Discussion · bonfire.cafe

To be usable by the less savvy, the Linux desktop lacks stability. Not software stability, but organizational and human stability.

I want maintainers to have a stable income. I want apps to last a decade, instead of having to chase the next rewrite of an abandoned project.

The Linux desktop is a beautiful accident that only exists because people devote part of their lives to it, for better or worse. We ought to support it financially, as a public service.

#linux #publicGood

Klaus Frank

@agowa338@chaos.social replied · 2 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin A decade ago I'd have agreed with you but by now that appears to be mostly solved. At least for Gnome, where enough corporate money is funneled into.

But Xfce and KDE aren't that bad off either from the looks of it at least.

The Psychotic Network Ferret

@nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe replied · 2 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin

Re: having to chase the next rewrite of an abandoned project.

Yeah, its been an ongoing problem for a while now.

https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Beaver

@BeaverGEGLChamp@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin
I strongly agree with what you are saying but I think it should be communities funding it instead of Government. We need to normalize both cooperatives and mutual aid networks to support devs. FOSS devs should also practice the norm of getting people to crowd fund pay for feature request.

Emory

@maphouse@mapstodon.space replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin why isn't every gov paying for Linux dev instead of MS slop suites

Perina

@perina@fosstodon.org replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin I've tried to become Github sponsor, imagining to set donate amount a month to distribute to different open source projects each month and failed in disbelief how unfriendly that process is for such crucial resource. So much opportunity there, but MS ownership means historically no hope.

Patrik

@PatrikSchoenfeldt@gruene.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin Of course, I want maintainers to be paid. But being a Linux desktop user for 20 years, I have to disagree on an important point: In the past two decades, the major desktop environments and applications have gone through an evolution without any rough changes. On other desktop systems, every other release gets some stupid anti-feature that is eventually removed later. I never experienced tiles on the desktop, cloud for everything, local AI crawlers, etc. I'd call that stability.

Antanicus

@antanicus@puntarella.party replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin linux. distributions. must. become. cooperatives.

Beaver

@BeaverGEGLChamp@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@antanicus @thibaultamartin
Thibaultamartin's comment about cooperatives echos Proudhon's mutualism, go down this route instead of Government funding. Something can be a public good without Government.

Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻

@mro@digitalcourage.social replied · 3 weeks ago

Hi @thibaultamartin
right, and it lacks #product management and #UX testing. What orgs does it require to foster that? "Scratch your own itch" brought us until here. How from now?
What communities would even want funding for product management? I am sure @NGICommons may help.

Marcus Rohrmoser 🌻

@mro@digitalcourage.social replied · 3 weeks ago

Hi @thibaultamartin,
right, and it lacks #product management. What orgs does it require to foster that? Scratch your own itch brought us until here. How from now?
Would the communities even want funding for product management? I am sure @NGICommons would help.

Arturo H. Plascencia :vf:

@plascience@masto.es replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin

Orion Ussner kidder

@OrionKidder@mas.to replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin I'm new to Linux--only about a year--and I don't see this as a negative, myself. What I mean is that part of the effect of Windows' monopoly practices has been to convince people you'll only ever need to learn one OS and one set of software, and then just stick to them forever, but that's only true for monopolized products.

Nazo

@nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin The problem is, you can't have it both ways. For AAA money to be involved, there must be AAA money to be involved.

Honestly I wish we could go back to people not expecting every piece of software to present that AAA flair they have come to expect. Yeah, it's not perfect. It will never be perfect. But Apple is over there locking people into walled gardens where everything costs 2-3x as much and you're not even allowed to do a lot of simple basic things so they can sell you a new proprietary dongle and Microsoft is over on their end selling copies of everything you do with your computer. That AAA money has to come from somewhere and ultimately, one way or another, it's going to come out of the users...

Internet Rando

@mousey@mastodon.seattlematrix.org replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin I've been using Linux desktops since the 1990s, and a lot has changed over the years, and over the desktops.

I'm 1000% all for desktop-app ecosystem support. I feel like hackerone.com or something would be a good model for this (after watching a recent curl talk about it), but the problem is, as you say.. A beautiful accident.

There is no one Linux desktop. there are many, and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of apps that run on any/all of those desktops. Fund them all!

snowing

@snowing_mb@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin the question then becomes: how do we choose what to fund and how much?

An interesting approach I've seen around is Retroactive Public Goods Funding (check [here](https://www.retropgf.com/) for instance), but I haven't really delved into it yet

Thib

@thibaultamartin@mamot.fr replied · 3 weeks ago

@snowing_mb I wrote this proposal earlier this year, to build from

https://ergaster.org/posts/2025/02/28-prosthetics-that-dont-betray/

snowing

@snowing_mb@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin good points, I think retroactive funding could be a nice tool to add (since you only mention regular funding in that article).

A broader issue is that the current system of production-consumption in our society doesn't leave much space and resources for non-profits. The FOSS domain surfaces these issues. Somehow we should start to look at ways to fix this power and economic unbalance

numanumayey

@breathOfLife@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin

would be nice to have a desktop environment that's "done", that covers all the necessary features and that doesn't have security holes.

Danielle Foré

@danirabbit@mastodon.online replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin I recently got an email from someone that said they’d already paid for the previous version and didn’t want to have to pay again for the new version. Out of curiosity I checked, and they paid $6 total over the last five years (our suggested price is $20 per version). It’s really hard to stay sustainable when repeat customers don’t think your product is worth as much as a cup of coffee :/

Antanicus

@antanicus@puntarella.party replied · 3 weeks ago

@danirabbit @thibaultamartin I have set up a recurring 50€ yearly donation to the KDE team like 5 or 6 years ago. Money so well spent I can't even begin describing it. Folks don't realise how much effort goes into a good DE.

Sharp Leaves

@BoysenberryCider@mastodon.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin Can I add something, as a non IT expert who loves Linux. I think the difficulty for non-technical users is far overestated, and the bullshit Windows pushes on non-technical users is far understated (let alone phones).

If someone shoves Mint or Ubuntu on a USB, guides Grandma through the process and the hardware gods are kind, then she need never see a command line again. If the salesman does that much, that's a linux user for life.

André Polykanine

@menelion@dragonscave.space replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin Software stability too. Especially for most vulnerable groups of users like beginners or my fellow blind users. We depend on audio (and Braille sometimes), and this is one of the most unstable things in Linux. Imagine if you booted your computer and prayed for your monitor to work correctly this time. this is it for us. I can link you a series of article one smart blind guy wrote, and he knows what he is talking about because he spent years on Linux desktop. If you, folks who want Linux desktop to be a real thing and not a geeky toy, make it accessible for everyone, it will succeed. Othersie… no, sorry, I need my PC to work, hence I use Windows.

Thib

@thibaultamartin@mamot.fr replied · 3 weeks ago

@menelion this is unfortunately true, and the solution is much more complex than "just pour money on people without any form of accountability."

The first question is "to whom" and the following one is "for what." I wrote a post earlier this year about the structural changes I think we need to go through so the Linux desktop can be considered of public interest.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about it if you have some time for it.

https://ergaster.org/posts/2025/02/28-prosthetics-that-dont-betray/

André Polykanine

@menelion@dragonscave.space replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin I'm taking notes while reading.
1. Accessibility *is* a technical problem, not (only) a social one. To make something as huge as an OS accessible means, at least: A) To expose accessibility APIs on every plan of existence of the OS; 😎 Develop a decent screen reading solution (see JAWS or NVDA for Windows); C) Develop a decent screen magnifying and color altering solution (see ZoomText for Windows); D) Harden audio stability, so that a trivial update won't break your audio system; E) Develop a solution for people with motor disabilities that would allow decent voice control (see Dragon Naturally Speaking, for instance). That is an absolutely technical endeavor. You'd say Linux has Orca screen reader and you are right, but it's developed de facto by Joanmarie Diggs. Alone. No, of course, there are some people sending PRs, but do you see the difference between a paid solution like JAWS or even a community-driven solution like NVDA on the one side and a screen reader developed by one (brave and genius, but one!) person on the other? Again, I really admire Joanmarie, but she does need help, and I mean, lots of help.
2. Mobile. It's yet another challenge because tactile screens accessibility is something else than keyboard accessibility, be it terminal or GUI. Apple (no matter how I hate their policies) already solved many problems, hence the most common combo in the wealthier blind community is Windows + iPhone. Who would do the same for Linux? Up to you (in plural) to decide.
3. Toxicity of the community. I'm really sorry to admit, but open-source community is very often either toxic or indifferent. When I or one of my blind fellow folks open an issue about "X is not accessible at all, please fix it!" (where X is anything from a small web-based solution to the whole LibreOffice Calc), guess what we get? "Send a PR!". Heck no, putain de bordel de merde de… — excuse my language! I cannot spend my whole life to dig into undocumented code then send thousands upon thousands of PRs, then beg their supreme highness of developer to please merge it, then wait till it's released. I need to work, to eat and to feed my family, including cats. Hence… I use Microsoft because it just works, and if there is an accessibility bug, it gets fixed, — not always super mega fast (like in Visual Studio Code, kudos to them!), but it *is* fixed. Unlike with open-source, sorry.

Globob

@Globob@thecanadian.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin Maybe a universal basic income would help in this regard. Open source developers could do what they love without worrying about how to monetize their efforts.

cipper 📌

@cipper@mastodon.uno replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin actually I'm a bit bored when everything works in my desktop

Morpheus Being

@MorpheusB@aus.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin Not stable? Bullshit!

sammypanda

@sammypanda@aus.social replied · 3 weeks ago

@thibaultamartin true dat, it's unfortunate that businesses default to being set up to be interested in infinite growth which is a major incentive to enshitify. You have to borderline already have a ton of financial stability to avoid negative pressures, it's a well designed mess.

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