Can you think of examples of larger Open Source projects, where the lead developers are perhaps too aggressive in pushing forward into some new, progressive future, that it takes a very long time, perhaps never, for everyone to catch up to?
What aphorisms, sayings or idiomatic phrases would you use to describe such moving-too-fast, overly-ambitious behaviour?
Which projects are the worst offenders here, would you say?
These are the examples in my life:
in the Gnome project there’s still a lot of lag for many GTK3 apps to even so much as catch up to GTK4
in Nextcloud, there are a lot of new ambitious features being aggressively added with every new release, when basic, foundational features are sometimes not as stable and rhobust as I’d like. Syncing problems can happen, or CPU-stuck-maxxing, through basic use of modestly-ambitious apps such as Notes, Deck and Bookmarks.
I would even say Plasma moves too fast. Some things finally work and then they break them again but I also think that this is a problem in FOSS in general. Some developers change stuff for the sake of change, at least I get this impression.
Gtk4 is a good example. There are still apps using Gtk2! I know some will say they did not port them in time but the train is really moving fast anyway.
I was trying my hand at some Android coding a few years ago. From what I recall, Google’s Android Studio was literally changing every few days. It uses Gradle and also an Android Emulator, both of which were also changing every few days. One thing or another seemed to constantly be broken, so it was tempted to always update. In the weeks that I tried it, even the basic templates for creating the skeleton of an application (classes provided by Google, to get started for Android development) wouldn’t compile. I gave up on Android because of that. Maybe again some time in the future…