To fork or not to fork

In general, it seems like a bad idea to “start over from a clean slate” in Open Source software. More wood behind fewer arrows seems like the way to go to avoid fragmentation, bike shedding and re-inventing wheels.

But one of the best things to happen to Node in the past few years was Bun and Deno. Node’s pace of improvement has increased dramatically once it got some real competition to be inspired by (.env support, test runner, watch mode, glob support, top-level await, require/ESM cross-import, single file bundle, Typescript support out of box, SqlLite, window shim, and stable fetch).

While I like the Gnome desktop project, they do sometimes feel a little slow in their rate of innovation & their openness to innovation. Merge requests that everyone’s pretty much on board with can be open for years. Maybe Cosmic desktop’s “fork” (technically re-build) and a little competition will speed them up like Node was sped up by Bun and Deno!