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.

Either PCSX2 or Play!, yeah.

Entitled to nothing. Toxic by acting like they are entitled and now a slew of other people are toxic about a FOSS dev.

But we sure do love FOSS, am I rite?

It's like introspection or game theory mean nothing to people...

No. Some people just simply can't ignore that shit. Why can't those users just not post asinine comments.

You'll find the copyright owner is Sony.

So not setting up a Discord in the first place is not an option because some people are so desperate to get feedback even though they are annoyed by feedback?

Eg., Phil Fish of FEZ and Indy game: the movie fame is another who seems unable to ignore negative feedback and massively overreacts to it.

What is the problem with retroarch ? Am curious.

Merriam Webster seems to agree with me.

Why is it terrible? Appimages are fine.

Agreed really, but less about the RetroArch part and more just in general with the way this person in particular is. In my mind, if you're not ready to be able to turn the project over to the community to maintain instead of yourself because you're as much of a controlling prick as this guy, then you should never make it even source-available and should just keep it private source.

I've seen multiple emulator devs frustrated with how demanding the project itself is, but moreso toxic behavior from the lead developer towards emulator devs and users alike. Can't handle any kind of even constructive criticism worth a damn and when people understandably are frustrated by him lashing out he then turns it back around to say they're out to get him.