[keyle]

I feel it's somewhat a deeper change. Older developers are getting kids and have very limited / no time to allocate for open source development (unsupported financially).

Younger developers are chasing the golden goose on the web/mobile, or banging frameworks until sunrise. They feel like old c++ codebase etc. are like old ruins, in deep dark caverns. They wouldn't touch any of it. They're anti-mailing-list and pro-slack. There is a huge gap between the two.

It's as if new generations come in and they want to make their own mark. And there is what's sexy ("getting rich yo") and what's completely unsexy ("let's pick up grand pa's code and move it forward on my mac book pro").

[scrollaway]

It's not like you can't make desktop development "sexy", though. You could, but we're not there yet.

Qt is a pretty amazing framework (yes, I'm biased). You can write apps in Python, but Python is a clusterfuck for shipping anything cross-platform or any kind of desktop apps.

My vision for LXQt was to very much have a modern desktop (targeting recent tech such as fingerprint readers, wayland etc), while retaining some design patterns from the classic desktop ("classic" taskbar or global menu, icon-based desktop grid, etc) without trying to reinvent "desktop shells".

Working on the desktop doesn't always mean using ancient tech, nor solving ancient problems - FWIW I'm probably younger than the average HN demographic. We tried having/creating solid developer tooling, good documentation, a decent-looking website but there's only so much you can do when you're lacking manpower in every area. Nearly all my time was spent doing developer outreach.

[keyle]

Yes I really like your vision of desktop. And I'm not saying desktop dev is unsexy. I'm a designer/ux/ui developer. There is tons of sexy stuff to do. Just look at the VFX of scifi movies and take cues (http://www.aspenexcel.com/), desktop is stuck in the past and could move forward.

What I meant is: the code base is ancient to them. The unsexy monolithic code base that's not running on the cloud and doesn't emulate itself 3 times before running. No new developer fresh of the boat wants to pick up large projects codebase, they want to write funky new code from scratch with tons of bugs, because that's where the fun lies when you're not paid.

[scrollaway]

Yah I got what you were saying. It just annoys me that this is the state we're in.

I share your love for UX and UI development. For what it's worth, the LXQt project could really use people like you dedicating a few hours now and then on drafting app designs, filing UX issues, etc. If you're ever interested, file an issue on the tracker[0] and cc me (@jleclanche) on it.

https://github.com/lxde/lxqt/issues

[acchan]

How do you feel about elementary OS? [0] They spend a lot of effort on UX and it's the project I personally believe has the most chance to push Free Software to a wider audience, but on the other hand it's yet another project contributing to fragmentation.

I'm not sure where they stand wrt XDG, but I bet if you asked them for help with UX and designing stuff, they would love to collaborate.

[0] https://elementary.io

[scrollaway]

I like that they're doing some good UX work (although it's really just copying apple's HIG... and style), but again it's not very interesting to have a group of people working on apps, when the apps themselves look like crap on any other desktop.

On LXQt, I made sure there was no NIH. All the apps that came out of LXQt were lightweight alternatives to bloated stuff from KDE and were "in scope" of the desktop environment. Whereas Elementary includes an Email client.

To put things in context: An email client is office software. It's such a burden to maintain that Mozilla dropped support for theirs (Thunderbird), despite its massive userbase.

People work on what they want to work I suppose, but we're talking about apps that are never going to be used outside of that one particular desktop. That one desktop out of god knows how many, since everybody is working on their own piece.

Are there really so many different ways to do a lightweight tabbed text editor with syntax highlighting in GTK, that Scratch, gedit and Leafpad all need to exist? Or can we admit there's a problem?

[cutthehypocris]

> Younger developers

Let's not put all the fault on "younger developers".

I agree with you completely when you say that nowadays developers care more about new and shiny JS/ROR frameworks than anything else, because they are easy to use and allow them to ship thing overnight and possibly make even a bunch of money out of it.

But let's talk for a moment about the "grand pa's" efforts to welcome new developers. I speak out of personal experience here. In the past, when I was a very young and very new to development, with a limitless willingness to learn and help out doing my part in open source (and, more importantly, limitless time to do it), many of my attempts at trying to collaborate -- two of the most notable and worst experiences on my side being Tox and Fedora -- ended up with me getting mocked for even trying. And when I say mocked I mean it. I wasn't just normally (or, to use a blasphemous word, politely) turned down, which I would have understood. Someone of the Fedora project, when I had attempted to take part in an initiative intended to attract new developers, even went the extra mile basically telling me to go get screwed because I had never contributed before.

This happened when I was around 16 or something. Now I'm 27 and it takes a huge effort on my part to even just consider contributing to "old guard" open source projects. Nowadays, I still would never dare to participate in mailing lists/IRC channels because I'm still too afraid of being treated that way again.

I'm not trying to start a flame war. I just wish everybody would be more self-critic.

[reddotX]

i'm old and i never liked mailing lists