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by zerfall 2169 days ago
No matter what your preference, sabotaging a desktop environment by calling `exit();` is certainly not the way to go: you're only hurting your users.
5 comments

> I use GNOME Wayland and I have x/y/z problem!

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ#i-use-gnome-wayla...

> Is GNOME actively sabotaging the Linux Desktop?

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/wiki/FAQ#Is_GNOME_actively...

Except, if the vast majority of your bug reports come from that Desktop Environment, and noone wants to step up and support it, this might be the best option.

I've worked on projects where I have wanted to do similar things, just refuse to work on systems i know are buggy and I do not have the time to fix.

It's not sabotaging. It's removing support.
Back in the day, that's roughly how web developers would frame it when they tried to rationalize making websites that would deliberately refuse to load if the user-agent said something other than "MSIE".

Removing support is a passive action; you accomplish it by just doing nothing. Calling exit() is rather more on the aggressive side.

All that said, good on 'em. I got a decent chuckle.

> Removing support is a passive action; you accomplish it by just doing nothing. Calling exit() is rather more on the aggressive side.

It's more graceful than the program exiting in a bad way because you passively decided to stop support.

Maybe. But, he calmed down, and corrected his mistake after some rethinking. And what about gnome and gnome devs?
They spent the last 9 years dismantling their platform one piece at a time. I think they are too committed with their design now to admit they completely screwed up by betting on a vision it never managed to take off, and differently than Microsoft, they don't need to actually listen to their users because they don't have enterprise users they really need to sell their product to (but Red Hat does, and that's why "Gnome Classic" is still around).
Apparently mpv reached the same conclusion, since they took that out and replaced it with a warning.

I agree too. At minimum there should be a launch flag (e.g. -allowGnome) so users don't need to outright recompile the app.