Harvey So, when talking about facts, please feel free to point out where in my comments I started to quote you: "whinge whinge whinge"? Feels offensive the way you write and that is not the way to treat constructive criticism is it?

      majamee
      Oh please...

      Constructive criticism? Where? You complained about the last blog post date. An ignore actual development work being done. I have no idea where the logic behind blog post date being an indicator of project health comes from. It makes zero sense.

      You want to talk about insulting? It's insulting to the developers and maintainers of this project that you dismiss their work as "maintenance mode" which is a statement you said you agreed with despite it being demonstrably not true.

      An while the "whinge whinge whinge" wasn't directly at you, notice i didn't reply to an individual it was a general statement about people who complain about progress being made and no new blog posts in x months... If the shoe fits...

          c432 We aren't in maintenance mode. If you pay any attention to the weekly syncs that would be abundantly clear. The Roadmap is a list of goals and the months were guidelines on how long we things different things will take. They aren't deadlines. Nor are we remotely upset about "missing" them. All of us contribute part-time, and unfortunately I'm simultaneously working on a PhD which has taken up way more of my time this year than it did last year.

          But saying we are in maintenance mode is an insult to the maintainers who have been dutifully updating existing packages, adding many new ones since the start of the year, and working through many long-standing bugs for both hardware and software. It's also an insult to all of the development work that Josh and I have done this year, on top of both having full-time jobs in addition to Solus. I'm sorry that we aren't living up to your expectations of a constant stream of social media posts hyping everything that we do, but that's hardly reflective of just how much work has been done around here. Ikey's departure wasn't the death of the project, it was just the start of a new era in its history.

              Harvey PS: When talking about facts, please check them yourself before pasting any random links for github. Did you really compare the numbers? E.g.: https://github.com/solus-project/budgie-desktop/graphs/contributors

              ikeydoherty
              2,209 commits 274,315 ++
              vs.
              JoshStrobl
              167 commits 7,624 ++

              So you are proving my point. I am happy to have a professional discussion anytime, but your reaction seems more guided by feelings than facts as it seems. Also to put it as simple as that, if one developer leaves a project it loses 1 dev in manpower, so the difference should be notable always.

              DataDrake Thank you for your great work and good luck with your PhD thesis. I hope I haven't been disrespectful, because I am actually a fan of your work.

                    majamee ikeydoherty
                    2,209 commits 274,315 ++
                    vs.
                    JoshStrobl
                    167 commits 7,624 ++

                    And Ikey worked on Budgie a lot longer than Josh, so that metric is misleading. 🙂

                      majamee

                      So you are proving my point. I am happy to have a professional discussion anytime, but your reaction seems more guided by feelings than facts as it seems. Also to put it as simple as that, if one developer leaves a project it loses 1 dev in manpower, so the difference should be notable always.

                      No its guided by facts. As just pointed out above. Also of course it takes more lines to create a project from scratch than to add features and improvements. Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about.

                          Ooookay, easy guys. Let's pretend we're better than insulting each other's intelligence.

                          Harvey
                          I didn't ignore the actual development work and I also don't need updates in the communication too often, I just pointed out that the last official update in the blog is almost half a year ago.
                          When talking about no idea: I studied applied informatics and working in the field since over a decade, meaning that I know that even when I said the last blog post is a while ago, that even actively maintaining a project is a lot of effort and I have the deepest respect for that.
                          Also I do work when time allows myself on a few small open source projects on github, if you like you are welcome to check them out.
                          So please let me know your experience and why it seems I hit a nerve?

                          P.S.: Just to be clear - I never said the project would be dead or anything like that. I also never wanted to reduce the time and efforts the developers put into this project. I just wanted to ask for an update about the roadmap as the communication about it wasn't clear plus provide an idea about how the 3rd party app integration UX could be improved.

                              In my opinion, it is time for the "No' and/or 'Discussion Locked'.** People who are unhappy with this distro and/or its development and/or its hard working dev team can choose to use something else.

                                elfprince Fair enough, that did take a turn in a completely unforeseen direction. No hard feelings and please excuse if anything I said did hurt any feelings. Also not a native speaker.

                                So, short answer to my question:
                                No updated timeline for the roadmap aka done when its done and until then no improvement ideas for current 3rd party app implementation.

                                  elfprince Thats the kind of response I've been noticing lately... Our way or the high way. Why can't we, instead of getting on our high horses and acting like the other person is an idiot that needs to go away, why not actually inform them in a nicer manner? Seems to me this has started to become very cultish.

                                      The way I see it, true it's not a perfect world. But I believe that, considering that, we are very fortunate to have Solus as is.

                                      majamee You hit a nerve because people have been making claims like this since Solus started. It doesn't matter how much work we do, how often we post blogs, or how many people are formally members of the project. People have always claimed that we are going to die in the near future. So can you really be surprised when yet another person makes similar claims that long-time members of the the community are annoyed?

                                      Also, I'll kindly ask you to stop arguing over statistics. With your Budgie example, that's wholly unfair. Ikey created and spent a crap-ton of time on it over most of the last decade. Josh didn't need to contribute back then and focused on many other things. We've also publicly stated multiple times that Budgie 10 will not be receiving major features or upgrades and that all of that will be the focus for Budgie 11, which isn't on the table until next year. It's also a huge fallacy to equate Budgie's development with Solus development.

                                      @Harvey posted those links to point out that there has been active development on Solus-focused software since the beginning of the year and that we haven't just been sitting idle. He wasn't trying to equate the scale to that of Ikey working as a full-time developer for Solus. And just looking at the software we write is not enough to gauge the amount of work we do on a regular basis for Solus. A ton of work goes into keeping things up to date, adding new software, fixing bugs, and providing user support. Maintaining the project doesn't mean we are in maintenance mode. Maintenance-only would mean no stack upgrades, security-only updates, and minimal user support. Describing our day-to-day efforts as "maintenance" is insulting to the time the people have so graciously donated to the project. So please stop describing it as such.

                                        majamee

                                        So please let me know your experience and why it seems I hit a nerve?

                                        I think its beaten to death now especially with DataDrake basically saying what I was going to. But I've had a cuppa and will try explain it to you without calling you any names.... I'll try at least.

                                        I help the community look on my forums/reddit/irc history. I also have started maintaining some small insignificant packages for Solus (2 currently) with intentions to contribute more in this area. I work in IT as a systems administrator and have previously done web development work, come to think of it I actually have a open PR for the software center. Not entirely sure what that has to do with you not knowing what you're talking about in terms of "maintenance mode".

                                        You "struck a nerve" because calling the work the developers do and continue to do "maintenance mode" is insulting, DataDrake said it himself. It also means the time invested by others without pay be they helping someone on the forums or helping with packages, submitting fixes, documentation, translations etc pointless if this were the case.

                                        You realise maintenance mode for a distribution is death right? You move forward, or you die. Simple as that.

                                          Thing is "maintenance mode" aren't even my words. Also even if they were, my understanding is a little different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_maintenance#History --> compare perfective maintenance.
                                          Also the official communication channels did go pretty quite lately and I have to stand by that. So please don't be surprised about people asking about the status then. Also the unfair budige example of mine was originally brought up by @Harvey. I started the thread because to silent followers of your project it does matter how often you inform. Any project looses a lot of its transparency and trust IMHO if

                                          • the roadmap is outdated and noone seems to care to update it from time to time
                                          • the blog is not actively maintained since months
                                          • the ongoing development plans/ work isn't announced to the whole user base

                                          But it is okay, I will never say anything remotely in that direction again.

                                          Thank you @EbonJaeger as I have to admit, I have never ever seen such tension when discussing about a project like I just experienced here and I think his input is very good. Especially https://discuss.getsol.us/d/2630/26

                                          Have a good night everyone.

                                            majamee With respect, I don't give a rats-ass whose definition it is. It doesn't apply here. Solus isn't a piece of software. It's a living, breathing entity and the sum of countless hours of human interactions and efforts. You are diminishing its value by defining it as anything else.

                                            What you don't seem to get is that our plans haven't changed. The roadmap was never intended to be a set of deadlines that should be updated if no longer valid. People like you are the reason I regret having calendar months in the roadmap at all. We have been fully transparent to anyone willing to ask about it. We have also made it perfectly clear in previous posts like this one that we have no intention of publishing an updated roadmap.

                                            And again, all the tension comes from the fact that you are being unnecessarily dogmatic in your assessment of the project and unreceptive to disagreements.You are arguing with people who are in contact with us Solus developers daily. They are trying to dissuade you of your position based on their interactions with us and their having a daily "finger on the pulse" of Solus development. And you are continuing to ignore and disagree with me, the Core Team member saying that your assessment is not accurate and negativity unnecessary.

                                              1. DataDrake explained why I linked what I did perfectly.
                                              2. DataDrake said Solus isn't in "maintenance mode" end of discussion as far as that label goes.
                                              3. Roadmap is a list of on going plans. My understanding is the time frames were intended as how long its expected to take not ETAs as Solus has a long history of not giving ETAs - IMO any mention of time should be removed it.
                                              4. Blog is for important updates only. People even complained when there was a blog about infrastructure upgrades behind the scene because they only care about gnome stack upgrades, you can never keep everyone happy. What would the blogpost be about? "There have been some delays, all is good, cya"... pointless.

                                              An if you think I have been too harsh in my in my wording (even though I don't think I have been) I will unreservedly apologise for any offence you have taken from the words I used to describe why you are wrong. (Not being sarcastic).

                                              Just my 2 cents as someone who works in IT. Maintenance mode isn't even inherently a bad thing in industry. Lots of companies routinely have such periods where all "new" development is at a standstill for 8+ weeks just to give time to catch up on bugs in software.

                                              But even discussing what is considered "maintenance mode" is besides the point since the dev-tracker is literally in the sidebar where you can see daily progress being made on a ton of things that are not bugs.

                                              I would rather wait for an ambiguous floating deadline and know that my computer will continue to work as intended than seeing updates that break things or a million blog posts where nothing is actually news. If I wanted either of those I would use some arch derivative or Ubuntu.

                                              And I guess a final point would be the core solus developers are a ton more active on these forums than any other distro I've seen. I don't think I've seen a post directed to them go past even 12 hours before being answered. And that's honestly better than blog posts I would imagine for 90% of people.