[conspire] Installing Linux on Elise Scher's Chromebook

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Syeed Ali (syeedali at syeedali.com):

> I think we're on the same page here.  I had a GTK 2 app I liked and paid
> someone to support.

The reason I tend to rag on the GNOME people and their Freedesktop.org
partners in crime ;-> is that they suffer what Jamie W. Zawinski
famously dubbed the CADT problem (Cascade of Attention-Deficit
Teenagers).  JWZ wrote his sarcastic CADT essay in response to having
filed patient, detailed bug reports against gnome-core and other GNOME
codebases, had them ignored for a long time, and then saw them closed
with "won't fix" on grounds that that software release was being EOLed
and the developers refocussed their attention on gratuitously different
replacement software.  https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

They do that all the time:  Stuff you've been relying on and patiently
trying to get them to patch suddenly get abandoned as
no-longer-maintained, because the developers decided in a
caffeine-driven jag, one day, to discard everything and write a
replacement from scratch, in pursuit of the new shiny thing.

This is _not_ to say that it's necessarily a bad thing to abandon a
project and start over.  But... the trait can be indulged past reason,
and the price can be heavy.

Meanwhile, the same Window Maker or IceWM stuff that worked 25 years ago
just keeps working, getting incrementally improved gradually, without
any trace of CADT disease.

> I think the complexity of Linux and everything within and around it has
> increased so much that "just fork it" has become ever more obviously a
> failed argument, and now whole chains of dependent projects and entire
> distributions have to be forked to some degree or other.

See, though, here you are equating heavy-weight Linux Desktop
Environments with Linux.  Some of us never bought into DEs in the first
place, and still enjoy the modularity and cleanly defined interfaces
that made Unix successful in the first place.

> (Cinnamon was a fork that became a project, but what do we call a
> Devuan-esque endeavor?)

Devuan is a partial fork.  A limited number of Debian's packages (those
with too-irksome dependency on systemd and its brood of Freedesktop.org 
co-conspirators) are maintained as Devuan Project-sourced forked
packages housed in the Devuan repos, but most packages are _literally_
Debian packages.