The end of Chromium Notes

Alas, Evan Martin’s excellent series of blog posts from the Chrome-on-Linux salt mines has come to an end. His sabbatical apparently didn’t relieve his general malaise, which he explains thusly:

Before we’d jokingly say “year of Linux on the desktop!” and laugh about how it would never happen, but my smiles had become bitter. A short way to put it is that writing high-quality software is not really a goal of the platform; stuff that doesn’t matter like continuously rewriting atop ever-changing platforms is. The scrappiness and free software spirit is what makes me love Linux as a hacker but I recognize now a deeper doom, that it will only ever broadly succeed by removing that spirit (e.g. Android).

I disagree that “writing high-quality software is not really a goal of the platform”, but there is an argument to be made that incrementally developing a high-quality platform (to enable writing high-quality software) makes life harder for third-party developers. It’s easy for free desktop developers—myself included—to underestimate the impact that tweaking the platform has on others, even if the changes make the platform more coherent in the long term. A common justification for churn is “the work is done by volunteers who wouldn’t necessarily spend their time on other things instead of this”, but that tends to ignore the other volunteers, caught up in dealing with unrelated changes, who would rather spend their time on other things.

This is not to say that platform-wide changes should be avoided at all cost: one of the great merits of the free software ecosystem is that it’s possible to make such changes. Nor am I claiming that volunteers cleaning up stagnant code bases is to be discouraged—quite the opposite. Nor is this an anti-GNOME 3 post, lest I be misinterpreted as thinking that Gtk+ 3, GObject Introspection and other leaps forward were a mistake. But taking advantage of this excellent new technology in applications does carry a cost in the short term.