Don't be that guy. ( lemmy.world )

When you’re talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don’t like to be treated poorly.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.

xan1242 ,
@xan1242@lemmy.ml avatar

This goes for inter-developer communication too. Be nice to one another. Someone just wants to help sometimes.

Carighan ,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

This is also any and all Firefox support queries in a nutshell.

“OMG THIS BROWSER IS SO SHIT IT ALWAYS BREAKS OR GETS SLOW”… “No I have not changed anything in ˋabout:configˋ, and what I did is definitely not the source of the problem!”… “Yes with a reset config it works fine, I don’t know why, your browser is shit!”

And it’s always the same people who do “hardening” and “privacy enhancement”, having fuck all actual clue what they’re doing but thinking they’re oh so smart. 😑

seth ,

Are you the developer for SMUI? Small world to see a username I recognized from another site. Nice-looking components! 👍

hperrin OP ,

I am. Thanks! :) I built my email service, port87.com with it.

seth ,

Oh that’s an interesting concept, I’ve been using username+label@gmail in a similar way for years, and missed it when I switched to proton

feoh ,

Couldn’t agree more.

For what it’s worth I think Brett Cannon wrote one of the best posts ever on the social contract of open source and how Not To Be That Guy :)

snarky.ca/the-social-contract-of-open-source/

Should be required reading IMO for anyone ever on Github :P

Pika ,
@Pika@sh.itjust.works avatar

just spent a few mins reading it, definitly agree with you, required for any issue reporter

hiramfromthechi ,
@hiramfromthechi@lemmy.world avatar

Should be required reading IMO for anyone ever on Github :P

Fixed.

KarnaSubarna ,
@KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml avatar

Would it be OK if I will be that guy when ranting about NVIDIA Linux drives? Asking for a friend 😉

DARbarian ,
@DARbarian@lemmy.world avatar

Oh yeah fuck NVIDIA. All my homies hate NVIDIA.

rivermonster ,

All mine hate capitalism. Though, I think we’re saying the same thing. ;)

OnlineAccount150 ,

I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

But he is a bad person. He’s being a fucking idiot and being insulting to the person who made the software for him in the first place.

People like that don’t deserve patience and understanding. Perhaps a good response would be “this software is free for you to use, if you don’t like it then fuck off and make your own”.

ISOmorph ,

Everyone without exception has had moments of weakness where they lashed out at something or someone wrongfully. That’s a bad deed but that can’t be the definition of a bad person.

Especially in this context. The dude isn’t really attacking the dev directly. He actually might just be venting. I wouldn’t do that like that but you really can’t assume anything from such a short exchange.

joucker29 ,

Exactly. Although you should still not be rude to the Devs if they don’t deserve it.

rivermonster ,

Just reading a mild, reasonable, even keel’d post made my day. I appreciate you!

mako , (edited )

But he is a bad person.

People like that don’t deserve patience and understanding.

These black and white statements won’t do you or anyone else any good. We understand that an inconsiderate or rude act doesn’t define a person when we can believe that about ourselves and love ourselves despite our many mistakes and cringe-worthy incidents.

When we love ourselves we begin to offer others the same grace and understanding we allow ourselves. We see the myriad reasons we don’t think or act how we’d like to and realize that everyone else’s life is just as difficult and confusing, and often for reasons we’ll never see or understand.

ky56 ,

Open source developers: Why aren’t more people using open source software software for everything. It’s better.

Also open source developers: Oh it broke your computer, well that’s your problem. You should have had a software engineering degree in order to vet the software yourself.

User goes back to closed source paid spyware… ahem software.

Open source developers: Why aren’t more people using open source software software for everything. It’s better.

ky56 ,

The entitlement of the open source community can be astonishingly deaf. You tell users that open source is better, users try it and your response is, oh it’s free software, you get what you pay for.

Pay who? If I donate do I get paid support? Almost any other paid product/service based off that project almost certainly won’t be open source and probably subscription spyware. So your answer to use open source is don’t use open source???

If this is your attitude on your repo then don’t imply/demonstrate it as for production ready use. It a personal fun dev project not fit for mainstream use. Pick a side, you can’t have both.

hperrin OP ,

I actually offer consulting services for this library in particular, so yes, if you pay, you get paid support.

CurlyMoustache ,
@CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world avatar

There’s a difference between trying to find out what is wrong and being a cunt.

If this person had asked politely after quickly searching for answers, the developer’s response would most likely be different and helpful

ky56 ,

Absolutely. Should have clarifying that I’m not defending the attitude and abuse of developers. However driving non technical end users to insanity with ill thought through processes is also wrong. Such as expecting users to write bug reports when an automated tool should be being used. An unclear installation guide where 90% of user run into the same problem. etc.

Linus’s (LTT) Linux challenge was the ultimate test of the open source community and they failed miserably. Blaming linus for bricking the system. Um hello, he never should have been incentivized to open the command line at all.

baseless_discourse , (edited )

There is a tradeoff between UX, user liberty, and user privacy. Traditionally, Linux is leaning heavily towards liberty. However now there are systems have locked down core system (like chrome os or mac os), so it is impossible to mess things up. Yet user might complain that they “cannot do anything”.

As for telemetry, privacy is a fundamental pillar of human right. I admire FOSS communities’ stance on privacy by default, and I don’t think they should change that. Although now opt-in privacy preserving telemetry is slowly getting implemented in Linux, I think it is a good thing, but needs still be treated carefully. Privacy-preserving telemetry is good, but it is notoriously hard to guarantee such correctness.

Finally, I think the bug Linus encountered is extremely rare. The flatpak install script is broken, and the apt install removes DE. I don’t think there are any documented incident of both installation methods to have such critical failure. It is even more unfortunate that it happens just as the most popular tech youtuber decides to try Linux.

hperrin OP ,

It didn’t break his computer. In trying to fix it, he deleted his node_modules directory, and now he’s complaining that he has to run npm install and wait for it to finish.

So to be clear, it was his own action that caused him to have to reinstall everything.

auf ,
@auf@lemmy.ml avatar

People who take stuff for free and compain them are bad people ngl.

unrelatedkeg ,

Complaining in and of itself isn’t bad. Hell, a bug report is a complaint and it’s very much useful. As are feature requests. Whining definitely isn’t good, but complaints can and often are useful, warranted and lead to a positive outcome

Grain9325 ,

And here I am anxious thinking I might offend the devs so I spend way too much time thinking what I’ve written is not rude

platypus_plumba ,

I’ve only had beef with a single dev ever. The maintainer of Prometheus, Brian Brazil, or whatever his name is. His attitude is so shitty towards people proposing actually good ideas that would push his product forward.

DeltaTangoLima ,
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

Yeah, I had the same experience with the devs of Pushbullet, after constructively suggesting a few ways they might be able to work with proxy servers, and all I got back was “Proxies are bad, mmmmk?”.

Fucken Peter Pan-level mentality.

jasondj ,

Proxies aren’t bad they are just dated.

Ironically the big problem with proxies is really that software doesn’t support them properly, usually due to lazy or unknowing devs.

NotJustForMe ,

Hehe, sometimes I wish that I could be snarky like that. ;) Good for you.

I have been told by numerous people these days that there are no free things in life. I write and contribute to FOSS software, and had that exact discussion.

Apparently, I do it to feel good, and for the prestige, a reward in itself. Also, I probably want to make up for something.

“Doing something for free is no excuse to do it badly.”

Some others don’t even know what “free” means." And some don’t believe it at all, that someone is paying me. Probably thinking about influencers or something. Perhaps they saw an ad somewhere and believed I’d see any of that revenue. ;)

I just went with posting the wiki entry about FOSS, and my ko-fi page, and thanked them for their interest. The first two, because they genuinely didn’t know any better, and the third because, well, at least that one is clear. Every user is a tester. Testing is good.

Gooey0210 , (edited )

Or don’t be that “don’t use any of my GPLv3 packages in your projects, because i don’t want”

Or, that guy who is “My project is free and open source, please don’t use for piracy, i don’t support piracy”

But yeah, complaining sucks, especially from somebody who doesn’t have his hands dirty, to somebody who does

And for free projects, don’t pay- don’t expect anything And even when paying, don’t expect much Just make stuff yourself, only making everything yourself you can be sure it will be good

gomp ,
@gomp@lemmy.ml avatar

User: “I have to waste my whole life fixing this” Dev: “you are complaining that you have to spend a few minutes”

Savage.

IgnacioM ,
@IgnacioM@lemmy.ml avatar

I see this in the comments section of Skyrim mods and it pisses me off so much

blazeknave ,

It’s every game and the bigger the community the lower the denominator.

HiddenLayer5 ,
@HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml avatar

Worse, I see this with Fediverse platforms like Lemmy. During the initial Reddit influx so many people expected the exact level of polish and user experience as Reddit and there were tons of threads (on Lemmy itself) basically complaining how much Lemmy “sucks” compared to Reddit, despite them coming over to Lemmy because Reddit was being enshitified. Same with Mastodon when the Twitter people were coming over.

LordKitsuna ,

I mean to be fair it’s still terrible. Better than the early days and in my opinion better than using Reddit which is why I’m here. But basic functionality is just awful. Trying to discover new content outside of your particular instances incredibly tedious. So many large instances won’t stop trigger happy Banning practically every other goddamn instance out there which isn’t helping. The whole thing that originally made Reddit popular was that it was an easy place to go to find almost any topic of Interest but I now have to hunt through many different instances to potentially find what I’m looking for on top of that the community for any one particular interest could easily be scattered across multiple different instances that don’t Federate with each other and if I subscribe to all of them I’m going to likely be subjected to a lot of repeating posts

I fully understand why a lot of people were not on board with that I put up with it because I hate Reddit more than I hate that but a lot of people will not share that opinion

HiddenLayer5 ,
@HiddenLayer5@lemmy.ml avatar

Keep in mind though that Lemmy is very much still in open beta while Reddit has been a mature product for years now. Lemmy only started federating like two years ago, and even compared to other Fediverse platforms Lemmy is still very new. Most of the “must have” features people associate with Reddit took a while to materialize as well, in fact when Reddit launched it didn’t have subreddits or even nested comments on posts. Not saying your grievances are invalid, but give it time and things will improve as Lemmy gets more development.

nonfuinoncuro ,

IIRC it always had threaded comments but yes subreddits took years. Shamefully I was very much in the anti subreddit camp and argued fiercely for tags instead like Flickr (RIP)

Lemmy with Sync is pretty baller though not sure what everyone is complaining about.

chicken ,

Being polite is better than not being polite, but the way I see it, all user complaints are valid and are better not taken personally if possible. Maybe you as the developer didn’t do anything wrong that contributed to their problem, or are not actually in a position to resolve whatever their problem is, but it’s worth keeping in mind the bigger picture: how well peoples computers work to benefit their lives.

If someone is getting upset that they have to spend time troubleshooting, maybe because they didn’t understand something or made a mistake, there’s definitely other people going through the exact same less-than-ideal experience and not saying anything about it. That’s information about the state of how well things are working and it’s better for it to be out there in some form than not.

hperrin OP ,

Yeah, I didn’t take it personally. He’s just venting, but doing it toward the person trying to help you is unhelpful. That’s why I posted here, basically saying to remember that you’re talking to a person, not a punching bag.

DeltaTangoLima ,
@DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.com avatar

Nah - don’t make excuses for them. Here in Australia, we call entitled people like this cunts. With a hard ‘c’. Not the nice one, with a soft ‘c’.

CallumWells ,

Sunts?

corsicanguppy ,

Don’t worry: I intend to NEVER be that guy. I don’t even USE the word ‘literally’ except ironically, so I think I’m safe.

starman2112 ,
@starman2112@sh.itjust.works avatar

I’ve literally never used the word “literally” unironically in my life

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