Many thanks for your support and donations and also for your feedback and ideas. Today we’ll talk a little bit about some of the negative aspects of Free Software development, but before we do, I want to emphasize how lucky we are here at Linux Mint to have this community and this level of support. It’s not always easy to achieve what we want, sometimes it’s not even easy to define what we want to achieve. We can have doubts, we can work really hard on something for a while and then question it so much, we’re not even sure we’ll ship it. We can get demotivated, uncertain, depressed even by negative reactions or interactions, and it can lead to developers stepping away from the project, taking a break or even leaving for good. And then sometimes simply seeing people enjoy what we did can boost an entire team, whether it’s seeing happiness in an email/comment or getting a feeling of satisfaction after a constructive interaction which leads to a fix or an implementation.
I personally haven’t enjoyed this development cycle so far. 2 of our most talented developers have been away. Boosting performance in the Muffin window manager hasn’t been, and still isn’t, straight forward. Feedback on the new website and logo brought a huge amount of incertitude. We’ll still have a great release in the end and we’ll still achieve plenty of improvements (we did already to a certain extent), but we need to be strong and remain confident and it’s not easy when so much time is invested into something and then a month later it’s not ready, or it causes other issues, or it might please some people but not others. For a team to work, developers need to feel like heroes. They want the same things as users, they are users, they were “only” users to start with. At some stage they decide to get involved and they start investing time, efforts and emotions into improving our project. What they’re looking for the most is support and happiness. They need feedback and information to understand bugs or feature requests and when they’re done implementing something, they need to feel like heroes, they literally do, that’s part of the reason they’re here really.
I can show them 500 people donated money last month, I can forward emails to the team where people tell me how much they love Linux Mint, I can tell them they’re making a difference but there’s nothing like interacting directly with a happy user, seeing first-hand somebody be delighted with what you worked on. How our community interacts with our developers is key, to their work, to their happiness and to their motivation.
On his blog, Georges Stavracas talked about his experience:
On Being a Free Software Maintainer
This is something we read within the team and of course I think most Free Software developers can relate to. What I really enjoyed in Georges’ blog post is that he illustrated how from being a user, he became a contributor, and from there how he eventually became a developer.
We sometimes feel a divide between “users” and “developers”, as if they were different people, as if users weren’t developers and developers weren’t users and that’s ridiculous.
The notion that an empowered developer can’t understand something that is clear for everyone else is something we see in the streets, in politics. It’s a populist notion where empowerment is corrupt and the street knows best. That’s not how it works here, there’s no difference between a user and a developer other than their level of investment within the project. Anybody can and should contribute to the best of their ability to tackling the problems they have knowledge of.
I think I have a tough skin and it is my role also to protect this project, the people I work with and the community around us. We can have so much fun working together, I think it’s important we nurture these relationships and ensure the interactions remain as positive and constructive as possible.
Feedback is something we should love, not something we should fear. It’s what fuels our project and our development. When developers do things right, the changes they commit result in users being even more happy. When users do things right, the feedback they give results in developers being even more motivated.
We’re very careful not to frustrate users with (sometimes necessary) code changes. It is important for our community to not demotivate those who within itself stepped forward to become the so-called developers.
Before I move on to the next topic, I’d like to say thanks to Georges Stavracas for his work on GNOME Calendar. It’s a great application and we were delighted to add it to Linux Mint 19.
I hope that didn’t sound like a moralizing rant. Things are going very well. Georges’ post brought the topic up and I think it’s good for us as a community to touch on the topic as well. I also feel the need to clarify my position on this as I’m involved in moderating this blog, I’m often looking for quality feedback, detailed information that can help us do better and keeping motivation and fun as high as I can for everybody involved.
Website and logo design
The feedback on the new website design left us perplex. First of all, I’d like to thank all the people who gave us feedback on this. It wasn’t what I expected, but it does always help.
I think we already knew that our community is split between people who embrace the new trends (flat style, no gradients, simple lines/shapes…etc) and people who don’t enjoy them. We have that in mind when developing software (we use new widgets here and there but not as liberally as in say GNOME) and themes (such as Mint-Y and Mint-X). We want to look modern but not avant-garde, and we want to keep support for what people loved in the past and continue to enjoy. I didn’t think so many people enjoyed our current website, and that really surprised me. It does make sense though, the trend nowadays on the Web is for websites to look flat, they all do, and failing that they look old, and that’s the problem we’re trying to tackle: Our website looks really outdated.
Within the feedback, and putting the dislike for the new trends aside, I noted that the new design was a bit generic and didn’t convey enough identity. It’s a good point and it’s something we need to work on.
I also gathered similar feedback on the icon. I’d like to thank Grady and SebastJava for their work within the design team. I’m not sure we’ll push the change during this cycle, it will depend on how other things go I think, but the more we’re looking at it the more we feel the need for versatility, even at the cost of looking unique. That leaf shape, and its border in particular, is restricting us in many ways and preventing us from producing crisp visuals in some areas of the operating system. The simpler the logo is the more shapes/buttons/backgrounds it can adapt to. We’ll document that as we go along. For now, just like the website, this is still pretty much a work in progress.
Themes improvements
A project was started to improve the artwork for Linux Mint 19.2. It’s available as a milestone and you can follow its progress on Github at https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/milestone/1.
Some of the work items in this project were implemented.
Some reviews of Linux Mint 19 and 19.1 criticized the quality of the fonts and the overall contrast. These two aspects were looked at in detail.
The fonts were switched to the Ubuntu fonts. They look slightly nicer and removing the Noto fonts (fonts-noto, fonts-noto-hinted and fonts-noto-unhinted) also allowed us to fix a bug which caused stuttering in Chromium. The work done on this is available at https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/200.
The theme contrast in Mint-Y went under heavy scrutiny. We did improve it twice after all, and if we were still getting negative feedback, so it was time to really analyze this, write down anything that could be wrong with it, fix it and stand our ground once the job was done. This is available at https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/198. One of the key things in there were the missing improvements in GTK2, this is fixed now.
Last but not least, we looked at fullcolor action icons. This is probably the biggest improvement in terms of contrast. The issue and its solution are described at https://github.com/linuxmint/mint-themes/issues/197.
Cinnamon improvements
It’s all about Muffin at the moment. We’re trying to make it smoother, to make the windows feel lighter… radical changes and refactoring occurred, it’s eating a lot of time and we’re chasing regressions left, right and center. This is documented at https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/issues/8454. It’s a really tough exercise, it creates tensions within the team but the potential is there, if we can make our WM snappier it’s worth the hassle.
The ability to switch VSYNC on or off no longer requires restarting Cinnamon and we’re adding a combo in the preferences to be able to choose the VSYNC method. It’s a bit technical… there are 3 VSYNC techniques if I may say so, we were always using the same one. We’re now letting users switch to the other two so that we’re able to gather feedback and get a better idea of their pros and cons on various hardware and conditions.
A printer applet, based on the printers@linux-man, will be added to the core project and loaded in Cinnamon by default.
Downtime on multiple servers
You may have noticed some of our servers went down lately. This has happened three times so far and it’s due to a power issue in one of the data centers we’re using. We were promised the issue would soon be resolved permanently. We’re keeping an eye on this and we would like to apologize for the inconvenience.
Linux Mint 19.2 codenamed
We want our next release to be “simply the best”, and so its codename will be “Tina” 🙂
It will be available in 32-bit and 64-bit and in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. Its base will continue to be Ubuntu 18.04, it will supported until April 2023 and upgrading to it will be safe and easy.
Alpha Testing
We’re currently working on making it possible to “Alpha-test” Linux Mint. A “Daily Build” PPA is available at https://launchpad.net/~linuxmint-daily-build-team/+archive/ubuntu/daily-builds.
This PPA gathers the latest code changes for the software we work on (Mint tools, Xapps, Cinnamon etc..), builds packages on a daily base and provides software updates.
Be warned, daily builds are unstable by definition and translations aren’t complete until we get close to BETA. We’ll soon document how to use this PPA and how to report regressions to the team within the Developer Guide.
We’re hoping to have more eyes and more feedback as we go along, within the development cycle, to identify regressions sooner than later and make the BETA phase a little less intense than it currently is.
Other improvements
The Update Manager received a huge number of improvements (again). We’ll go through this in detail, with screenshots, in the next blog post.
The Blueberry systray menu now lets you connect or disconnect paired devices with a click of the mouse.
Sponsorships:
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