Higher in this thread they said the author does provide a flatpak, so this didn't seem to work ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Daniel still has the RetroArch trademark registered in his personal name and continues to oversee the project and that's enough for me that he's still in a mangerial role, but you're right in that the last shitty thing I heard about him is fucking up netplay in 2022.

Having read a lot of the thread it sounds like that's sort of what's going on with the version on the AUR. Sounds like it is the old GPL v3 version and the dev doesn't wanna put the new CC BY-NC-ND version on the AUR themselves because they don't want to make an account there (understandable, not saying they should have to).

The whole situation is sort of sad, but ultimately devs working on free (as in money, I now -ND is not libre) software need to do what they need to do to remain sane. If it's a CC BY-NC-ND emulator without Linux support versus no emulator at all I think we'd all want the first.

I hope this thread can be an eye opener for folks to remember to treat volunteer devs with respect. (Not implying anyone here was part of the problem.)

He took an open source project and made it source available. I don't blame people for being upset.

I use the Duckstation flatpak funny enough

True but there is a workaround: a patchset to a specific upstream git commit and local compilation. Pretty much what PKGBUILD already does. LAME was developed this way for years. It was a patchset to reference source code under a nonfree license.

And android users are not obligated to give a good review after not receiving support.

I have no problem with his actions, (if he doesn’t have the resources/energy/time to support on all platforms, who can complain about that?), but I don’t think he’s very good at the whole communicating with other humans part of software that sadly in the OSS world tends to fall on the same devs that do the work, he could have avoided both this comment thread and the angry android user above with zero extra effort by simply phrasing things better.

The particular poor phrasing he chose seems to imply to me that he’s lumping all users of each platform together in his head, and each negative interaction builds on the previous, which isn’t the healthiest attitude, and does indeed make him look like an arsehole to anyone who’s just turned up and hasn’t yet done anything wrong.

CC4.0 licenses work for code. The language was made generic and no longer talks about performing music on stage and such.

Better to use CC NC for non commercial works than to homebrew your own text. CC BY and CC BY SA are GPLv3 compatible.

AFAIK they did.

AUR can. It’s just locally checking out the code from git and compiling it locally as well. I’m not a pro AUR maintainer but I’m not aware of a single AUR entry that ships software source code directly from AUR.

To write a script that checks out upstream code and compiles it locally is not a distribution by a 3rd party. The code comes directly from Stenzek. That’s why he puts the Arch check there.

If that script happens to do a search and replace of archlinux with some random jibberish (so the check is no longer for archlinux), that’s still not a distribution of modified code because all code modifications happen locally.

Normal people would just invite distribution packagers to develop fixes upstream.

Who forces him to respond to such messages on Discord? He can just not engage with people of whom he thinks are idiots.

If he doesn’t want to engage with users at all, maybe not set up a Discord in the first place.

No. Every time FOSS comes up on Lemmy, FOSS adherents remind me why I'd never dip my toe in that mess.

I use some open source, but I also pay to support it, so I'm not true FOSS. See: Home Assistant. I contribute to the support at times, and I'm familiar with the frustrations - and the need to be consistently cordial. And thick skinned.

For all you know you're talking to someone on the spectrum. Perspective matters.

I don't use Arch but I have noticed a growing number of forums where people seem to talk about a lot of problems. I have used Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu etc. But Arch stands out as the distro that seems to have the most helpless users. Or is it the most broken distro?

No, on aur there's duckstation which is the old GPL3 version (stuck to one year ago) and duckstation-git which downloads that git with latest license and compiles on the end user machine. Both versions respect the dev intentions of "no packages" as it downloads the code and compiles it. The problem that it was about were probably two

1. Documentation on how to compile is insufficient. It depends on many libraries but doesn't say which exact version which causes issues at compile. Someone did the guesswork and wrote "instructions" (the pkgbuild file) for everyone but it's not the main dev and it breaks often

2. Because it downloads the code from git, it might be an issue if it's not tagged correctly, users get the latest commit instead of latest release and that's undesirable (didn't check for this case, but it was an issue for other emulators where non devs could run buggy code and complain about non-issues)

This is sad. Various programs have gone through the same type of situation with Debian stable. Debian is very conservative and doesn't ship upgrades quickly on their stable branch. Various authors have complained because they frequently get emails / bug reports from Debian users, who happen to be using a few-years-old version of their software.

I do understand the frustration, but it does feel a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It's possible there are other solutions, like detecting whatever random issue is frustrating people and pop up a dialog.

For example, if he's upset with it being broken on Wayland, why not detect Wayland and start off with a dialog: "Wayland is beta and is not officially supported. See FAQ here: [........]"

Just blocking people feels over the top. But hey, it's his project, if he wants to go this way, it's his choice and right. Depending on the license he might get forked, but that's just how it goes.

I use arch on a couple of machines and for a rolling release I find it surprisingly hassle free. So with a scientifically relevant sample size of one - I declare that it's the people that are the problem.

That is with regular updates though.

I also have a gentoo box that is fine if you let it update every week or two, but tends to need more love and attention if you turn it on again after half a year. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same for arch. Users who only update twice a year aren't really the target audience for rolling release.

It probably also depends on your hardware and what your usecases are; as always using the right tool for the job helps

Oh, that's weird, you'd think there'd be a way to tell whatever is on air to download a specific tag. Or like one that downloads the other indirectly. I haven't looked into pkgbuild or aur.

Sometimes devs are the most difficult users.

"Why is this not working the way it should? Ok, yes I did rewrite how the code manages save data in the filesystem, but that shouldn't have any impact, I just thought it should make sure it only writes in 8k chunks because I read a comment somewhere that says it would increase ssd life by 3%, but I promise you it's exactly equivalent to the original code and the problem must be elsewhere, not my patch. I patched dozens of other packages without issue with my 8k barrier strategy without any problems"

Devs come up with wild ideas, rewrite stuff, fail to mention it until you run into it, then explain why it doesn't matter and stubbornly refuse to at least try without their weird change.