long rant about etcs' (again) and partly also GNOME's lack of backwards compatibility; featuring my doomerism about future of European railways
I haven't ranted about anything really lately, so uh, I will go back to GNOME and a lack of ANY backwards compatibility, which is therefore a sheer incompetence of said devs. Do you know an industry where the absolute lack of backwards compatibility of systems means that everything is more expensive? It's most likely every single one of them, but I'll focus on railways, since it's very visible there nowadays.
ERTMS/European Rail Traffic Management System is supposed to make sure that any train and rail network in Europe are interoperable with each other, and able to compete with road and air transport, and ETCS/European Train Control System is a part of ERTMS.
But in reality, ERTMS is nothing more than a capitalist scheme made to profit two or three companies that make ETCS equipment, every single version of equipment is absolutely incompatible with any other version. Let's say, a train operating company has a bunch of trainsets that use old software versions on their ETCS equipment, but they can't use said equipment, because railway line they wanted to use ETCS on, has had its ETCS equipment installed very recently and it's way newer than the software on their trains. They can either:
- use national signalling system, which might not have as great safety systems as ETCS, but it works everywhere, however it could be illegal and/or require additional staff onboard (Poland moment);
- update the equipment, which is very costly and sometimes not actually worth it, or...
- they can't, because the equipment provider doesn't care at all, and the software isn't open source. Very reassuring huh?
And so they are stuck with a bunch of perfectly good trainsets that can't be used to their full potential.
How is all of this somehow related to GNOME, you might ask, the truth is i took it out of my ass /s; GNOME has this noble goal of creating a good looking, usable and accessible [citation needed] environment, which i think is quite similar to goals of ERTMS/ETCS, however the rejection of the idea that is any kind of even short-term backwards compatibility with old versions or extensions will inevitably backfire at one point, either by people moving off to a different piece of software that has the feature already built-in, if they haven't already, or, ultimately end up with a piece of software that isn't at all suited to all of their more important needs, because of capitalism and/or software devs being incredibly stubborn about adding anything that doesn't fit their agenda. I really want to use GNOME, I really do, but all this lack of various stuff that is common place in stock KDE (clipboard management, better window management and integration with KDE Connect [I do not take anti-KDE tribalism as an answer to this btw]) just doesn't cut it.
Back to ETCS and railway bullshit, recently, new regulations (TSI CCS) came into place, which along other things, now require that any used trainsets/locomotives that were bought after a said date, must have ETCS retrofitted regardless of what they will be used for. And as you might have already guessed, ETCS equipment isn't cheap at all, and might absolutely make that cheap used regional DMUs deal from Germany look not so cheap afterall, especially if the lines these DMUs would be used on, don't have ETCS, and don't have plans to be upgraded with ETCS any time soon. Company's other choices would be to:
- get EU funds and buy new, heavy and still expensive battery-powered multiple units, which might have all the problems of any first-generation product, alongside with potentially bad range;
- experiment with hydrogen powered units, but let's be honest, who's dumb enough to do this lmao, oh wait, why is this a thing???
- not get EU funds and somehow try to buy new diesel multiple units, which is frowned upon for some reason. This is something that ฤeskรฉ Drรกhรฝ are doing right now, by buying a lot of PESA Regio140 DMUs, branded as RegioFox-es
- wait/lobby for electrification of the lines (extremely unlikely, might not happen any time in next 2137 years, they will do either of the three options above, or try to get these used units running anyway if it is still cheaper and makes sense, and maybe wait for electrification anyway)
Obviously this is the bespoken interoperability, and ability to compete with road transport that EU is talking about: making every single thing extremely expensive, so much so that it's either not viable to get any trainsets at all, or companies will have to increase ticket prices to the point no one rides the trains anyway, and people are this way back to their 5 meters tall SUVs. Which then will lead to restricting railways to small and expensive S-Bahn-like networks that have lower frequencies than today, with a bunch of connecting lines that are in bad shape, so, pretty much, USA. I might be very negative about this, but that's how I ultimately see the future of European railways in next century: a fad of night trains, well, fading once again in next 15 years or so, high speed rail getting out of control with prices, and then neoliberal austerity coming back to the point of reducing railways to just agglomerations, with a bunch of very expensive and infrequent "express" alibizugs. If we haven't died because of climate change already, that is.
anyways, etcs is a system that should be reformed from ground up, and so is gnome(though that's kind of a thing already with cosmic, which i am rooting for)
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