I loved reading this comment. Thank you for this long quote which contains few familiar thoughts. I've shared similar points during one of my presentations few years back.
Yet years passed and we in FLOSS world seem to be stuck in the same place. We're creating more and more overbloated-I-do-it-all-better software than to improve with small drop in solutions. We can see that the only integration efforts are done by replacement of small good tools with crappy rewrite inclusions. Not compilation and redistribution of original small but good software following good old UNIX pipeline philosophy.
Sure, the are projects like suckless keeping up the good work but there is no connection with more mainstream solutions like Ubuntu or KDE. Which instead of serving with experience about UX and stuff do their own rewrites according to their own APIs.
Writing independent GUI applications becomes more and more of a chore. So many different ways of doing simple things to support. Like multimedia keys or even a tray icon. Try to do it for multiple operating ststems: you do macOS, Windows and when it comes to Linux: Unity, Gnome, KDE and there is I think still at least standard X-window way of doing things for others which should work quite fine for other UNIX based open operating systems.
Yet years passed and we in FLOSS world seem to be stuck in the same place. We're creating more and more overbloated-I-do-it-all-better software than to improve with small drop in solutions. We can see that the only integration efforts are done by replacement of small good tools with crappy rewrite inclusions. Not compilation and redistribution of original small but good software following good old UNIX pipeline philosophy.
Sure, the are projects like suckless keeping up the good work but there is no connection with more mainstream solutions like Ubuntu or KDE. Which instead of serving with experience about UX and stuff do their own rewrites according to their own APIs.
Writing independent GUI applications becomes more and more of a chore. So many different ways of doing simple things to support. Like multimedia keys or even a tray icon. Try to do it for multiple operating ststems: you do macOS, Windows and when it comes to Linux: Unity, Gnome, KDE and there is I think still at least standard X-window way of doing things for others which should work quite fine for other UNIX based open operating systems.