Roadmap

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.

EbonJaeger Agreed, and 'nice manner' goes both ways. :-)

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 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 The roadmap was never intended to be a set of deadlines that should be updated if no longer valid.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.

majamee Thanks for pointing that out, I am glad this project continues and I appreciate the job everyone is doing here, but that sums up my impression as well.

@majamee How else am I supposed to interpret agreement with someone saying we are in maintenance mode?

majamee If you had quoted specifically what you were agreeing with, originally, that would have saved you a lot of frustration. We are all reasonable people here and contrary to what you might think, I was calm and collected for all of my responses. I apologize for the misunderstanding, but hope you can see where we were coming from and why we might be upset by @c432's overall remark. Especially given they made an account today just to come here and say that.

majamee I did not get the impression from your follow-up posts that you were clarifying for the opposite interpretation. I suspect the others had the same difficulty.

@c432 did not go the "extra mile". They came here to make a remark that they knew full well was inflammatory because of our previous responses here and other places. One that was rightfully treated as an insult as already discussed in our previous responses to you.

Now, if it's constructive discussion you want about the roadmap, I have already made our stance perfectly clear. Until such a time as the content of the roadmap (beyond the calendar months that I regret advocating for) actually changes, we will not be publishing an updated roadmap.

The Roadmap is not a description of goals for specific versions of Solus either. It's nothing more than a long-form TODO list to inform the Solus Community what we have planned for the near future. And once we get 4.1 out of the door, I think we will probably stop assigning new tasks as specific goals for each release. That way we can refresh the ISO more often, without getting blocked by larger ongoing efforts.

YAWNS

This kind of sterile discussions isn't just tiring but on the long run they are just toxic (this is just one of them but along the years there are many) and it's always the same people who have to handle these guys who criticize usually in a non-constructive or in a biased way because they only take some elements out of the global context, then they post links to demonstrate they are right, then quote themselves to show they are kind person and finally pretend to be the victim.

The time @DataDrake spent reading and answering this discussion (and the other similar ones) is time he could have spent working on Solus or on his PhD (and the soonest he finishes it, to soonest he will have more free time and thus time for Solus) or simply to rest and relax because believe it or not, he's a human just like you.
Same for the blog posts, perhaps it would make you happy to have a blog post saying we have updated MATE to 1.22, we have updated Plasma to version x.y.z, etc... but seeing Solus is a small team it would just be wasting time on details while it could be used on more important things... Don't you see the updates in the Software center ???
The ones who complain about the frequency of blog posts are also the ones that complain about things not moving fast enough... As if posting more on the blog would speed up things...

dbarron I mean the most important thing I remember from teamwork/business/etc is communication.

IF things get done, otherwise it's fairly useless to say non stop "we are where we were 10 minutes/hours/days/centuries ago".
Announce what you've done (if it's relevant and useful) when you've done it: if you stay quiet it's because nothing happened.

c432 It looks like you know what "big feature" means: Please, enlighten us and define what "big feature" is. Meanwhile, I recommend you check the Budgie part on https://getsol.us/2019/03/17/solus-4-released/
If you don't see ANY NEW relevant features there, then you are simply biased against the project.
You could check the dev tracker too, but it's been said and pointed out too many times in this thread (tip: look up there).
On a side note, I like how people spend their time making new accounts just for the sakes of toxicity. It's jokingly funny.