Working in a US company, I can ensure that US people tend to forget that there is a timezone issue, that people have different taxes in Europe, different keyboards per country, differents laws, etc. US residents are pretty unaware of the difference this make, because when your country is a federation taking half of the continent, you are not really thinking of case where this is different.

So yeah, maybe they got screwed up by their lawyers. Maybe they tought that 24h support was a given, maybe they gave contradictory requests ( like take the cheapest option, and the best one too ). maybe indeed the german company was happy to do it during the night, because they were more expensive. Without any data, we cannot do much ( and seriously, even studies on productivity are bullshit, when I am doing nothing in a meeting, i am not producting anything, but when my manager is, he is doing his job and paid more, search the error ). Heck, if I do a car, and no one buy it, is this productive ? If I produce luxury goods, am I more productive because that's sold at a much more expensive price ?

On top on innovation ? Not really. Debian has become too big to innovate fast, and Debian is a little bit too often in freeze ( like 20% of time ) due to release pressure.

Mageia did it last year, so of course, this is doable, but for something of the size of debian, moving from mysql to mariadb is not easy to do, as you have dependency all over the archive.

Because they used the magic word "forking gnome 3".

You know, unlike /. comenting, doing real work take time.

That's because the whole idea of being touchscreen friendly is a strawman argument. Gnome-shell designers acknowledge there is lots to do to have a touch friendly interface, yet people think otherwise and think gnome-shell was designed for that. Then they say this is not adapted, then the designers got it wrong, despites them saying this is nor finished nor a immediate goal.

That just show how clueless are some of the gnome-haters crowd. If something look different from win 3.11, that doesn't mean this is touch friendly. Some people struggle with small icons even with a mouse, for example.

And that's not because smartphone use big icons for their touch interface that anything using it is made for touch interface. That's just a logical fallacy.

Sure, and if the 3 forks are unable to cooperate, they are all doing something wrong.

Debian was forked to Ubuntu, Ubuntu got forked to linux mint, linux mint got forked to solusos, I guess we can agree that a huge part of them are doing it wrong ?

Bug fixed, you mean "bug fixed by backporting gnome fixes because they are unable to do by themself" ?

> The fact that Linux users are less likely to be passive herd followers should be no surprise to anyone.

given the number of people who just rant without having any clues, based on the substance of the ran ( ie, people who complained on nautilus without trying it, for example, like the mint guys ), there is more followers than you think ( or the systemd hate , the only thing that turned "BSD is dying" into "the facist german coders of Linux are trying to kill BSD by using features of the kernel" ). Ubuntu brought lots of non technical users, and while this is good, they also brought a mindset of "let's complain on the forum because unlike my previous OS? I think people are here to hear me rant". The monetization of eyes balls as operated by pseudo jounalists like phoronix, sjnv or sam varghese didn't help either ( ie, the more they flame, the more ads they serve, the more they earn, the more they can survive, because Linux stories are not interesting enough for mainstream to not use such tricks ( ie, too few users for now ). People crave for drama, because they can relate too. Spending time to help, not a chance.

"real work" is like "this is breaking my workflow", a term used by people who do not like the new shells, but cannot explain why, and yet think they know better.

It is used to sound like a professional, so being important ( note the use of "work", so people who disagree are not pro, therefore of a lower social status ). Yet, they complain on /. as anonymous cowards. Sure, there is people who may prefer the old way. That's rather unavoidable. I have seen people saying they preferred dos, or amiga or anything. Once you decided that something, crappy or not, is what you like, you start to rationalize your choice and find bogus or not less bogus reasons to justify your own opinion. But because it is valid for you doesn't mean anything regarding others.
So some people are bothered because not listened, and instead of thinking and reflecting about themself, they just go and think the others are wrong, no matter if they are or not.

In the end, you cannot conclude anything about such rants, so they fuel themself their hate, by being totally useless. And of course, explaining why the rant is useless just make people more angry, so in the end, you spend lotsof time to get information they cannot give, so that's too often a time waste.

And worst, by being a time waste, they prevent people from fixing real bugs, or just finding a better design for the issue they are facing ( but are unable to explain ).

So, you have become a designer, or given the fact you are not coding and starting to explain to the designer their job, you are yourself a designer ?

because that's volunteer based and volunteers are not interested into doing quality assurance ?

You could help, anybody could. yet, people wait on the developers, who are already busy doing the software to also do everything. For each 1 glitch people see, don't they realise how many they didn't see because of others ? Don't people feel in debt of getting a whole desktop free of charge, even with some problem, and a desktop where they could give back without shelling lots of money ?

Well, I can do some real work suring the week using gnome 3, so maybe you should start to do some work instead of sitting on slashdot saying how you want to do some work ?

They are not really concerned about cooperation. Linux mint is a free loader of Canonical works ( because the only thing they do is the visible part ), who is not exactly the most contributing player in the field, and they already depend partially on Debian for lots of their distro. That's fair game of course. Then LMDE came, and managed to collaborate neither with Ubuntu nor Debian, and then Solus-os, made by the same people than LMDE not even try to collaborate with Gnome nor Mint. Heck, they do not even try to work with Mate people. ( on nemo )

They are not concerned about usability, they are concerned into keeping their habits because they think this is better. If they were concerned with usability, they would at least try to explain their ideas, do some usability testing, show the design, etc. They don't, they just did some git clone and that's it.

I am sure in the end, they will end like mate people and start getting all their commit from gnome, until this slowly become too late. Then the developers will start to fight each others and split more ( because when you do not care enough to work with upstream despite having disagreements, you surely do not care about the rest of the team, you forked once, so you can fork a 2nd time )

They will end like the trinity and kde3 revival desktop. When the developers of a software leave it and say this is better to start from scratch, they are not doing it to annoy others usually. They are doing because they know it cannot be done, because they did since years.