- I think you're partially correct. People are upset at the time it takes to land even the most basic of fixes. Replies being bright red might be one of the most indicative examples. So while the work towards public sector deployments has probably helped with some aspects, the user-facing side has stagnated and people dislike that.
- You say that but has XMPP really improved over the past 10-20 years? The same issues plague it still.
- I suspect there isn't anything really stopping them (especially in the EU) except threats.
- When have they been wrong?
- Digital sanctions are long overdue.
They would be necessary just because of the amount of malicious traffic and abuse coming from Russia without any proper recourse. Why should we accept their traffic and play nice if Russia really doesn't.
- > See Google Summer of Code projects for a very practical example of how "just pay randos to work on issue X for cheap" can quite often end up in failure.
That potential for failure is there for any "subcontractors". I wonder if anyone has any stats on this.
- > Rebble took Pebble apps developed at no cost to the users, and then maintained them and added cost.
Again, if that's all it were, Core could and should just take that old Pebble dump and use that. Why bother Rebble if they haven't done anything as you imply.
- I don't this makes business sense in general.
I do however think that there are quite a few bugs that might be triaged as "easy" but if worked on would reveal much more serious problems. Which is why some random selection of "easy" issues should make it to work queues.
- I actually use it for 3D objects for my printer. Stays nice and clean compared to My Documents.
- The fact that Core is not willing to just start from the old dump publicly available already shows that it's not just "rent-seeking". Core clearly wants what Rebble has spent significant effort in not just maintaining but also building.
They're entitled to it just because in some sense Core is a successor to Pebble? No, not really.
- Don't forget Gradle ("GRADLE_USER_HOME") and OpenJDK ("-Djava.util.prefs.userRoot"), those too litter.
- There are multiple reasons for this.
One being that it's _my_ $HOME, not some random developers'. I literally had more than 50 different dotfiles and dotfolders in my $HOME at some point. It was a garbage dump and I couldn't even identify the culprit with some of them. Simply disrespectful.
Then there's the issue of cleaning up leftovers and stale cache files. It shouldn't take a custom script cleaning up after every special snowflake that decided to use some arbitrarily-named directory in $HOME.
Not following the spec also makes backing up vital application state much much harder.
In the end, I made my $HOME not writeable so I could instantly find out if some software wants to take a dump. It turns out it's often simply unnecessary as well, the software doesn't even care, just prints an error and continues.
- Migration might be nontrivial but there's absolutely zero good excuse for creating _new_ noncompliant directories for 17 years.
There's lot less to migrate if you don't wait that long.
- I think most people are okay with software such as OpenSSH keeping its long-existing conventions. In the same way I don't think a lot of people mind ".bashrc" being where it is. It's manageable if there's just a few and they're well-known.
However this "exemption" does not and should not apply to anything newer. Things like Cargo, Snap, Steam, Jupyter, Ghidra, Gradle, none of those should be putting their stuff (especially temporary junk) directly and unsegmented into $HOME.
At some point I had more than 50 different dotfiles and dotfolders in my $HOME. It was unwieldy and nasty to look at. I couldn't even figure out what created some of those files because they were so generic.
Plain $HOME as the dumping ground simply does not scale beyond a select few.
- It is not. If Core wants, they can take the old Pebble dump and start building on top of it like Rebble has. All is fair.
- No. Core can absolutely implement their own, just not on top of their work.
- It's not just running it, they have built on top of it. Embrace, extend, extinguish is exactly what the Rebble team is afraid of. If extinguished and Core goes bust, the community would be left holding the bag yet again. Rebble doesn't want that, why would they.
- Yes, that's it, but there's no toggle to turn it off. Maybe it can be patched, but I don't want to fight my hardware like that.
- > Things I learned to look out for:
Don't buy any recent Intels. Some Intel ThinkPads have accelerometers built-in just to throttle your PC to oblivion when it moves. Basically unusable in any moving vehicle such as a train. It's basically anti-portability baked-in.
When it doesn't throttle, it just has abysmal battery life compared to AMD Ryzen ThinkPads of the same generation. Both lose horribly to Apple's ARM chips though.
They also tend to have soldered WiFi modules, making it impossible to upgrade later when newer and better WiFi iterations come out. If that had been the case with a few of the older models I still have, they would be unusable at this point.
There are plenty of firmware bugs as well. For example plenty of Lenovo (especially Intel as far as I've seen) models have stuttery and freezing touchpads. Though the touchpads tend to be horrible anyways.
I'd say the older (5+ years old) generations might have had slightly better driver support or they're finally fixed at this point. But there's nothing I'd spend my money on if I can just as well install Asahi on an M-series laptop.
There's something else hindering XMPP that it stands so still, alternatively it simply can't be improved.