Zed is very interesting. I know it.

Very recently, I found a fork of Zed that gutted the AI Assistant integration and Telemetry. I forked that, myself, and took it further: gutting automatic updates, paid feature-gating, downloading of executable binaries and runtimes like Node.js (for extensions that don’t compile to WASI), integration with their online services, voice-calling, screen sharing, etc.

My branch ended up down 140 000 lines^[1] of code and up less than 300! It was educational and the outcome was absolutely brilliant, to be fair. In all honesty, forking it and engaging in this experiment took less than 24 hours even though I restarted three times, with different levels of “stringency” in my quest.

This experiment was very realisable. Forking Zed and hacking on it was quite possible – the same cannot be said for just “forking Electron” or “forking VS Code” or even getting up to speed on those projects to the point of being able to fix the underlying issues (like this OP) and submit merge-requests to those projects. They have a degree of inscrutability that I absolutely could overcome but would not, unless I was paid to at my usual rates. (I have two decades of professional development experience.)

I shelved the effort – for the time being – for a few reasons I don’t particularly want to extenuate, today, but I shall continue to follow Zed very closely and I truly, deeply hope that there is a future in which I see hope (and, thus, motivation) in maintaining a ready-to-go, batteries-included, AI-free, telemetry-free, cloud-free fork.

Part of maintaining a fork would include sending merge-requests upstream even though I should hardly expect that my fork would be viewed favourably by the Zed business. But, from what I can tell, Zed seem to act true to the open-source principles – unlike many other corporate owners of open-source projects – and I see no reason (yet) to believe they would play unfairly.

I don’t see it as a “lol” matter.

The Electron project made an extremely stupid decision. Individual people who are left to wrangle with the fall-out and manage the PR have nothing but my utmost sympathy, as do all the down-stream projects (Signal, Discord, VSCodium…) who have to do the same. Even the developers of xdg-desktop-portal are facing unnecessary backlash because of this. Their release schedule and time-line for when org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser v. 4 could be reliably expected to exist in the wild was surely not kept in secret!

This doesn’t only affect Flatpak apps. The xdg-desktop-portal mechanism is used by many things. Even “gtk native” applications like Firefox use it when running on a correctly configured KDE environment and one of the nuances of this issue is that those applications – today – continue to work perfectly. Electron is not part of their stack.

I have flatpak on my desktop just for Steam and even flatpak’d steam still seems to work, correctly.

It’s a good question for the package maintainers.

In their defence: it isn’t a direct dependency, it isn’t advertised, and it is likely that the distro package maintainers just don’t know about it – Electron hardly announce that they chose to depend on something that they know isn’t released, anywhere, yet, and won’t be for months.

To lighten the mood, here’s a screenshot of one of the lowest points I achieved while hacking away, trying to resolve the issue: What even is going on, there?

• pixelated menu
• “Cancel” button at the top left??
• “Open” button at the top right??
• clearly Adwaita but not actually Adwaita as configured – the VSCodium window (behind) shows how Adwaita is actually configured on my system and that’s how all native gtk applications actually draw.

Taiga is too broad. I tried it out with all the best intentions and, quite simply, it is too big. It is too complex and complicated and feels extremely heavy to use.

From decades of professional experience, I know that all forms of planning are performed breadth-first and not depth-first. One jots down a bunch of titles or concepts and delves into them, fleshing them out and adding layers of detail afterwards. Taiga just doesn’t seem to facilitate that workflow.

It is focussed on fixed ideas like “epics” and “user-stories” and its workflow needs one to understand how your planning should fit into those boxes. I never work like that: I don’t know whether a line-item on a scrap of paper is an “epic” or a “story” or just destined to be an item in a bulleted list, somewhere within something else. I don’t want to have to choose what level of the plan the line-item fits before I capture it in my project tracker – I just want to type it up, somewhere, and be able to move it around or promote it or add stuff to it or whatever, later.

In summary: Taiga seems “fine” but just isn’t for me.

I know Bugzilla from the days of yore. I haven’t actually used it since about 2007, I estimate, and I’m happy to say that your post didn’t trigger any hyper-ventilation or other post-traumatic-stress reactions so I do appear to be recovering. 🙃

You are right, though: it is very classic. And libre.

I do like putting task-cards in columns and dragging them from left to right but I’m explicitly not going the Kanban route nor the Scrum route. I reject the prescriptivism that inevitably accompanies those “brand name” methodologies, even while I acknowledge that both methodologies do encompass several excellent ideas one might usefully borrow.

In fact, I always rather liked Trello simply because one could do whatever the heck one wanted with its boards – and the hotkeys were brilliant. (If I test out Planka, hotkeys will be evaluated for sure!)

Sadly, Trello devolved into and, yeah, I wouldn’t touch any Atlassian^[1] product with a barge pole, today, nor have I in years.

Ta. Along with Taiga – which is presently first in the queue to try out^[1] – I’ve added Planka simply because it looks so immensely and elegantly simple and down-to-earth. I shall not be surprised if Planka wins out from pure simplicity: that would be the same reason why I migrated my self-hosted environment to Gitea (from GitLab)

Planka actually looks to do precisely what I want where as Taiga appears to be an Eierlegende Wohlmilchsau. The latter is great when one actually wants wool, milk and pork, but I’m thinking I only want the eggs. ;)

I did know about the association with PenPot but hadn’t actually looked at that because that’s not what I’m seeking, presently. But, I did, now, and they are the same people and I also find it very reassuring to see this as No 1 in their FAQ, too:

Penpot is Open Source, and self-hosting Penpot will be free forever.

There are many recommendations in this thread – Wow! Thanks, Lemmy – but I think I shall begin with trialling Taiga, first, and report back on my findings.

I’m thinking to try Taiga, next, but not today. Their pricing page doesn’t seem to indicate that self-hosted instances will be limited and there are other overtly positive signs on their site, too.

Self-hosting is an option they openly promote on the landing page. If you use ctrl+f to search for self-host, you immediately find a link to documentation on how to do that.

Has anyone any experience of Taiga? Horror stories? (Save me time!) Or good recommendations are also welcome.