Emmanuele Bassi

Emmanuele Bassi GitLab profile picture

Emmanuele Bassi, who usually goes by the username ebassi, is a GNOME developer and a lead on the GTK team that is infamous on /g/ and used in memes as well as shitposts, especially from the GNU+Linux users and FOSS advocates, for having very controversial takes and toxic remarks regarding related software projects ~~as wells as being grown man that still plays with legos~~. Pejoratively referred to as ebussy on /g/. Usually mentioned during discussions involving the free software community, Linux, GTK, Gnome, the developers as well as maintainers of Gnome and similar devs, and more.

What /g/entoomen think of him

Why /g/ dislikes Ebassi

He is a Linux/FOSS programmer adept at C that is very high in the GNOME foundation that focuses mainly on GTK but contributes to a number of Gnome projects. Infamous for essentially acting like a Reddit or Discord mod and usually at or near the center of most GNOME and GTK's controversies and bad decisions. You won't hear this mentioned by sympathizers and shills on subreddits like r/linux and similar forums. Pretty much embodies the faggotry of GNOME devs (and to an extent some but not all FOSS/Linux devs like Red Hat and Wayland devs). He is that toxic developer that acts pretentious, always right, super politically correct in a performative manner, very authoritarian and hates good critical marks aimed at him or his software. Pretends everything in final product is near perfect and intentional. Removes features and snaps at people for suggesting useful new ones in the issues. Sometimes even tries to make you apologize for being "entitled". Usually asks for use case before saying the usual notabug, use case unclear, won't fix, etc then closes the issue. Rejects merge requests that fix bugs/add features because its not in a way of how he would implement it yet complains about the lack of contributors. That or the merge request sits for ages. Fragile ego and like a redditor uses "trolls" as an excuse to close issues/turns off replies whenever there is any pushback. Likes having behind the door meetings with other GNOME devs for changes he intends to implement like the recent proposal for GTK5 to remove X11 support because he is too fragile to have open discussions about it. Despite being an open source developer, along with the rest of GNOME, creates software that doesn't allow open ended choices and feels restrictive at times. Has this weird philosophy that his software must cling to (usually in the name of accessability) which comes at the expense of long overdue goals like proper API to support shell extensions and sometimes creates spaghetti code. Praises accessibility options and uses it as a woke sword and shield. GNOME devs and ebussy like to rally support especially after a controversial decision by praising it having the best a11y complaint digital accessibility on Linux and the fact that GNOME has a QA team. Also uses it to attack developers from smaller teams with critical opinions of GNOME or GTK like what happened during their beef with System76. Despite all that, dropping his mask numerous times displaying horrendous communication skills and horrible personality, somehow thinks he is just an innocent and humble developer who gets a lot of shit and mistreated by rogue, selfish users and desktop application developers. Who just happens to be intolerant towards intolerance and has spice towards bullies and "entitled" people. Admittedly, /g/ slightly overdoes it and sometimes uses him as a scapegoat at times for something someone else (usually within the GNOME foundation) did or said but he is still has an atrocious personality.

TLDR

Long story short, ebussy is a open source dev with a Reddit/Discord mod mentality. The archetype of programmer and lead developer that /g/ hates. Made worse by the fact that he is very high up in the Gnome foundation's hierarchy with influential development decisions over the direction and features that added or removed of Gnome and GTK.

is Ebussy based?

Some ponder, is he actually le based? Some shitpost and call him ebasedi. After all he removes ~~useful~~ useless features you don't need aka bloatware. BTFO of nocoders that keeping asking for features. Tells codelets to essentially "learn to code" and devs that use free software to get off their ass and actually contribute if they want thumbnails in file picker or playlists in music player. GNOME desktop doesn't suffer from *krashes*. Claims to be a husband so probably has wife and touches grass.

Controversies

Blurry text issue

Controversial reply to issue about blurry text

On March 25th 2021, a user opened an an issue on the GTK repo on GNOME's GitLab about text being blurry in GTK4. Matthias Clasen closed the issue, saying it is not a bug, and not a regression, but simply a change on font rendering. Jonathan Moerman disagreed with Clasen, stating that it being a change in font rendering doesn't mean it isn't a regression, and that with sharpness as a metric, the new font rendering is definitely worse. This sparked the infamous comment by Bassi; "What makes you think that sharpness is a metric?"

The issue was subsequently posted to /g/, where Bassi was mocked for his ridiculous comment, which completely ignores the fact that the user experience is degraded by the blurry text.

Fractional Scaling for HiDPI

Mostly a Wayland issue which also has GNOME tier devs but ebussy's interaction is still comical. User asks for HiDPI fractional scaling support and ebussy says that its not something the GTK toolkit itself can fix. Wayland then implements it. Another user asks again and ebussy and another maintainer freak out and tell him to add the feature himself.

Pop!_OS/System76 fight

Ebussy's response to Cosmic challenging GNOME

Many open source, Linux/BSD application developers had growing frustrations with the GNOME ecosystem around early to mid 2021. They were mostly upset with the many changes made in GTK4, the then coming GNOME 40, and libadwaita. Pop Shell, the customized shell of Gnome that comes out of the box on Pop!_OS would be affected. Jeremy Soller, one of the leads at System76 who is also the BDFL of an all Rust OS called Redox, and others publicly asked for some of the more commonly requested things like a better recoloring API, more control over theming, and some features that were dropped from GTK 3 only to be won'tfixed. Gnome and System76 devs fought for a bit on Twitter. GNOME as usual acted like everything was near pristine and that System76 and others were being toxic and just afraid of change. That broke the straw for many such as the Budgie team. System76 responded with original plans for a simple fork/alternative design of GNOME 40. Later on, in late 2021, they announced that plans changed and that they would be making their own Desktop Environment called Cosmic. In early 2022, they started making more blog posts that gave more insight into development. Showed off a little bit of its design which has a very close look and feel to their Pop Shell as well as gave a general time frame of when it would likely be ready for the public to test. They also decided to use the up and coming iced-rs, a widget toolkit for making GUIs written in Rust, instead of GTK with typescript or Rust bindings. This caused many fragile GNOME developers to immediately attack them. One Gnome dev pointed out the lack of accessibility options in iced, which was still relatively new, to try to push a narrative of them being ableists. Ebassi also chipped in and insulted them in GNOME's public Matrix server.