> Either you're a modern linux with pulseaudio and pam and systemd, or you're dying. So much for the pionneer spirit of opensource, where you were free to innovate and do cool things, and more or less have interesting software able to run on your machine...
What a weird doublespeak paragraph. By "innovate and do cool things," the author seems to mean "ship, and rely on, old versions of software."
I think he's complaining about the "Linux-centrism" of some projects.
What I find ironic is that those Linux focused projects are turning more like BSD: a tightly coupled system.
If I want my app to work best with X and I need to interact with some stuff that it's only available on X, that's it. I may provide an alternate way of doing things, but I may not.
For example: I may use DBus to speak with NM to see if I the system has network connectivity, but what if DBus or NM are not available? Some time ago you would put effort on that possibility, now you may not because... DBus and NM are everywhere!
That's what is changing I think, although I'm not sure if Espie means exactly that.
In some cases it's the "brand" thing I can't understand, like "only for Ubuntu" that started about 2-3 years ago.
> Some time ago you would put effort on that possibility, now you may not because... DBus and NM are everywhere!
Which sounds like a good thing. People have put in a lot of effort on things like DBus and NM, so that applications can use a consistent, reliable API. That's rather a waste if every application author still has to handle the case when they're missing. They're valuable precisely because we can build on top of them.
I'm slightly playing devil's advocate, but that's actually pretty close to my real view.
He means more that some software is not shared (or available to) with everyone. Systemd is very explicit in that only Linux is supported. I guess pulseaudio is also a problem.
A large part of open source is to share the source code so that others can take that work and do their own cool things / innovate. But then it has to be available.
Yes but isn't that a core problem, if you want to make the best use of something (in this case Linux) you will want take advantage of all the features it offers.
From what I gather the problem is that other systems (in this case *BSD) doesn't support certain features either because they don't mesh well with the BSD system(s) and/or has a lack of manpower to implement them.
What a weird doublespeak paragraph. By "innovate and do cool things," the author seems to mean "ship, and rely on, old versions of software."