Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by imwillofficial 1803 days ago
> “Who cares? Do you even care? I don't think you do“

> “ The goal was never to make a desktop with no features”

Wow, your first paragraph you accuse people of lying at worst, or capriciously taking a position that doesn’t matter to them at best. It gets better in paragraph number two where you misquote GP and go boxing with that strawman.

So to address your first paragraph, I’d say people here care a lot, and the bashing they do is not out of a place of tribalism, but out of a place of constructive criticism. Most of us here would LOVE to see improvement in $ArchEnemySoftware, and the failures strike deep because this stuff means so much to us. A mixture of disappointment with the status quo, and/or poor judgement calls with design or execution, rather than knocking a bit of tech that doesn’t appeal to us.

As for the second paragraph, GP didn’t say “no features” in reference to GNOME, but decried the basic features that were removed, thereby rendering the software less useful to them.

I’d take a brighter outlook on discussions like these, if the points land on the right ears, perhaps positive change might happen in GNOME. We can hope anyway.

1 comments

I'm not accusing anyone of that and I'm not misquoting, please stop with this hostility. In my experience, people are happy to switch when it suits them. By "no features" I was referring to those basic features. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

I also didn't see any constructive criticism, if you have any specific suggestions for positive change you'd like to make, then please make them. I'm all ears. But for the record, if you'd like to get involved in development, places like HN and reddit are generally not a good place to do it. The people who are most likely to listen to requests don't visit here.

So let me get this straight. According to you, I should not criticize software that does not meet my needs lest it be interpreted as bashing and ruin the party for those who do use the software in question? That’s my take, please correct me if I’m not understanding your point properly.

Also, no hostility here. I find these discussions illuminating.

As for Reddit and HN, these places are excellent places for such commentary. Often times the maintainers of different packages heed complaints leveled here and change their ways. That’s a win for everyone if the change is a positive one.

>According to you, I should not criticize software that does not meet my needs

I have not said that, I just asked you for your specific criticisms.

I don’t know what GP deemed as basic functionality that was removed from GNOME. I use MacOS on the desktop.
Well there you go, you switched to a Mac :)
So GPs opinion isn’t valid because I switched to the Mac, got it
> “ I find it pretty disappointing” - Then you go into the praise vs bashing.

What do you find disappointing? I guess that’s what I’m driving at. When somebody knocks MacOS, and it’s a valid point, I hope somebody from Apple is reading! Then maybe it gets fixed. So why would that arrangement disappoint you?

For me personally I find the endless "Linux desktop wars" to be disappointing. It doesn't matter, this stuff is open source, if you really want it to be fixed then just go write a patch. But in my experience most people will just take a few minutes to switch to one of the many alternatives.

I'm just relaying what other people have told me, these type of forums are full of uninformed comments, and are not a good place to solicit feedback. You could hope that maybe an Apple engineer would read it but they probably won't. You would have better luck sending them feedback through their official channels, where you know they will read it. If you're giving feedback to a YC startup then this would be a good place, but otherwise not so much.

“ these type of forums are full of uninformed comments”

Hacker News has solid representation from Big Tech, FOSS projects, and Academia. What data do you have to back up that this is a bad place to air grievances with software?

Whenever anyone mentions Amazon, my ears perk up. If it is within my power to correct, I take action. So what data do you have to support the assertion that HN comments are uninformed, and that this is only a good forum for YC startups?

That's just my personal observation, I haven't seen many unfocused airings of grievances that ended in positive change. Sure there are knowledgeable people here, but they may not always be speaking within their area of expertise; it helps to direct it at someone who is within that area of expertise, in the case of HN, that area is startups.

I've seen plenty of complaints about Amazon here go unanswered. Amazon is a pretty big company, I'm guessing you don't know everything about it and may not be the right person to ask about many things. If I had a question, I'd definitely ask you if it was something you were an expert in, but I don't know what that is because you didn't say.

Have you even seen an Amazon issue reported here that you had power to correct?