Recently sidux decided to completely change their logo which made every piece of sidux art I'd ever created obsolete and totally useless. Rather than let all that work go to waste (I hate to think how many hundreds of hours that was) I have converted all of it to debian art and closed the sidux section.
The decision to completely change the logo was done behind closed doors in secret dev channels with absolutely no discussion with the wider sidux community. They had apparently no concern for the implications that it had on the art community that had contributed so much when they decided to throw the baby out with the bath water. They didn't even consider it worthy of discussion and just sprung it on everybody without warning
This unfortunately has become the standard modus operandi for sidux. They claim to be a community distro but in reality it has become a pure autocracy where decrees are announced from on high and it's either cop it or leave. Well this little black duck has decided to leave. I am turning my back on it and putting the whole sorry affair behind me.
I should have seen this coming really. There were signs of how things were that began to appear quite early. Simple things like refusing to include something as tiny and simple as nano on the live disk regardless of how many people asked for it. The devs use vim so they didn't care that a lot of people didn't know how to drive vi and would like a simple editor like nano at their fingertips. They were happy with vim so nano was never added.
Then of course there was the fiasco with smxi. Smxi is a fantastic application that h2 maintains religiously on a daily basis adding rules that put holds on any packages that are troublesome and may break your system. When using Debian/unstable one has to do dist-upgrades regularly to keep all the libraries synchronised. As it is the unstable branch the chance of a dodgey package coming down the pipe is extremely high, smxi shielded most users from the inevitable dramas caused by this.
H2 insisted on keeping tight control over smxi which is totally understandable due to it's rapidly changing nature. That didn't go down well with the core sidux devs who have to control everything. Their response was incredible. They banned all third party scripts, closed all the threads on their forum (there was an entire section devoted to smxi which was the most used section on the site) and moved the section into archives. - But that wasn't the end of it by a long shot. They adopted a policy of "zero tolerance" on their IRC channel and began ruthlessly banning anybody that mentioned it. Even many of the old time sidux users found this outrageous calling it fascist behaviour and even nazi-like. Hardly the behaviour one would expect from a supposedly open community to an application that most of their users used and had relied on since sidux began.
It is sad the way that sidux has gone, it started with so many good intentions and ideals. Now it seems that hardly a day goes by without me hearing complaints about the way things are done and people declaring that they have had enough of sidux and are dropping it. It makes me wonder if the choice of a scorpion as their new logo was a subconscious reflection of the way things have become. It certainly is ironic that they have chosen a poisonous bug as their image to the world. I still chuckle thinking about it.
