WOGUE is no friend of GNOME

Alex Diavatis is the person behind the WOGUE account on YouTube. For a while he’s been posting videos about GNOME. I think the latest idea is that he’s trying to “shame” developers into working harder. From the person who’s again on the other end of his rants it’s having the opposite effect.

We’re all doing our best, and I’m personally balancing about a dozen different plates trying to keep them all spinning. If any of the plates fall on the floor, perhaps helping with triaging bugs, fixing little niggles or just saying something positive might be a good idea. In fact, saying nothing would be better than the sarcasm and making silly videos.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

23 thoughts on “WOGUE is no friend of GNOME”

  1. I just commented about this atrocious video in Reddit. It’s so idiotic that I wouldn’t take it too seriously. Thank you for your great work, that I take seriously. Regarding Software I think the problem is mostly due to lack of progress feedback during long operations which is perceived as seriously buggy by the end user, even if the problem is not that deep. This is specially severe in Fedora because sometimes there is a 1GB flatpak runtime download or because of the auto-update metadata policy of dnf that tends to silently delay installs. I’ve been more lucky in Ubuntu in this regard.

  2. Maybe it is not the best way, but it is a matter of going to see different forums and tickets regarding GNOME Software to see that the feeling is generalized. I know and understand all the work that is behind, however, to see a final version (aka stable) and that this does not work well makes me think in the same way. To this day I can not recommend Fedora Workstation or Silverblue to novice users because GS does not work properly (yet).

    Note: Thanks to WOGUE videos, I find out about new features that I would not otherwise know.

  3. i’m not going to argue with you, it is your opinion after all, but taking one or two videos out of 500 for making a point, while all the rest are something positive or just demos, it is really very fair :/

    and i do open bugs, so that’s not true either.

    1. and btw, when you say something personal to someone, positive or negative, it is a good practice to tag him :)

    2. Hey Alex,
      I imagine you meant no harm. However, the phrase “#hallofshame” inspires shame and resentment in the developers who spent no doubt countless hours building this software.

      If you made a video about one of my FOSS projects, which I work on 100% in my free time and put a lot of effort into, that’s probably how I would feel. That’s not to say that it’s bad to report bugs. If you made a video about the things that don’t work for you, showing bugs, commenting on what could be improved, without implying I should feel ashamed, I would appreciate the video.

  4. Is Wogue that channel with disturbing sexy child anime stuff on every single video? Do people take it seriously?

  5. Richard, sometimes you need to have a sense of humour. The videos are entertaining, and I don’t think the rants are meant to be taken seriously. I personally became a GNOME fan thanks to Alex. When GNOME 3 came out, I thought it was hideous, but then Alex uploaded many videos about how to customize it, how to use extensions, and what are the latest GNOME Apps.

  6. You didn’t have to dignify that video with a response imo.

    As long as actual bugs are reported through the proper channels there is no need for social media drama.

    I’m a Linux user of twenty plus years now and I enjoy using gnome with Wayland. I know for a fact there are many of us who are beyond grateful for all the work done on the gnome ecosystem.

  7. I’ve been watching WOGUE for about a year, and I want to say that thanks to Alex and his channel, I learned a lot about Gnome and other software. As for me, his video with a review of the latest innovations is a Popularization, which is good (although everyone does not like his style).

    It is rather strange that you attacked a YouTube user who can do what he wants (and which viewers likes) ))

    1. For you his videos help you to fit in into GNOME, that’s great, but did you count all this users which hating even more GNOME and GNOME devs after watching his videos?

      Also you can learn much more and not learn all his mistakes and misinformation which he often post in his videos, comments, twitter if you’d read official resources, devs blogs, etc.

    1. I think that would be a great idea. There are lots of little “nits” that would only take a few minutes to fix.

        1. Feel free to let me know at mail(at)asciiwolf.com if you need any help with the issue. I’ll be glad to help. :-)

  9. Hi Richard, your excellent work is deeply appreciated here. It is true that gnome-software needs a bit more work, but we all know you are very busy and I certainly do not blame you for that. I hope you can find a bit of help for all your projects. Keep up the good work!

  10. Honestly I think that WOGUE’s videos are very nice to show the latest cool stuff in the Linux ecosystem. He uploads very frequently and he demos lots of cool stuff, and his bug reports/feature requests are very useful and personally I appreciated them a lot for some of my apps he featured.

    He’s a bit trolly, but he’s not a bad person, and I think he’s just showing some sense of humor.

    I hope you can reconsider his work, he’s a very active member of our community and I’m sure he means no harm with what he says.

  11. Just want to chime in with my sincere appreciation for the work you do, Richard. Gnome Software was a much-needed application and I’m very glad I have it. And not just Gnome Software, of course. While I have less insight into the other things you did on Gnome (as they’re less user-facing), I’m really grateful that you’re pushing the free desktop forward.

    That same appreciation also goes out to all the other Gnome contributors. This is generally work that’s done first and foremost with an altruistic motive, and it’s very inspiring to see the amazing quality of work that this community has accomplished.

  13. Well, I agree that the video contains a little bit of trolling, but I don’t think that Alex meant any harm. And the truth is that GNOME Software would definitely need more bug fixing and testing. I don’t blame you or Kalev, I know you guys are doing hard work and I really appreciate it. Great would be if Red Hat or Canonical could assign a new developer or qa/qe to work on GNOME Software. That would help a lot, at least from my point of view (as a long time GNOME Software user/tester).

  14. You’re clearly taking one users describing his experiences way to personal. And posting his name in some strange attempt to shame him is just childish.

    If I try to review some piece of software and it’s bad then I’ll write that it’s bad. I’ll say it’s buggy if it is buggy. If it crashes all the time then I’ll point that out. What some developer will think about those facts isn’t something I consider for a second, it’s irrelevant to the end-user experience.

    WOGUE’s describing his experience with GNOME. There’s nothing wrong with that. And you should be thankful for it, you can learn from it and it does showcase GNOME even though it also points out some of the current flaws. It may be worth considering that blog posts like yours and the quality of GNOME software is why I tend to just not review it or mention it at all.

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