this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2025
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I don't really get why people try to block people from using the software when their problem is that they don't want to support it. Fix your support process if it's getting spammed by idiots. Block people there. Add a dropdown that makes you choose which OS you are using and tells the user that you won't support their distro if that's how you feel you need to gatekeep things.
It's not that I don't understand the frustration of dealing with idiotic support requests, or that I deny their right to stop packaging the software for a whole OS... but it always just feels so deeply misguided to me. Providing direct technical support is such a totally different thing from simply providing a best-effort attempt to build your software on a different OS or at least not getting in the way of people who do (by prohibiting anyone from building packages).
The logic behind these decisions escapes me, it's like moving to a different country and leaving everything behind because you went out in your shed and saw a spider in there, and then justifying it by saying you hate spiders and rarely used the shed anyway and it's just like... why? I get that you don't like spiders but lets be realistic it's not going to hurt you and if it really bothers you that much throw a bug bomb in there or something, it's a common and manageable problem whether you feel like it is or not, and you're not managing it in a remotely sensible way.
I have to disagree here thanks to one great and recent counterexample:
Remember OBS getting hammered by error reports that had already been fixed ages ago?
Fedora had a habit of building and distributing their own version of third party projects.
Fedora users were downloading OBS but they were getting the broken Fedora repackaged version instead.
No matter how many times OBS tried to get Fedora to change what they were doing, the Fedora devs wouldn't budge.
It led to OBS threatening legal action against Fedora:
See: https://gitlab.com/fedora/sigs/flatpak/fedora-flatpaks/-/issues/39#note_2344970813 Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJJvq3dpylM
Fedora finally started listening to application devs after that.
Podcast interview discussing resolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKP1hgdFJKo
Now for Duckstation it's a similar thing.
Arch (AUR) has a borked distribution that they're linked to instead of the official version.
The one difference is that OBS has financial support from paid streaming software that uses OBS as a base, whereas Duckstation doesn't.
Which means that Duckstation doesn't have the financial backing to legally compel Arch to drop their borked distribution.
So their only recourse is to make a public appeal saying if this isn't fixed, I'm dropping support entirely.
Entirely understandable.
This is not the same as the Fedora OBS situation. Duckstation is now under a CC by no derivatives, non commercial clause.
Packaging software can be considered making a derivative, so people can't really legally package the latest version of Duckstation anymore.
Instead, the packages use the older GPL version*.
In theory, nothing would stop Fedora flatpak from simply shipping the OBS version in their own repo instead. But here, something like that isn't legally possible.
To add further context, it is theorized that this developer**, Stenzek, is actually an alt account of Talreth, the creator of the android PS2 emulator. Both accounts have a pattern of creating a discord, and then being unwilling/unable to moderate it (or appoint any other moderators).
So Talreth got harassed on discord, because the audience of an android ps2 emulator is mostly children, many of whom are ungrateful. And it ended with Talreth's final update to Aethersx2 being a borking update that broke the emulator for everyone.
And that is why I would rather not use the official version of duckstation. I'm not interested in seeing my home directory get nuked because some kid called Stenzek a slur on the discord.
And this is what distros exist for. They act as a barrier, betweem potentially hostile developers and the users. For example, when Audacity added telemetry, all the distros would patch it out when they compiled it.
*Afaik, he did either get permission to relicense, or rewrite GPL contributions of others. The latest version of Duckstation does not illegally use GPL code.
** In r/emulationonandroid, I have been following this drama for a while. A long while. The less mature community seems to be drama prone and it sucks.
EDIT: Found the reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/EmulationOnAndroid/comments/11q726j/do_not_update_aethersx2_on_google_play_i_repeat/ . It's not truly broken, but it did get ads and performance was made much worse.