) Journal

      Yes! Coming rather late to the Linux-as-the-primary-desktop-OS party, I started with Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and was quite happy with it and converted all my machines to Linux soon after that, but then found too many unwelcome changes in Ubuntu Mate 18.04 when it came out (which even made it stop working well enough to be usable on some slower machines), then tried a few other Linux distros including other Ubuntu flavours which all were ok somehow but all had something I disliked enough to make me continue the search, then tried Mint 19 with xfce on slower machines and Cinnamon on more recent hardware, and I immediately kept it and now that's where I hope to be staying for the foreseeable future.

      Beside it being arguably one of the best-maintained and most solid distros around, one of the things I find incredibly nice in Mint is that even the different flavours (Cinnamon and xfce in my case) have been successfully made to look and feel very similar, so that changing between machines which user different flavours is really easy on my nerves.

      • I'm looking to switch from Ubuntu (18.04) to Mint soon. Ubuntu just seems to have far too many issues, and things that no longer work as well as they used to.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    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?

  • Be depressed (Score:2, Interesting)

    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.

    • by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:41AM (#58371388) Homepage

      I don't know much about water, but in general it's driving a huge part of the global economy. Public water utilities aren't raking in much profit, and they should be. Water utilities aren't appreciated nearly enough.

    • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

      I don't know about the teaching profession, but education in general is an important part of insuring our nation's future, but teachers aren't paid well. They should be.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:23AM (#58371258)

    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. [wordpress.com]

    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.

  • by sunami88 ( 1074925 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:24AM (#58371260)
    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 ;)
  • 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.
  • Summary of article:
      * we write great shit but people don't appreciate us
      * donations are nice, but what we really need are regularly scheduled attaboys
      * oh, and send us money, too! Cause we're depressed, and despite the fact I just got done telling you money wasn't the issue, money will totally make it better!

    • 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.

    • 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... [linuxmint.com] - Is that a lot or not?

      • by reanjr ( 588767 )

        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 po

  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @09:33AM (#58371314)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      This is just one example of a wider problem though. It goes way beyond just Mint.

      Hobby software projects can be fun, but tend to go one of two ways. Everyone loses interest and it dies, or it gets really big and working on it becomes a chore. The only solution anyone has found is to go commercial, to pay people to work on the project.

      Most Linux contributed code is written by people being paid to do so. Kicad was languishing until CERN started pumping in development effort. Ubuntu is a Canonical product. Com

    • It's a Linux Distro. Seriously. It's not that you had the solution for cancer and then lost it or something..

      I do cancer research, and many of us use Mint as a primary desktop as it is easier to install and maintain current versions of the tools we need than the windows (or worse mac) software we need to do our data analysis. Sure my institution might have a expensive licence for a very specific piece of software that is slightly easier to use once you learn it, the problem is I'll have to learn it, and when I leave in 2-3 years to work somewhere else with better resources, they aren't likely to have a license to

  • 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?
  • 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 som

  • So when you appeal to a group of users who just look at an OS as an OS, and not a community, the Linux Mint user base is what you wind up with.

    .
    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.

  • 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.

    • 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.
  • 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!

  • 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

  • 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.

  • by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Tuesday April 02, 2019 @01:07PM (#58372920) Journal

    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!

  • 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

  • ...stop paying your bills for a couple months.

  • 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 mo

  • 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

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