constant annoyance of people complaining about a free product

Yes, this is the attitude right here. This is the one that people complain about. People are not “complaining”, people are reporting issues. And it’s not free software if it’s being gatekept by entitled assholes

I know perfectly well what upgrading the shell means. You are missing the point entirely. This dev community does not accept bug reports on older versions even if they’re in use by a lot of people and then when they’re reported on the latest version and they’re acknowledged, they tell the reporter to piss off.

it’s not that the issue wasn’t fixed that got me to give up on Gnome, it’s the fact that a known issue was closed with no resolution even after I gave a patch as a workaround. This is why I am done with them.

can you explain how testing this on a VM would have helped me with my issue on my day to day computer? Let’s say that the problem was solved in the latest release, what good would a VM do? Maybe i didn’t make myself clear, the message was not an attempt at debugging the situation. That dev just told me that the team is not interested in bugs reported on older versions and I should just upgrade.

my last interaction with that community, the one which broke the proverbial camel’s back was when i reported a bug in the notifications display. Basically, if a new notification arrived while the previous one was displayed, it would get queued but not displayed. When a new notification appeared after that, the queued one would be displayed instead of the new one. After this, the notifications would become out of sync. A notification from one hour ago would show up instead of the current notification which would not be displayed until a new one would appear.

To this I got the following responses:

1. To upgrade to the latest version (rather than the one shipped with my distribution) - huge waste of time and caused instability in my system and didn’t solve the issue. (Oh, and when I said that my system is unstable, the dev told me i should have used a “test computer”, obviously)

2. Then another person described how the thing is implemented and how this might happen with no solution offered. When I asked if this could be changed to always show the latest notification at least, that person told me that it wouldn’t make sense to not display notifications in order and closed the bug report as not a bug.

And that was it. One person decided that it makes more sense to get a display of a stale message to which i probably replied to more than an hour ago instead of a display of a message that my cpu is overheating right now . The issue is closed.

I’m sorry but this is bullshit. Very few people complain about the speed with which things get fixed. I think that everyone understands that things take a while given the nature of the project. But the attitude is still annoying to the point people are turned away from the project entirely by those devs. They gatekeep broken functionality and refuse to help users. It has nothing to do with pay. If it did, they wouldn’t do those things either, they’d just step away.

Any developer with such an attitude should step away. And by the way, doctors do volunteer work too and they would absolutely be held responsible for bad medical advice regardless if the work was paid or not

if we’re being fair, it did involve a lot of that historically. Package managers weren’t always around and even after they became established, there was still a lot of fiddling with bad drivers and various distributions had policies which didn’t allow certain software with certain licenses to be setup through their package repository and so on and so forth. Sure nowadays this is less of an issue, but then windows security is also much better than it used to be. People here seem to want to compare the latest Ubuntu to windows 98

if you designed the system so that the extension is part of the functionality, then you have to hide it away so that your users don’t accidentally delete or modify the extension thus rendering their files useless (within said system)

it’s a fundamental shell design flaw: one should never allow users to modify data critical to functionality. And it’s not something that can be changed because almost all applications depend on this

Is it a scam? How does it work?

Yes, but paid content is not the norm and the reason for that is that blatant advertising and shoving malaware down people’s throats on grandma’s recipe website is not only legal, it’s a predictable business model.

Yeah, that’s fine, but at some point we need to start talking about alternative methods of monetization for websites. On the one hand, compiling a list of recipies on a website and maintaining that website is not easy or cheap and the owners should be able to make money out of it. On the other hand, the user should be able to pay for this comfortably and have a nice experience on the website.

This ad model doesn’t serve any of the two, business or consumer.

That’s not a Linux thing. It’s just whatever desktop shell you chose to use and various shells behave in various ways. The reason this might be safer in most Linux distros is that you’re discouraged from executing things under a privileged user which means that malware can’t make significant changest to your system easily. If you do the same in windows, you’d be just as safe.

Is this some AI generated answer? I refuse to think a person can talk like that.

The “obviously” comes from the article which states that Microsoft allows uninstallilng software which obviously means they always could do that. They just didn’t want to allow users to do it.

That’s the point. Obviously you can uninstall any windows application too, it’s just that Microsoft doesn’t want you to.

Do you associate it with any fond memories maybe?

It is rated 7.3 on IMDB. Everything over is usually pretty good. Well, with the exception of superhero/marvel crap where even the crappy ones score high because of popularity. But liking something more low key with a score of over 7 is not that unpopular of an opinion.

but it doesn’t change the fact that many organizations chose between those two databases plenty of times before Oracle acquired Sun.

Sure, but the choice is: can we not use Oracle and if the answer is yes, then they won’t.

I understand what you’re saying. I am a database engineer and have worked on several with the business model of taking customers away from Oracle/SQL server/DB2. But I wouldn’t call our products competitors to those. Well, maybe SQL server but that’s a different story. You can’t really be competition if you can’t serve the same customer base in terms of capabilities.

Also, whenever Oracle or DB2 actually wanted to keep a customer, they just made a low enough offer that made them attractive (remember they don’t have a list price) and we’d be left standing. In fact, I’m pretty sure we were used several times just to get those two to make a better offer…

An inferior (in my opinion) direct competitor to MySQL.

There is no comparison between the two. They don’t even compete in the same market. Oracle is an enterprise level database with features MySQL doesn’t even dream of yet, whether it is security, performance or just reliability alone. The problem with it is that the company is horrible and extorts people who actually have an use case which requires them to use oracle. They’ve built the infrastructure in such a way that one can’t just buy a database and use it by themselves, they need to buy services form the company forever. And there isn’t really a fixed price for those services. Oracle basically charges as much as it thinks the client can afford.

Sun bought MySQL in 2008. Oracle bought Sun in 2009, but not for MySQL, they just kinda got it as a package deal. The real target was java. There wasn’t any plan to keep developing it and MySQL wasn’t making enough money on its own to be able to fund it’s own growth. There wasn’t some plot from Oracle to kill off MySQL, they simply didn’t bother with it.

And by the way, there is a non Oracle MySQL alternative called MariaDB.

It’s the same with Facebook. People are so addicted to it that no matter how badly they are treated they just can’t quit.

Facebook is a very different beast. It exists and thrives because it convinced people to engage personally. It’s difficult to leave Facebook because family and friends are there. And Facebook also bought a lot of the competition and branched out: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. It also has value to businesses, it has a market place, it truly is a monster.

Reddit has nothing. It doesn’t know its users and most of them are really careful to keep anonymous. It has shared interests communities, but not friendships/personal relationships. It’s really easy to quit Reddit if one decides to. It does not affect daily life.

By the next time Reddit messes up, and they will, the next batch of escapees will find a much more fleshed out set of alternatives, which will make leaving there and staying here easier. Rinse, wash and repeat.

I don’t think that even matters from a business point of view. Even if people aren’t leaving, the problem is that Reddit is not a place new people see as valuable after all the bad press. If they don’t grow, they fail.

Not really. They get money when you click on them. They don’t get anything for displaying it. That’s the whole point of having targeted ads, it increases the chance of interacting with them.