New article, although this one is a controversial one based on the situation of GNOME Calendar and Linux Mint. I present to you: How far would hostile distributions go to hurt application developers?

https://tesk.page/2026/07/18/how-far-would-hostile-distributions-go-to-hurt-upstream/

#FOSS #OpenSource #OSS #FreeSoftware #Linux

@TheEvilSkeleton It makes me sad seeing that #linuxmint has such package maintainer.

@TheEvilSkeleton "You chose the wrong license" but they conveniently always miss the "this program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose" part.

@TheEvilSkeleton if a distribution fails to respect the distribution model it's just a bad distribution

@TheEvilSkeleton naming of stuff that's not trademarked has always been an issue on FOSS licenses. you just have to hope for good will. :(

@TheEvilSkeleton Out of curiosity - Is it that users of Ubuntu and Debian just do not show up in your bugtracker with bugs of outdated versions? You write that they don't bother you, but I don't think it's clear if this is what that entails. And technically they should have all the same issues as Mint does.

@TheEvilSkeleton whewwww that's a lot of therapy speak. gosh I've seen so much drama about gnome, I wouldnt blame distros for removing their packages altogether.

would be some work for the distro to find alternatives, but hopefully healthier for both parties longterm 🫂

besides, niche communities tend to step in and fill the void - motivated users find ways to run unsupported software 👍

@TheEvilSkeleton

Speaking as a know nothing I shall be checking out Debian on one of my spare Thinkpads prior to moving house.

Anecdote not included.

@TheEvilSkeleton I disagree with a lot of what's in this blog post (for example, when a Mint user running a release from *2022* files an upstream bug in *2026*, that's on the user - not on Mint). However, the issue of branding and bug reports on outdated software isn't going away, and I wish build systems included by default some kind of rebranding/link modification flag.

Chrome/chromium does this in their build system, but it's custom and I feel like cmake and others should make it A Thing.

@TheEvilSkeleton

Can't the bugtracker just filter reports send by old versions and LTS?
Isn't Upstream failing at bug triage?

@paninodesu are you going to work on that? And how are you going to deal with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem ?

@pomagarnet what is "therapy speak" and what makes it like that?

@Andres4NY allow me to remind you that Chromium is backed by a corporation. Also, Chromium is designed to be rebrandable. GNOME Calendar is designed for GNOME. Why would we introduce and support more features?

@TheEvilSkeleton I understand that, I'm not talking about Calendar adding the features. I'm talking about build systems in general adding the feature, so that downstream users of packages that makes use of said build systems could simply add `--rebrand foo-calendar https://distro/foo-calendar` during the build to override various upstream strings and urls.

@Andres4NY

> when a Mint user running a distro from 2022 files an upstream bug in 2026

Which bug report are you referring to?

@paninodesu also, about this GIF, if you are annoyed by my refusal to take on abuse from downstreams, feel free to unfollow or block me

@TheEvilSkeleton Apologies, I misspoke about that - I was thinking Mint 22 was similar versioning as Ubuntu (eg, released in 2022), rather than Mint 22 being based on Ubuntu from 2024.

@TheEvilSkeleton I just wish distros wouldn't even bother. Like, why is Mint building their own version version of Gnome Calendar when there's an upstream-maintained version of the application on Flathub? They could just preinstall the Flathub version and all of these issues with downstream repackages go away. It's not viable for every application (for now) but so many problems could just be solved if distros got comfortable with not shipping every package under the sun.

@Syn32 @TheEvilSkeleton As an addendum and for completeness: Not all issues would og away, but still some/most. I also only noticed that after looking through some of the issues Hari linked in his blogpost, some problems arise from the flatpak interacting with outdated external dependencies, such as evolution-data-server. These issues the flatpak won't solve.

@TheEvilSkeleton
Quick question/suggestion:
Can we get a list of the big distributions that could be considered hostile in this case? If not, then... Which distros can be directly considered as hostile?

@Syn32 @TheEvilSkeleton honestly yeah. there seems to be this belief that the role of the distro is to provide software, or that its a net "good" for distros to have their own packages for stuff like this, yet there's mountains of evidence from maintainers and users showing that it couldn't be further from the case.

@TheEvilSkeleton
what percent of bug reports you get is invalid reports by mint users

@m I have no idea to be honest. Why does that matter?

@TheEvilSkeleton @pomagarnet honestly just sounds ableist

@TheEvilSkeleton Did you really tell me to fix it for you?

I don't know how bug reports works for Gnome, it's a decade maybe since I last used Gnome, but here when I want to report a bug on some program or KDE component I have to fill a form.

Beyond the "product", this form asks on which component of the product the problem is, the exact version of the product, what platform and OS version I'm using, what is the severity of the problem, plus all the other descriptions I can give.

@paninodesu

> I want to report a bug on some program or KDE component I have to fill a form

This will alienate tons of people, including myself. I stopped reporting bugs to KDE because Bugzilla is extremely difficult to use, and I never know which components to report to. Same reason why I never report bugs to LibreOffice and Firefox.

And yes, I do want you to fix it for us. You'll come realize that this is not fixable upstream if you want to maintain something that is easy for newcomers to report.

@TheEvilSkeleton

I was under the impression that everyone used a similar system, but maybe this is just a KDE thing? How come?

@TheEvilSkeleton the Linux mint is real can we get much higher

@AlanyG21 Linux Mint, Fedora, and Manjaro come to mind currently

@TheEvilSkeleton
Ok, so I'll "blacklist" the other two for now (I already blacklisted Manjaro, and I hope that doesn't include Fedora's downstreams)

@TheEvilSkeleton
BTW, thanks for answering

@Isofruit that's correct.

I realized that I failed to express that some versions of Linux Mint and Ubuntu share the same gnome-calendar package. The difference between the two is that Ubuntu users will report bugs to Ubuntu (supposedly), whereas Linux Mint users will report them to upstream. Even if they both share the same technical bugs, this is less of a technical issue but more of an issue with Linux Mint failing to respect the distribution model.

@TheEvilSkeleton
As an aside, not all versions of Ubuntu even install GNOME Calendar (ubuntu-desktop-minimal doesn't).

I don't think Ubuntu installs the gnome (DE) metapackage by default either (in universe section).

And then a further proportion of Ubuntu users who might file a bug report understand their GNOME experience has been somewhat customised by Canonical anyway, and their expectation is on Ubuntu to package things to work on the distro.

Plus Bugs referencing bugs.launchpad.net.

@TheEvilSkeleton Interesting article. This is the first time I've seen herring used as a verb.

@TheEvilSkeleton

@paninodesu what does that mean?

@TheEvilSkeleton something funny, but maybe you wouldn't like to know, I have to wonder...

@paninodesu you know, I would appreciate if you don't speak in riddles

@TheEvilSkeleton While I feel for your situation, I’m sure a lot of developers are in a similar boat, it doesn’t seem like you are closer to having your needs met, and have done violence. I recommend reading Marshall Rosenberg’s book, A Language of Life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

@TheEvilSkeleton If this is the core problem, wouldn't for such an issue it already suffice if they just swapped out the issue-tracker links on the app as well as the app-store?

Though I'm not sure even that could fix it. I've been looking a little bit on what differences between Mint and Ubuntu it could be and I'm coming up short. Both link to the gnome bugtracker. Both have official debug guides that explicitly do not lead upstream.

@TheEvilSkeleton while I empathize, I'm having difficulties to understand what going on exactly 😕

So we've got this chain of publication: GNOME Calendar -> Debian -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint

Is the issue that Linux Mint did too many changes on an old version? (Which, from what I understand, they didn't do), or is the issue that the version is just too old? (But then, why Debian and Ubuntu don't raise the same issue?)

I'm a bit at a loss here as I've read Mint's arguments and they also make sense 😕 I simply want to understand 🙏

There's also the fact that Fedora (the distribution I use and like) got entangled as a "bad downstream" for reasons I also don't understand.

@TheEvilSkeleton This is so strange. As someone who actually does work on packaging GUI stuff for a distro, the GNOME Calendar issue with Linux Mint reads like a textbook "do not do this for any reason at all" situation for a packager. Shipping old software is one thing, but then *also* shipping it broken and refusing to do much of anything about it and then *also also* getting defensive when probed about it and then blaming the developers is just gross.

@TheEvilSkeleton so I got linked to this before ... from what I can tell in the issue, as an outsider, it looks like neither side wanted a productive conversation, and it just felt rude on both sides. The issue body itself also initially didn't look completely clear what the actual problem is, it just asked for rebranding everything without any specific reason.
This article itself is just inflammatory, again pointing fingers at LM which is not helpful.

Note linuxmint is not innocent either, they definitely messed up by packaging gnome-calendar in this state, but I feel if the discussion started by clearly stating the problem (people reporting long solved bugs in the wrong place, which is hurting upstream) and not pointing fingers all the time the outcome probably would've changed significantly.

But instead there was a lot of miscommunication, both from your side and their side, miscommunication that could have definitely been avoided, which is sad to see.

@TheEvilSkeleton There's this blog post also which I think quite resonates with how I think about this whole situation: https://pointieststick.com/2026/07/19/whos-responsible-for-bug-reports-on-old-software-versions/

@Andres4NY @TheEvilSkeleton well it is on mint for not redirecting the user to the correct bug tracker (theirs, downstream)

@fun to be fair, I did want a productive discussion, but if you looked at the first issue, the first thing the packager did is dodge the entire concern and jump straight to something else.

As for "it just asked for rebranding everything without any specific reason.", I don't think that would have helped for Mint itself, because the packager was already aware of it for years. I do admit that would have definitely helped from an outsider's perspective.

As I stated in the article, there were several discussions about this prior to the issue, so it wasn't a surprise to the packager.

@fun yeah, I definitely do agree with everything, except some parts which I address here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@TheEvilSkeleton/116949185516023452

@KekunPlazas @TheEvilSkeleton
Uncooperative downstreams like Linux Mint disregard section 2a of the GPLv2 (section 5a in GPLv3) that says divergent versions should be clearly marked as such ("You must cause the modified [stuff] to carry prominent notices stating that you changed [the stuff]") to avoid reputational harm to the upstream maintainers.

Then they act all surprised when we ask them to take our brand off their package, and they claim we don't understand FLOSS.

https://mastodon.social/@nekohayo/116558059890431661

@TheEvilSkeleton @fun Rebranding stuff or heavily modifying a project's source code is nothing new to Mint.

Again, from what I noticed, most people are poorly informed about what upstreams can do. An upstream has no control over the repositories of a distro so the upstream author cannot do much about the bugs because its the responsibility of the distro.

I don't even understand the backlash against you because its a downstream maintained package now.

@creak @TheEvilSkeleton The issue is, Mint is shipping an extremely outdated (4+ years) version of GNOME Calendar because they're against LibAdwaita, as it would mean losing theming for apps.

While they absolutely can do that, the GNOME Calendar maintainers are inundated with bug reports from Linux Mint users for bugs that got fixed a long time ago, because the "Report an issue" link in the about window still points to the GNOME Calendar issue tracker, not a Linux Mint one.

GNOME Calendar developers got fed up with wasting their time on triaging bug reports and asked Linux Mint to drop or rebrand the Calendar app, so if Linux Mint chooses to ship severely outdated versions of app, it's their problem to deal with. Mint basically evaded requests at every turn, GNOME devs got peeved from the constant goal post shifting by Mint, Mint tone policed and told them to pound sand.

It's not an issue of code. It's an issue of attitude and common courtesy of not wasting the time of app developers you rely on to make your distro by being an ass.

As for Fedora, they did a similar thing when they shipped either outdated or broken versions of Bottles and OBS Studio via their own Flatpak repo, and users similarly filing bugs for versions the original authors do not control or support. Both asked Fedora to stop that and went unheard for a long time or had to threaten legal action to make themselves heard.

@SebinNyshkim @TheEvilSkeleton that's the part I was missing, Mint not willing to update past libAdwaita.

So I assume Ubuntu and Debian don't have the issue because they have more modern versions of GNOME Calendar (IIRC they are not against libAdwaita).

@creak @TheEvilSkeleton As far as Ubuntu is concerned, they update their distro frequently enough that the issue doesn't arise and they're keeping pace with GNOME development.

I dunno about Debian, but I'm willing to wager that when they ship stuff, they also have enough maintainers to carry the burden themselves once the software reaches EoL.

Mint doesn't have any of that, it's a relatively small distro with a very slow development cycle (they even slowed it down further recently). So that makes it doubly baffling that they would conduct themselves like that, when both parties involved are strapped for time and resources.

This issue isn’t even really about the pros and cons of libAdwaita, that was just for context.

Mint has deliberately chosen to freeze certain GNOME applications in a hopelessly outdated state because they disagree with the technical decisions made by the upstream developers. They probably lack the resources to maintain these apps themselves or backport fixes, yet still choose to ship outdated software.

The ones who suffer as a result are the Mint users, who have to deal with utterly outdated software suites, and the upstream developers behind them, who are unjustly blamed for this desolate state of affairs.

Mint allows this suffering to continue and refuses to take responsibility for its decisions.

@SebinNyshkim @TheEvilSkeleton in order to mitigate this issue (if we assume Mint maintainers won't change), maybe add a template in the Github/GitLab issue that would ask the version of the GNOME Calendar app and warn that Mint have a very old version and that the bug is very probably already fixed.

Just a suggestion. I personally don't mind answering a few questions when creating issues, as long as it reasonable 😉 but information such as the distribution, its version, and the version of the app seems very reasonable to me.

In general, while I do appreciate that a lot of developers and news outlets are on my side on this, but I think there is one thing I believe that we get fundamentally wrong: the issue is not LTS, and I would argue that LTS actually has nothing to do with this, as it is just a technical detail.

In my opinion, this is inherently a downstream attitude problem. I believe the most brutal recent example was between Fedora and OBS Studio, where OBS Studio was ready to sue Fedora over misusing trademarks and brushing it off. Fedora is not an LTS distribution, but it shared the same inherent attitude that (in this case) Linux Mint had.

@creak @TheEvilSkeleton Someone already made that suggestion on the Mint Issue tracker and it does not address the core issue: Mint users open tickets on the GNOME Calendar issue tracker because Mint is entirely disinterested in forking or rebranding, thus users keep being sent there to open issues that don't even exist anymore. It takes time away from GNOME devs for a problem that is entirely caused by Mint. It shouldn't be an issue for GNOME devs to solve or even address on their end.

The core issue remains Mint's blatant unwillingness to fix an issue they brought on and they already went ahead and tell GNOME Calendar devs to deal with it and be total assholes about it.

An issue template will not stop people from opening issues for ancient software full of bugs that have long been fixed. Time spent on telling people it's Mint's fault, is time not spent on making the actual app better and it burns devs out.

Again: This is an issue of Mint that GNOME devs shouldn't have to deal with to begin with.

All it would take is for Mint to replace a link.

That's it.

@SebinNyshkim @TheEvilSkeleton I completely understood the core issue. That's why I said "I assume the Mint maintainers won't change".

At some point you need to be pragmatic too. You can still ask Mint to change their behavior, while helping yourself at the same time, you don't have to suffer until they think it's relevant.

At least with a template and some information, triaging the issues will be easier.

@TheEvilSkeleton for OBS I understood it was also a problem with licenses, and fedora policies over providing certain codecs. Although it was also communication because I didn't read this, it was my interpretation in between the lines.

@TheEvilSkeleton Yeah I'm not saying the packager is right. But it helps to restate the context even if you think the packager might already be aware, it can clear up things and that packager may also be working on a million other things besides gnome-calendar.

@creak @SebinNyshkim @TheEvilSkeleton Mint ships libadwaita with some of their patches to ease themers (although libadwaita is perfectly themeable on its own). So the problem is clearly not with our platform library.

@SebinNyshkim @creak @TheEvilSkeleton

> they also have enough maintainers to carry the burden themselves once the software reaches EoL.

They don't. When GNOME 48 was released, it replaced Cantarell, our old font, with Adwaita Sans, i.e. Inter with one modification. They weren't able to include it in time for their release, because everyone was too overworked.

If they couldn't package font in time, I don't think it's a great sign. But that's just Linux distros being inherently unsustainable.

@TheEvilSkeleton @thelinuxEXP did a video about that yesterday:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1ebkQq5TcMw&si=sM8pZ51QWQ3EVIUI

@fun then my answer to that is simple: stop pushing your (Mint) issues onto us

I went ahead and edited the article to include a section of Mint downgrading GTK4+libadwaita versions of GNOME Calendar back to GTK3: https://tesk.page/2026/07/18/how-far-would-hostile-distributions-go-to-hurt-upstream/#addendum-past-visual-and-behavioral-changes-to-calendar-while-retaining-the-brand

And edited again to demonstrate potential license violation: https://tesk.page/2026/07/18/how-far-would-hostile-distributions-go-to-hurt-upstream/#addendum-2-potential-license-violation

Hopefully the first addendum should provide more context to why we're so annoyed by the situation.

@TheEvilSkeleton Like, I am not a fan of libadwaita and the general attitude towards theming within GNOME - as you know - but that doesn't mean I get to be an asshole. Properly fork the damn applications and make them work like you want to - theming, no CSD, whatever - instead of trying to ride the coattails of GNOME and profit from GNOME's name and marketing.