Wow! Well played indeed!

Your "desktop" isn't cryptic and touch to use: it just doesn't have the same feature set. The word "bloat" is the warning rattle that nature has given the incompetent to warn the rest of the world that their opinion has no technical basis and is, in fact, irrelevant.

If you hadn't been such an ignorant fool... You would have known that the name 'Baloo' was chosen by Vishesh Handa, who is from India. I guess he can be allowed to chose a name from India in any spelling he likes, right? Or is that colonialism too?

One of the hallmark problems of design-by-committee is that they extend languages for the sake of doing fun things, not because people need it.

While everyone needs containers (like vector/hashmap), nobody needs a simple graphics library. There is practically no hardware out there that doesn't have some sort of hardware accelerated graphics and simple operations just make no sense there.

So, my question really is why they are doing this? I'm betting the answer is not one where they have actual usecases in mind.

Qt has hundreds of committers from dozens of companies, if he can' t get his patches accepted, did you consider they were of low quality or in violation of the guidelines?

The Qt part left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, so I did some research of my own.

The first thing to notice is that a normal Qt application has no attack surface, there is no need for any part of the application to use elevated privileges. So what was his point? The presenter went with the assumption that some applications can be started as a normal user but get root rights by being installed as suid-root.

I don't understand why he would attack that idea. Having a GUI app started by any user run as root is not good security policy. Having your app run as root and linking it to multi-megabytes of library that is not hardened for such a case is just plain silly.

The answer of the Qt guys makes a lot of sense, the library is not meant to be run with different privileges as the user that started it. He should have gotten the point when the Qt security experts made the point clear with the plugins. If I can start an app as root from my normal user, and I can specify which styling-plugin to run, I essentially can tell it to run my code. As root.

So, I'm fully satisfied with the answer that Qt is not wrong, it doesn't have an attack surface unless the app using it is doing something stupid.

His security report is akin to blaming the vim authors that it is a security concern if you install it as suid-root. Its blaming the wrong person for introducing the attack surface.

ps. his quoted Qt code never occurs in any of the Qt5 codebase as far as I can find.

In the USA. Which is not the whole world... And it's probably not true in the whole of USA either.

Qt and Qt Creator is more than "decent". It's excellent. Especially when compared to Visual Studio -- and yes, I use both, professionally.

250k would pay for about fifty man-months of development. For Gimp, the problem is that they basically decided that money isnt going to help, when they messed up when Mark Shuttleworth promised them a stiffish bounty for getting high bit depth images working. But I agree, and if you can help me setup a way to get 250k, that would definitely accelerate Krita's development in a very significant way. We've already got quite a bit of experience with sponsored, full-time development.

Recording the voice... That would have been a recipe for disaster twenty years ago already when a Sinology teacher of mine at Leyden University in the Netherlands totally flipped out because a (disabled -- could not write) student recorded her lecture. She was violating her copyright!

"You're learning differential equations to prepare you for lifetime of abstraction, to sharpen your skills in symbolic manipulation." That sounds a lot like the reason people were once told to learn Latin and Greek -- it would prepare them for a lifetime of thinking. Me, I think it works. Make everyone go through a course that has enough hard enough things to do and keep the ones who get through. It's just that maths isn't anything special, or even of more practical use than Latin, it's just a way to distinguish between capable and incapable.

"In reality this is not the case, so applications DO use particular display/graphics system peculiarities and therefore there is a difference."

In reality, this actually _is_ the case. Applications DO NOT use particular display/graphics system peculiarities.

"it's easier for me to oppose their project loudly enough that it will sink" You don't have that sort of power. No matter how much you shout on slashdot or wherever, you won't be able to sink Wayland through your "opposition".

Well, you don't have any level of credibility either -- making a bunch of posts doesn't give you that. What have you, actually, done to achieve credibility? Have you run a 1000+ repo, 1000+ developer project for free? Have you, before filling this slashdot article with your "I-know-best-these-people-are-morons" posts acquainted yourself with the actual situation at hand? I am sure you have not, and you have no excuse. You have not bothered to find out things that are elemental before commenting, and there is no excuse. What, exactly, have you done with your life that makes you fit to judge?