I feel like people spend more effort trashing & talking down software in forums like this, than it would have taken to make an even mostly-constructive tiny little data point that could actually help open source, and open society. The author, a NixOS user, almost certainly had plenty of basic technical chops they could have brought to bare within mere seconds to get some first level idea what happened, which they refused. The malice/concentrated-negativity, combined with the lack of effort, to me, invalidate my willingness to take someone seriously.
There are plenty of good valid useful ways to share the view & be part of open society. Just trying to tear out the supports of the building & make it crash down- anger- is not an acceptable enduring view; it's an ok initial reaction, but eventually realer more mature cycles have to begin (unless despair & ruin is the objective)
As a passionate long time supporter, user and developer of OSS, my reaction was purely based on that "deal with it" quote from TFA.
All software, regardless of its licensing terms, should first and foremost deliver a usable product. The expectation that users of free software (in both meanings of the word "free") are somehow under moral obligation to test the software and report issues to the authors is wrong, just as OSS developers aren't under any obligation to implement specific features or provide support. These freedoms go both ways.
But when a developer takes the hostile stance of prioritizing their QoL over their users', as in TFA, that is the attitude that's hurting users, and the adoption of OSS. I appreciate the effort the Asahi team is making, but this is a toxic attitude that shouldn't be part of any project.
Most of the time, I do take the effort to diagnose issues and report them where appropriate. But as you can see detailed below[1], the issues I experienced were so obvious that I assumed they had already been reported. Given the complexity of an environment like KDE, it would have definitely taken me hours of my time to properly diagnose and report these issues. And sometimes, I just want to get work done, without "dealing with" my machine... The reality is that most users feel this way, so this response shouldn't be surprising.
User: I tried it and it didn't work well don't care whose fault it is I just care that it didn't work.
Response: Every developer that flings non-working buggy software into the void is entitled to the free labor of their users who will test said software and write bug reports so that in the fullness of time it may someday be worth using. If you by the mere act of downloading something once don't see yourself as part of that developers community then your opinion is clearly invalid because you are like unto a leper unclean and outside the nourishing light of our lord!
A proper reproduction of the bug, troubleshooting, research into existing bug reports and possible causes both in the immediate and upstream project and writing it up could easily be half an hour not seconds. Meanwhile 17 other things have claims on our time. It is perfectly acceptable to shoot the shit on a forum about how you dropped a non-working project like a chicken nugget with a human finger in it without also opening an issue.
Do you know what people do when they install your software and it crashes on first run. They delete it without comment because they are not indebted to you by being granted to privilege of non-working software and running something else is liable to be a better investment of their time. This isn't abnormal or malicious its absolutely normal. This is also why your software which has a bug that effects 10,000 people gets 5 bug reports. It's not because the other 9,995 people noticed the bug had already been filed its because none of them bothered.
Pretending this is something abhorrent and invalidating is quite frankly a gross failure of analysis committed in service of invalidating a negative perspective that seemed to stick in your craw.
But quickly their position crumbles. No advocates for their position maintain. What they were doing stops working. The user is swept under the sands of time & forgotten.
This putting all the onus on the developers is insufficient. The user doesn't have to advocate for themselves, no. Time happily can ignore their plight. We don't need them. The rest of the open society world is participating onwards.
