A Vast Majority Of Linux's Input Improvements Are Developed By One Individual

[schmidtbag]

I think there's two points here:

1. A personal appeal from the one guy himself... it's hard to argue that he wouldn't know best, and perhaps we should take this as him signaling that he's forming his own future career plans that don't include libinput.
2. Whoever that replacement may be, they would greatly benefit from ramping up with a knowledgeable mentor rather than being in the dreaded state many companies find themselves in: "Hey yeah this ultra important system had 1 guy on it, and then he quit. All that's left is his code and his documentation. Good luck!" Even with world-class documentation, this is not an enviable position.

Both are very good points. But, I guess what I'm getting at is if in an emergency someone had to take his place, libinput is already in good shape, and it isn't the most complex system in Linux. Whoever his successor is will likely have had a decent amount of experience with either X or Wayland, and should be capable of solving any future problems regardless of mentoring. You/he are not wrong that someone should be trained, but, I don't think we're going to have any major struggles should he suddenly be unavailable.

To put it in another perspective, AMD's GPU drivers are incredibly complex, yet, 3rd party companies like Valve and Google have managed to make adjustments of their own, and I'm not sure how much help they got from AMD. Their contributions weren't small either.

[M@GOid]

No Redhat no desktop. People need to remember this.

Building on that, also aren't they the ones with the atitude "is my way or the high way", A.K.A, Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome, unwilling to adopt other distros solutions and contributing heavily with the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem?

[Britoid]

Building on that, also aren't they the ones with the atitude "is my way or the high way", A.K.A, Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome, unwilling to adopt other distros solutions and contributing heavily with the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem?

If you mean other distros solutions with a giant CLA attached to them, no.

[schmidtbag]

Building on that, also aren't they the ones with the atitude "is my way or the high way", A.K.A, Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome, unwilling to adopt other distros solutions and contributing heavily with the fragmentation of the Linux ecosystem?

Just to be devil's advocate:
Red Hat has been around for a long time. They control a great deal of what the Linux desktop currently looks like. So, if they're unwilling to adopt other distros' solutions, wouldn't that mean they're trying to prevent fragmentation? I think your point is "there are other solutions which everyone but they will accept" but I don't recall the last time there was ever a universally agreed upon alternative. Whether it be the init system, the default desktop environment, package manager, X11 vs Wayland, etc, every distro has their own way of insisting what they think is the best or should be the default. And when someone's idea gets rejected by their distro of choice, they fork and create a new one. That is what causes fragmentation. You can call Red Hat stubborn, naive, or counter-productive for rejecting what may otherwise be an objectively better approach, but I don't think it is they who can be blamed for fragmentation.
Canonical on the other hand....

[sheepdestroyer]

sheepdestroyer They are busy working on other parts of GNOME.

At last! But that took a while. I'm really grateful that they changed their ways and are contributing there now though!

[M@GOid]

Just to be devil's advocate:
Red Hat has been around for a long time. They control a great deal of what the Linux desktop currently looks like. So, if they're unwilling to adopt other distros' solutions, wouldn't that mean they're trying to prevent fragmentation? I think your point is "there are other solutions which everyone but they will accept" but I don't recall the last time there was ever a universally agreed upon alternative. Whether it be the init system, the default desktop environment, package manager, X11 vs Wayland, etc, every distro has their own way of insisting what they think is the best or should be the default. And when someone's idea gets rejected by their distro of choice, they fork and create a new one. That is what causes fragmentation. You can call Red Hat stubborn, naive, or counter-productive for rejecting what may otherwise be an objectively better approach, but I don't think it is they who can be blamed for fragmentation.
Canonical on the other hand....

Here where I disagree with you. Red Hat have all the reasons to believe they are the big honcho on the Linux ecosystem, but as you said yourself, they can be stubborn and counter-productive, and this is the prime reason for fragmentation. And what upsets me, is that almost everybody give them a free pass when they were hit with a acute case of NIH (most recently, their own file system), but when Canonical do it, omg, is the end of the civilization...

I'm not calling Canonical saints (Mir) , but you have to admit they are much more pragmatical than Red Hat. And in the desktop arena, they are the ones we have to thank for pursuing a easy to use Linux experience, at a time where ejecting a CD-ROM needed a command on a terminal.

[schmidtbag]

Here where I disagree with you. Red Hat have all the reasons to believe they are the big honcho on the Linux ecosystem, but as you said yourself, they can be stubborn and counter-productive, and this is the prime reason for fragmentation. And what upsets me, is that almost everybody give them a free pass when they were hit with a acute case of NIH (most recently, their own file system), but when Canonical do it, omg, is the end of the civilization...

It's all a matter of perspective. It's like asking who was victorious in a war - there's no truly right answer, it all depends on where you stand in the matter. So, if you have a gripe with RH, you're going to think they're to blame for fragmentation, and there is some validity in you thinking that. But like I said before, everyone has their own idea of what the best thing is. There is no such thing as a universally agreed upon solution in Linux, and that's why forked distros happen. In other words, fragmentation occurs when people demand change. That being said, I feel Red Hat isn't at fault here because they're one of the very few leading organizations in Linux development that remains relatively consistent, for better or worse. In the corporate world, consistency and reliability is often more important than performance or efficiency. Of course, with Linux being open-source, RH can't win. There's nothing they can do to prevent fragmentation, but at the very least, they can maintain some stability in the corporate Linux world.
Meanwhile, look at how Windows works. Most of Windows is crap. A lot of people will install bloated 3rd party tools just to override how crappy the built-in features are. MS could easily adapt, but they don't, because that's the only way they can retain compatibility and consistency (which also includes familiarity), and that's really the only reason people use Windows. This is also why Windows 8 and Vista were hated so much - they both broke consistency.
Anyway, the reason Canonical gets so much flak is because they reject other people's ideas while also forcing others upon their own. Take Mir, Upstart, and Unity for example - each of those were a highly unnecessary distraction, and those resources were better off spent elsewhere. So, they're just as stubborn as RH except instead of just simply turning down better alternatives, they make yet another one.

I'm not calling Canonical saints (Mir) , but you have to admit they are much more pragmatical than Red Hat. And in the desktop arena, they are the ones we have to thank for pursuing a easy to use Linux experience, at a time where ejecting a CD-ROM needed a command on a terminal.

Canonical used to be pragmatic; they aren't at all anymore, and haven't been since maybe 2011. That being said, I do thank them for making Linux a more user-friendly experience, because Ubuntu is the reason I got as far as I did with Linux. I first started looking into Linux around 2006 but Ubuntu was the only distro that didn't feel like I was learning how to swim in the middle of the ocean. Today, Ubuntu is too fragile and inconsistent. It's not a bad distro, but if I were a beginner, the amount of deviations they do from other distros (and previous versions of Ubuntu...) would be extremely offputting to me.

[jo-erlend]

trying to develop and push proprietary software, aka snap, to increase their value so they can go public or get bought out.

Are you the same person who's repeatedly claiming that GPLv3 is a proprietary software license here, or did you just copy?

[Britoid]

Are you the same person who's repeatedly claiming that GPLv3 is a proprietary software license here, or did you just copy?

Neither.

[zanny]

I've been actively reading and using libinput the last month writing a Tablet config KCM for it on X and Wayland. And even just doing this I'm itching and aching to get back to Rust - I'm passing raw pointers between QML and C++ and hating every moment of it. I have a half dozen reinterpret casts to be able to interact with the XInput API because its all raw char* buffers and page long function signatures with the best documentation sometimes being a man page. But often its just "theres this named constant used in this one example, there might be another constant in some X header that does something similar that I'm looking for" then an hour of Googling and reading C headers buried in preprocessor barf you might find what you are looking for amongst a hundred other undocumented unmentioned variables in XCB or Xlib or XI or XInput or Xatom or one of the other hundred header files. That, versus actual search in generated documentation I have locally, is absolute night and day.

I fear that might happen more and more as the next generation of programming languages take off and all the foundations of the Linux desktop rot without new blood. Because the new blood is attracted to more well designed languages than C and C++. I basically started using KDE exclusively almost a decade ago because after having dealt with gobject C code in uni I never wanted to ever see it again. I remember back in ~2014 I was considering trying to contribute to the dying Telepathy project but once I realized it was all internally that same horrifying gobject C gobblygook I walked away.