I used to volunteer for the FSF and I can't agree with that at all. The FSF is politically/socially irrelevant and GNU has largely failed and been relegated to an extreme niche. The "free software movement" as it stands is still a reactionary movement, a desire to go back to the good old days when hardware vendors also wrote all the software and shipped the source code along with their products. It's just not a realistic goal.
It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.
To me that just further illustrates the point that GNU failed. I mean it's right there in the name, it's supposed to be "GNU's not Unix" but the only parts anyone actually uses are clones of Unix that get used on a different Unix-like operating system (Linux) which is not GNU. And the desktop environments also don't have anything to do with GNU. IIRC the only official desktop environment of GNU is GNUstep, which I don't even think is actually packaged by any distros at the moment.
Come on now, that is a pretty big stretch. And it's not even true, coreutils and glibc implement a lot of SysV and BSD compatibility. My point here is that GNU as an operating system is dead. People can make up some new goals for it but it seems obvious that the original goals have mostly been a failure. Even if you disregard Hurd and count the "FSF approved" Linux distributions, few people actually use those because most of them are just ordinary Linux distributions but with the only major change being that some proprietary packages and drivers are removed. Is that really adding value to the software ecosystem? I personally wouldn't recommend those to anyone beyond hardcore GNU nerds, for most people I'd still say just use Ubuntu.
Yes the desktop environments are still using GPL but those are already established projects, not growth areas. For newer projects it seems there is a shift away from copyleft towards Apache-style licensing. The newer copyleft licenses (GPL3, AGPL) just haven't gotten that good of a reception. And in the areas I've seen that do use them it seems it's despite the FSF, not because of them, for example the FSF seems to have completely given up on license enforcement or helping with anything in that area.
"The issue I dislike the entire GNOME project with it's software and philosophy is their mentality of treating users as idiots, removing options with false motives and attempting to impose their shit on other projects and application(refusing to support standard system tray and demanding all application use the GNOME way, refusing to support server side decorations and forcing all other applications, including old unmaintained ones to change to support GNOME)."
I don't understand any of these comments. There is actually a real design process that happens in GNOME. It's not just removing things because they think users are idiots. We can talk about issues in the process but I don't think your characterizations are fully correct here.
When it comes to things like the system tray and decorations and such, I don't know what you mean by imposing. If you build apps for KDE then you are going to build them "the KDE way" using KDE APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. If you build apps for iPhone then you are going to build them "the iPhone way" using iOS APIs, which includes certain things and excludes others. And so on. So I don't understand why you could single GNOME out for this. If you don't like their way, they you can go build an app for KDE or iOS or whatever. I can't see how anyone is being forced to change anything to support GNOME.
Qt apps actually integrate great with plenty of hosts. VLC, Krita, Kate, Kdenlive, etc. work great on Gnome & XFCE & Cinnamon & LXDE & Mate and on Windows and Mac too, and of course on KDE. Maybe not native great but still great (in a world of Electron apps, I no longer expect apps to integrate native great). Gnome apps look bad anywhere other than Gnome. They look bad even on other GTK based DEs like Mate or Cinnamon.
Really? I don't mind how GNOME apps look on KDE. I agree it doesn't look or feel "native" but I find them to be just as usable as they would be if they were used in GNOME. But in any case Qt is intended as a cross-platform toolkit. GTK is not really intended to be that, it is its own thing.
Edit: Actually part of the problem might be your theme. In XFCE/KDE/etc you probably want to disable the theming for GNOME apps and just use Adwaita, in my experience GTK themes have never really worked well with GNOME apps for various technical reasons. However I think in the coming years libadwaita will improve the situation.
I've never heard that, I don't think GTK has ever been intended as that. It has been intended to be portable to other platforms, but even when it was only GIMP using it, it was intended as a Linux/Unix first type thing.
I agree, though it's worth noting that GTK apps (particularly GTK2/3+, not necessarily GTK4/libadwaita) tend to behave and look pretty normal on any desktop that enforces a native-looking stylesheet. GNOME apps, however, do tend to look quite alien, even on their own desktop many times. Not quite sure what the disconnect is there.
I accept your criticism but I still find your comment to be unconvincing, if you have reason to believe some statistics (such as 5% users) are faked, then it would be helpful to show:
1. Evidence of that
2. Other more accurate statistics that do show it affects more than 5% of users
3. An explanation as to why 5% is a meaningful threshold. Why shouldn't it be lower? Higher?
4. Suggestions on how to reduce workload if it's too much work or it's too hard
Or any other data that you think could back up the conclusion. I understand that this is not easy to do. But if it's not done, then it will continue to be a battle of egos as you describe, and that's not helpful. You don't have to stop complaining but in my experience it pays off to always improve your complaints and make sure they're done in a fully convincing manner. It also helps to avoid insults and personal comments about others, those just distract from the issue. It pays to make sure your complaints are as fact-based as possible. In a big project the original person who made the decision may not even be there anymore, so it's really everyone else that you need to convince.
Edit: And please don't just show them to me, show them to the stakeholders who matter and can get things done. I may think some of your info is interesting but that's about as much as I can do, I am not the person you need to be convincing and neither are other random commenters on social media. I get that it's fun to rant on social media but the real hard work doesn't happen there.
OK, so when someone says we removed X feature, or you should do X like we want because is OUR vision, then I think I do not need to bring evidence that this is EGO based and not fact based.
About the percentage based excuses, there are several issues:
1 this big ego projects never shown the statistics/telemetry data so I can't prove them wrong since I am not the one that has the data.
2 it is easy to lie with statistics (or studies) so you need to keep an open mind when the source of the statistics is the big ego person and this statistic is supporting his point.
3 I bet that Chrome dev tools are used by less then 5% of users but you don't see the big ego dude removing those super complex features and moved them into a dev version of Chrome only. Why is a super small option super important for this designer person but this super complex and scary and not cool looking feature is there in the menus for a random clueless users to open? The stats are only used when the dude wants to impose his vision.
Complaining is important, see Apple new laptop changes, the big ego designers forgot to do actual UX and test with real users/customers and that costed Apple a lot of time. I understand that for open source project I can't apply same demands for good UX research with real users but GNOME has the money from RedHat and it's toxic community forced it as default on distros over DEs with actual real UX research.
Conclusion, I as a simple user that just tested Chromium I can't open a ticket and put in it real world data to maybe convince the big ego dudes that are wrong, I can at most put a me too there and get ignored for decades like the File Picker GNOME meme issue, and I will probably get spammed each time an upset user will add it's me too comment and the developers repeat again "you are using it wrong".
But I use Chromium/Chrome as minimum as needed, I avoid GNOME and the entire Linux community social media , just the comment I responded was complaining about X and Y browser and I added the Z browser there too to complete the list, and I was salty sicne the solution is to install some "chrome extension" to fix it - it reminds me of the install a GNOME extension excuse too.
Sorry, I'm not saying that what they're saying isn't ego-based. I really don't know because I wasn't there for the conversation. What I'm saying is, the only way you can shift it from being ego-based to being fact-based is to present those facts that show the right way, or at least find a way to change the conversation into being headed in that direction. Just calling out ego-based behavior isn't enough. To me this has applied to every professional situation, it's how to keep any meeting on-track and avoid having coworkers getting into fights about egos. If you don't have the data then it's going to be hard to make a convincing argument, I don't know a good solution to this unfortunately. It requires real work and you may have to get creative. At a big company often the most convincing argument you can make is that a decision will save X amount of dollars, so you can start from there. For a volunteer open source project you will have to find out what else really motivates the developers and then go from there.
Apple I think is a good example. It only mattered to Apple when it cost them a non-significant amount of resources. Ultimately they are a company and they respond to profit, if people buy or don't buy the product then that's the strongest fact that will influence them. Also I think it is a misconception that GNOME has a lot of money from Red Hat. They don't really from what I've seen, most of the Red Hat people I know are pretty strapped for time. I also have no idea what you mean by forced it as default. Distros don't have to choose it, I've seen many distros that choose other things or just don't have a default. If you mean things like Ubuntu, IIRC they chose to retire Unity and go with GNOME because Unity wasn't profitable for them. So with companies it always comes back to that...
I also don't really think it is useful to call out people for imposing their vision. On a certain level, everyone who builds things is doing that. They have their point of view and that's the only thing they can express, because well, what else would they express? If they expressed your point of view all the time, then they wouldn't be themselves, they would be you. It's possible to change someone else's vision but that's usually done by presenting new information, i.e. convincing facts.
- GNOME forced on people, the things that come to mind was pushing of tech like Wayland that makes it hard for little DEs. As for the default I remember clearly a giant anti_unity mob , there were some big Youtube channels giving Ubuntu and Linux a chance and the GNOME fanboys popped up in chat and convinced the dudes to purge Unity and install GNOME, this was idiotic because it was not a correct procedure so they created a broken Ubuntu and gave Linux a bad image.
About the "vision" comment, at my work there is always a support team, they get feedback from users and we never give a response "it is our designer vision or our dev leader vision that things are like this". The differences are that
1 we care for each and even one of our users so we never say "go use our competitors because we don't care about your problem"
2 we do not have a big birocracy or a tyrant with a big vision, so we can think for ourselves, propose solutions and implement them. Sure it happen that later the designers demand we simplify the GUI but we know that each complex feature is still used by some power users and w propose ways to keep it in, but more hidden so designers don't complain.
Maybe GNOME does not have enough money for their big ambitions but they have a lot more then other DEs.
My summary would be, vision is fine in your hobby toy project, GNOME, Chrome, Apple's OSX are not toys, if you do a radical change only based on a dudes vision IMO you are doing it wrong, you forgot about the users and are only thinking at your ego/CV.
I don't understand what GNOME using Wayland would have to do with any other DEs, those DEs don't really have to use Wayland if they don't want. Although they probably should for technical reasons. Also I don't think any youtube videos were a particularly big factor in the decision, Mark Shuttleworth said it was because of money: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/why-did-ubuntu-drop-unit...
"About the 'vision' comment, at my work there is always a support team, they get feedback from users and we never give a response 'it is our designer vision or our dev leader vision that things are like this'."
Yeah you may not actually say those words exactly but I've many times heard support staff essentially state the same thing. They might say "sorry the product is not designed to do that" or "we don't sell that here", e.g. if you go to a car dealership and what you really want to buy is a helicopter, they will say sorry we don't sell flying cars, these cars were not designed to fly. Maybe they don't use the word "vision" but it's all the same, if you decide you are going to build a car a certain way then you have to stick to that, once you decide to add helicopter blades then it's a different product for a different market. So you could just exchange the word "vision" with "plan" if that helps to understand it.
For a big project, yeah, they can obviously afford to do more and to put more features in a product but they still have to draw the line somewhere.
Your example with cars is flawed when you are talking about
1 having the thing but hiding it for Windows or Linux users because "vision"
2 having the thing, everyone else having same thing but you remove it because of vision.
So is not about just 1 dude demanding Gnome or Chrome to add say something weird like "vim" keyboard support , but many users asking something basic present in similar products and in previous version of same product or for the Chrome issue I mentioned the feature is visible but only on Mac.
Btw I appreciate our conversation, is refreshing to disagree with someone that puts effort int he comments and is maintaining respect, thanks
EDIT: about wayland, we will have to disagree, in my opinion Wayland could have been implemented much better like
1 have a protocol
2 implement this protocol and share the implementation with all DEs, like Xorg , so only say Rust guys could have a go and create their own version in their cool language
3 define the extensions and implement them, not do "X11 did this but it is stupid, it is not our job, go figure it out yourselves"
I don't really know the details of this but for some things it is non-trivial to ship even small changes on other platforms, even those will have to go through full dev-test cycles which takes time and money. About removing things, I don't know, I had a car once that had some really nice cupholders. Really deep and exactly the right size, exactly at the right height for the arm. My current car doesn't have them and I can't find any cars that have that were quite as good as that. They just stopped making them. If that's not "vision" then what is it? I mean somebody has to make the decision of how to make the new cars. There is also the question of, do I value cupholders over everything else in the car? Would I buy a car with terrible steering if it meant the good cupholders? If I could get the good cupholders in any car would I pay an extra $3000 or however much the dealership charges? I think probably not but it really depends. So there's many factors at play here.
Edit: Or say maybe I am a startup founder and I design and build my own car exactly how I want and turn it into a company. It's perfect for me but then someday I get bored of driving my car and I retire. Then I hire someone else to design the cars and pass responsibility on to them and they change some stuff. Well, now the cars are different and everyone pretty much has to accept it because the original designer is gone, and as much as people liked the old one, nobody else can really copy them exactly because it was really their personal vision that made it what it was.
For Wayland, I think all of that is happening already? There is somebody making an implementation in Rust. They did try to make a shared implementation (Weston) but it turned out that people didn't actually want that, they preferred to write their own implementations.
It is software, in Chrome case is just a simple popup, the code is there and it only is visible for OSX because the platform forced the vision guy's hand. The bullshit excuses that is hard to code and test and maintain do not work here.
Also excuses do not work even if valid if you destroy your users workflow, you don't remove system tray, server side decorations and just tell your users to find replacement applications because the ones they use do not conform to the GNOME vision.
Again, if is not a toy you target some users, is your duty to listen to this users and not to impose your vision on them, I am upset when there is no actual testing/research involving actual users and real world work, say when you test your app with "hello world" simple workflows that fail in real world with real users, or you make your app look cool on your expensive screen but looks like shit on real users hardware.
But you are right, GNOME has decided they don't want a part of the users and they are cultivating the perfect GNOME type user, a user that adapts to the software and not the reverse.
I don't know what you mean bullshit excuse. Everything has a cost to test and maintain. It doesn't help to say that it's bullshit if nobody has done a real cost analysis. Remember that this is something that has to be maintained for years. If some bugs occur in it later and it has to be removed again then the users will be upset again so it's not really useful for us to say just ship it and don't test, that's what we want to avoid. Yes, you and I could guess what it costs but that doesn't carry as much weight as somebody who actually works on it full time doing their cost analysis.
I get your frustration about your workflow but I'm still upset about my cupholders :) For the system tray and server side decorations, there are technical reasons for those to have gotten removed. Their existence may enable some workflows but it also breaks some other workflows so that's not an area where everyone can win. And if you want to bring them back then I can guarantee you that's not just a matter of flipping a switch, there is real work that needs to be done there and it won't happen if nobody is willing to pay the cost. It doesn't really make sense to blame volunteers for not being able to afford that either when this is something that's so expensive that the bigger contributors like Red Hat don't even want to pay for it.
Your DE has 10 features and 10 users, we decide we remove any feature that is only used by 1 or 0 users.
We look around and find that
1 feature F1 is used only by user U1 , we remove F1 and we push user U1 to go away.
2 feature F2 was used by 2 users but now that U1 left , F2 is used only by 1 user, so we remove F2 and kck out the user U2 , we left with 8 users now from 10 and 8 feature
3 feature F3 was used by 3 users including U1 and U2 , but since we kicked this 2 users ut only U2 left using it , so now we remove F3 , kick out user U3 (U3 regrets now that he was a dick to U2 and U2 accusing them of beeing snowflackes and using it wrong)
4 ... repeat until you reamin with 2 users, the designer and the developer (the dev uses other DE on his personal machine anyway)
My second point, GNOME team should just pause and reflect at Apple, see that vision without a connection with users is wrong, Apple has sales numbers and other ways to detect when their big ego vision dude has messed up but GNOME needs to reflect (not change, not implement features just reflect), are we going to far? how do we know when our vison dude has gone too far since we don't have sales number and shareholders keeping the bullshit in check?
There is a chance that GNOME vision is wrong and it can take much more years then it took Apple to do the "courageous" thing and undo the stupidity and replace the vision individual.
For GNOME I guess you could say it's the same way but they are more after volunteer contributions, not money. So they will make changes that tend to increase the contributions, sometimes it's a trade-off i.e. do we make this change to lose 5 contributors but gain 10 contributors in other areas. They're tough decisions to make, and nobody likes to be the one to tell angry users that their workflow is breaking.
I don't think that the ego dudes do this calculation, just use it to pretend they have a motive.
Since I stopped using GNOME i switched to KDE and a few years back Plasma also had a big ego dude in charge, we had similar issues there with the Plasma vision , one example is
- removing the cachew ugly widget, the dude refused to give us the option to hide it even if we contribute the 3 lines patch ... but guess what the cachew is gone or hidden by default now ... my point is that I have an example that is not GNOME where big ego caused issue and when big ego person left things were solved.
My experience contributing to small KDE project was great though, there was no big vision people that needed to approve a feature or adding a new menu, the maintainers were developers that were happy to help the users, help debugging and were super happy to receive bug fixes and improvements.
I would conclude(but without serious evidence) that big projects with big visibility will attract the individuals with big ego, like Plsama or GNOME , the big ego people will be attracted to this very visible projects so they canpush their vision into many peoples faces/lives.
But on the other hand if GNOME can double they contributors at the same time they lose half of the users is a metric they prefer then I hope they got their contributers, though by the number of GNOME forks that appeared it is possible their contributors got fragmented too.
To me it helps to think of it like debt, if they get a lot of money (or contributors or whatever) and lose users in the process then that can be re-invested to acquire more users at a later date. The GNOME forks I have seen don't really have a lot of developers, same thing with the KDE/Qt forks.
I don't really have any other comments on "ego guys", every maintainer has their own style. I have seen leadership with a strong vision work for some projects but not work for others.
So the issue would be if the community/team can control the ego person to prevent serious damage.
About GNOME forks, they don't need many developers, they just need enough to fork the shell UX so it screws with the vision of the GNOME team, you still won't get the missing features but you get a different experience because GNOME refused to give you options to customize stuff.
I think Ubuntu were fixing soem of GNOME problems for their users but still give you the option for a vanila setup but I don't know what happened in recent years, is Cinemon still continuing? Pop os was forking GNOME but I read here they jumped on the Rust hype so I expect a lot of disappointment when their DE will not be faster,cooler and bugs free.
In my experience, it's not really seen as being good form to raise major criticism about the design unless you have some standing with the designers, drive-by comments don't really help a whole lot as the person may not be making the comments with full knowledge of what the goal and target user is. If they wanted their feedback to be heard, I think it would help to start in smaller areas and then work up from there.
The reason the widgets take up a lot of screen space is for accessibility reasons, I think the article mentions how this is a good thing :)
macOS, e.g., achieves the same level of accessibility without wasting screen space, without hamburger menus, and without aesthetic mistakes.
In my view, the Gnome 3 designers came off as arrogant beginners, dismissing any criticism - even from well known designers - as the ramblings of people stuck in the past. I'd call that bad form as well. I haven't been up to date on this the last years and really hope things have changed for the better and that the Gnome 3 people display more maturity.
That's a pretty arbitrary yet general accusation that I'd find hard to believe about any group of people. Surely there are both arrogant and non-arrogant people in any community, GNOME included.
From my time contributing to GNOME (in the 2.x series), I haven't found many arrogant people at all, but times have changed, surely, and I don't know who gets attracted to work on GNOME today.
I also find your use of "well known designers" to be a signal that there's some arrogance you (or those other designers) might have displayed. Most of the "well known designers" are unable to accept the reality that heavily translated software needs to support a button "Cancel" that may turn into 100 characters in a translation (I am exaggerating a bit, but some things can turn shorter and others can turn massively longer in a good translation — good design should accommodate both and not require translation to become worse).
Not sure how often you were involved in running a popular free software project, but "drive-by opinions" are in abundance. GNOME has long prided itself on being a meritocracy, where merit to GNOME is what's valued. Jony Ive would not get extra points if he wasn't investing enough time into GNOME proper to give him a holistic view of the platform.
But the most important part of GNOME being a meritocracy is that you need to convince developers of a need to redesign something, not other designers: GNOME is not a company, it's a collection of individuals sharing _some_ goals.
I am guessing whatever opinions were shared were also shared without backing studies or user testing showing significant improvement in the UX without regression in other parts.
I think "well-known" is pretty relative, don't you? It's great if some people have a twitter presence or something like that but if they are not well-known within a certain project then it's not going to help much. I don't think it's useful to assume that everybody knows a person, even within our industry. Or if they do know of the person, they may not know what it's like to work with them, etc. So you have to approach it one step at a time like any relationship.
To use macOS in the same way you would probably turn the screen scaling up to get a similar amount of screen real estate :) And to me at least, the global menu in macOS causes other accessibility issues, I've seen hamburger menus done right and they aren't so bad. But the application has to be designed to use them correctly.
I remember reading some good jokes about that a while ago.
- GNOME's logo is a huge footprint, but it is not clearly established whether it is a huge memory footprint or a huge disk footprint.
- It has been theorized that the logo was originally slated to have two footprints, but the developers found having 2 feet to be an unnecessary feature.
I don't think the GTK team is all that bad, the majority of them are solid people with a good head on their shoulders. It seems that GNOME is where they sent the self-righteous loonies though.
"I can near-perfectly recreate Mojave with extra bells and whistles"
I think the GP comment addressed that, e.g. "don't compare it to macOS". In my experience, GNOME is best if you don't try to fight with it and don't try to install a bunch of extensions. You have to adapt your personal workflow to it, not the other way around. If you come in expecting to use a macOS workflow exactly as it is then yeah, you would be disappointed, I think that's a case of missed expectations.
Don't cast aspersions. I did have a setup that I enjoyed with GNOME, but then when 40 came it was broken. I'm complimenting KDE for it's flexibility, which is something GNOME objectively lacks.
And please stop responding to my comments. You've already shown yourself to be incapable of discussing problems with me in earnest, I have no intention of replying if you're just going to point the blame back at me without addressing the ways GNOME can improve.
The thing is, I agree with you mostly, KDE is much better if you want to do a "build your own desktop" type of things. I don't know that GNOME really has any interest in filling that niche when KDE already does it so well. For me at least, I don't think I would try to fight that uphill battle trying to add that to GNOME, it would be a lot easier just to contribute to KDE. I'm making an honest effort to reply to you in earnest. I don't think it is fair to the reader for me not to respond if I have an answer to some of the frustrations you have expressed. On another site I would say just block me, but on here you may have to ignore my comments if you don't want to continue the conversation.
My point is: If you relied a lot of extensions, it seems likely that was the source of your troubles. We can discuss how to improve the extensions, if that's what you're interested in. Or we can discuss KDE, whatever you want.
I have explained why I can't do that, I also think that stopping would be against the HN guidelines:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Even as we disagree, I'm making an honest effort to make my comments more thoughtful and substantive, I ask that you please extend the same courtesy. If you think there is something incorrect with my comments then the best way to deal with that would be to present more information that could change my mind, not shut the discussion down.
Edit: And I have not pointed the blame back at you. I mentioned what the source of your problems likely was, that doesn't mean it's anyone's fault. If you want to discuss real solutions then let's do that, but please let's do it objectively and without casting blame.
I've already made my point: GNOME used to be my favorite desktop, now it is my least favorite. Over the past 4 comments I've suggested several reasons for why this might be, none of them hateful towards the GNOME project in any way. The only antagonist has been you, the person insisting that the issue is with me, not the desktop: that somehow, by removing features and breaking functionality that worked fine, it's my fault for not assimilating into your common idea of a desktop. As I can see by scrolling through your comment history, it looks like a lot of people share my sentiment. I will give you one final explanation before completely forgetting about you altogether. I'm done entertaining your time-wasting, gas-lighting nonsense, and I'm not going to let you play Mr. High-road to help you feel better about patronizing someone on Hacker News.
- GNOME's philosophy and leadership is overtly, undeniably authoritarian. They lock people out of using apps by refusing to distribute via any method other than Flatpak, they lock down their desktop to make it harder for modders to do what they want, and they completely ignore their power-users who prefer more options and functionality. On top of that, their "my way or the highway" approach is completely user hostile, further evidenced by arguments like this, where you refuse to take notes and offer genuine solutions for the needs of the user. For everything that GNOME copies from Apple, "you're holding it wrong" should have been left on the cutting room floor.
- GNOME's featureset is encroaching on basic system functionality, which has not only proven to be a pain in the ass, but it's actually counter-intuitive to basic UNIX functionality. Efforts like dconf have legitimately done nothing for this community, yet their dumpster-fire glow can be seen for miles. As a developer, trying to conform to the GNOME spec is pointlessly complicated and ultimately meaningless. I still write everything with GTK3 and zero GNOME conformance just as a middle finger to the direction they're headed in. Plus, GNOME's dependencies are bloated, only exacerbated by projects like Flatpak that containerize and further bloat the runtime. There have been a plethora of font-related issues since pango was 86'd, and no shortage of graphical issues on both Wayland and x11. It's crazy to me that the GNOME desktop has had one of the ugliest transitions to a window server they've been advocating for years.
- GNOME has just been regressing. Tools that used to work, like Glade, now do not. Extension stability has gotten worse, which is a shame since extensions are undeniably a part of GNOME. You can tell me that they're unsupported, you can shout at me for using them, but if your users have to create their own custom modding options for your desktop, is that not a signal that you're feature-incomplete? How do you look at that and interpret it as everyone else's fault, because they were never supported in the first place. Same goes for user themes, shell patches and tweak tools. They are all a testament to the fact that people want to extend GNOME, so your next logical step should not be blocking them out. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me QT apps were unsupported because they're "not a part of the overall GNOME vision."
- GNOME's got people like you. What do I mean by that? It's not an insult, but I feel like if I don't explain this to you I'll be persecuted until the end of time. When interacting with the community, your job is not to refute other people's complaints. Your job is to listen, and see where people disagree with your philosophy. You cannot pretend like there aren't pain-points in GNOME, so trying to delegitimize other people's experiences will only frustrate them and drive them away. THIS is how people really start to despise the GNOME desktop. If I level a complaint about KDE, XFCE, or hell, even the goddamn Elementary desktop, I generally get a thoughtful response with someone showing me how to resolve the issue, or pointing to an upstream patch that fixes it. Apparently, some people care about maintaining a usable desktop. You can call things like thumbnails in the filepicker inconsequential, but don't come crying to me when you can't understand why people have an irrational hatred of your desktop. The issue starts with attitude, and the culture of GNOME is quite obviously not improving. No amount of CoC pull requests can fix that, especially when project leaders are flying off the handle at System76 for trying to improve on their desktop. It's a horrible look.
I really hope you reply with a long-winded essay in the name of saving face. I really hope you ignore everything I've written like you ignored my simple request for you to stop. At this point, I feel like my assumptions have been reinforced: I still have yet to meet a GNOME developer who was not insistent on being right and harassing people with legitimate criticism. You've seen my comments: I've spent far too much effort trying to be constructive, when all I'd be told in the end is that it's my fault for not using it right. Why bother? Why even have these discussions if we're just going to end them with a pointless us-vs-them fight where you ultimately tell me to stop using GNOME if I disagree. The least you could do is point me in the direction of someone who's capable of making change, because fighting like this wastes both of our time. Yet, you hunt me down on every comment as if my opinion is haram, and needs to be struck down with links to desktop's philosophy or whatever. I don't care. I simply need a computer that does the job: GNOME doesn't do it anymore.
So, all your assumptions about me are completely wrong, and you've also posted a number of things that are incorrect. Please avoid making assumptions about other people that you don't know, it's extremely rude. You are grouping me in with other people that I don't agree with and it's not fair to me. I am not a GNOME developer nor am I insisting that the issue is with you, nor am I hunting you down. I am simply commenting on HN threads about my interests, as are you. We happen to be both be interested in this, is it fair for either one of us to try and shut the other out of the discussion? I don't think it is. If somebody else made a similar comment as you I would also comment on that as I have done in several other comments here. I am not interested in refuting your complaints, nor am I interested in delegitimizing pain points in GNOME, I could list a number of my own pain points if you wanted me to.
Also I could actually go through each one of your issues and mention what you may have missed, or ways that one of us could help improve or fix things, and I can actually point you in the direction of people who can make change. You've mentioned some real pain points and you deserve an answer for those, if that's what you really want. But you have to stop attacking me here, and I would need assurance from you that you would actually read them. I would also really appreciate an apology for all the false things you just said about me, that hurts my feelings. I'm a real person, I get upset, so please just remember that. It's not fair to take out your frustrations with some other developers on me. Edit: If you want me to start, I'll apologize first. I'm sorry that my previous comments were taken badly. I didn't mean them that way.
Anyway I was thinking about this and I decided I want to respond to some of your comments to correct some of the wrong information in them. This isn't for me, it's for the reader who might get the wrong idea, and it's for you in case you change your mind and decide you want to discuss this. If you don't want to believe me and you still think I'm doing this just to be a smug jerk and make myself look good, well, I'll say it right out. I don't matter, I'm not a person of importance, I'm not here to promote my projects or my company or my blog or my twitter or anything. I only comment here to help people and help resolve the technical issues. That's it. I don't care how you think this makes GNOME look because I don't represent that project, if you take my comments as some kind of slight against something else unrelated to what I'm saying then that's on you. It's none of my business if you've got an axe to grind, I can only try to mitigate the damage. I'm going to avoid the personal stuff because I think I already responded to those.
"GNOME's philosophy and leadership is overtly, undeniably authoritarian."
This is totally wrong, GNOME explicitly doesn't have any BDFL or CTO or anything like that. It's more of an old school open source community like that. KDE is structured much the same way. The way it works is that the maintainers of each individual project are pretty much empowered to do whatever they want. Yes, this means they have authority of their individual projects. No, it does not mean they are enforcing that authority on you or they will never collaborate with anyone. A consensus has to be reached, if you don't want to deal with that then you still can do whatever you like with the project and the code, that's the point of open source. You could later collaborate with upstream or spend your volunteer time however you like really, what you can't do is boss anyone else around and tell them what to do with their volunteer time. As you've noticed, they probably won't take kindly to that. And I've personally experienced that on every project when you reach their limit: for example if you went to KDE and said "I don't like this, rewrite it in Java and make it more like GNOME" they probably wouldn't be too keen to take that suggestion. So I don't think you're being charitable when you try to label GNOME in this way.
"They lock people out of using apps by refusing to distribute via any method other than Flatpak"
This is totally wrong, pretty much every distro I've seen is shipping GNOME apps. I think there is a misconception here that GNOME (or KDE, or any desktop really) has anything to do with distro packages. They never have, that's up to the distro to handle. You can help out here by doing the packaging for your distro, if the app is open source then nobody can lock you out from doing that.
"they lock down their desktop to make it harder for modders to do what they want"
This makes no sense to me, the code is all open source. For me it has been fairly trivial to modify any GNOME app. You may want to try GNOME Builder which is purposefully designed to streamline the process.
"and they completely ignore their power-users who prefer more options and functionality."
I don't think those users are being ignored, if they were then extensions wouldn't exist at all. Are there issues with extensions? Yes, but that's a different conversation which I'll mention later.
"On top of that, their 'my way or the highway' approach is completely user hostile, further evidenced by arguments like this, where you refuse to take notes and offer genuine solutions for the needs of the user."
You are ignoring my comments. I've actually suggested multiple times that we could discuss genuine solutions, I just did in the post you replied to.
"GNOME's featureset is encroaching on basic system functionality, which has not only proven to be a pain in the ass, but it's actually counter-intuitive to basic UNIX functionality. Efforts like dconf have legitimately done nothing for this community, yet their dumpster-fire glow can be seen for miles"
This doesn't really make sense to me and I don't understand what you mean counter-intuitive to basic unix functionality. Dconf is just a file in your home directory. It can be controlled by command line tools and environment variables just like anything else in Unix/Linux. Also you do not even have to use Dconf, you can change the configuration backend although it may take some work. If someone is interested I can suggest ways to do this.
"I still write everything with GTK3 and zero GNOME conformance just as a middle finger to the direction they're headed in."
From my own experience I would advise not to do this. It's making things more difficult for yourself for bad reasons. I've tried to develop projects out of spite before and it didn't get far, it just hurt me, it hurt my users and it wasted everyone's time. It's best to use whatever makes you the most productive and don't worry about what others are doing.
"GNOME's dependencies are bloated, only exacerbated by projects like Flatpak that containerize and further bloat the runtime"
I can't agree with this, one of the reasons I think Flatpak has taken off is because it minimizes the runtime. The Flatpak SDK is actually smaller than my distro's GNOME packages. Yes GNOME does have a lot of libraries if you look at all of them but so does KDE, that's the price you pay for having a lot of features. And I think all those libraries have been a boon to app developers, they seem to really like using them.
"It's crazy to me that the GNOME desktop has had one of the ugliest transitions to a window server they've been advocating for years."
Yeah me too but the work is hard. Sadly X11 has caused some very real and serious technical debt that everyone is still paying down. Also I don't know what you mean Pango was 86'd. Pango is still around.
"GNOME has just been regressing. Tools that used to work, like Glade, now do not."
I assure you, nobody is particularly happy that Glade doesn't work anymore. The project has suffered from a serious lack of contributors and there is only one or two people working on the replacement. The GUI building functionality in GTK4 is actually a massive improvement but that's also made it technically difficult to bring a new GUI builder over to it. If somebody wanted to help out with it I'm sure that would be appreciated.
"Extension stability has gotten worse, which is a shame since extensions are undeniably a part of GNOME. You can tell me that they're unsupported, you can shout at me for using them"
This again is not helpful. I assure you nobody is happy that extensions are unstable, and nobody is happy to be making users upset every release when their extensions break. I'm not shouting at you for using them but you deserve to know: they're still unstable for very real reasons and you are making things more difficult for yourself by trying to push back against this rather than just acknowledging the limitations of the system and working within them. It's non-trivial to take an extension and make it supported. People are doing ongoing work on resolving this but it's a very hard problem, I think they're still looking for help too. I can suggest ways to help out here.
"but if your users have to create their own custom modding options for your desktop, is that not a signal that you're feature-incomplete?"
You could look at it this way but IMO the problem with this line of thinking is that some extensions conflict with each other. You can look in the extension list right now and see multiple extensions that just aren't compatible and will never work with each other because they fundamentally change the GUI in different ways. Just look at how many custom dock extensions there are for example. You could say "well just build in a dock and make it customizable" but that wouldn't make everybody happy either because the extensions allow a lot more customization than would be possible with just a built-in dock. So in that way it's not really possible to ever make it feature complete, some people are always going to disagree about how this goes. Plasma has the same issue and they sort of deal with it by having a large choice of Plasma Widgets, it would be nice if GNOME had something like that but it's difficult because GNOME is architected somewhat differently than Plasma and extensions are technically more powerful than Plasma Widgets.
"Same goes for user themes, shell patches and tweak tools. They are all a testament to the fact that people want to extend GNOME, so your next logical step should not be blocking them out."
I don't know what is meant here by blocking them out. All these tools still exist. And theming has seen improvements, GNOME 42 is finally getting a real dark mode and not a hack like the old dark theme setting is. Yes, they're finally catching up to KDE here after years. The changes there should benefit user themes, although user themes will always probably be unsupported and risk breakage because fundamentally they are doing things that the app developer didn't intend and didn't test for. That's not app developers doing it to be hostile, it's an actual technical limitation with themes: if you reskin an app then you have infinite choices of colors/icons/shapes/etc that you could plug in and it's not realistic for app developers to test for and anticipate every single possible combination that everyone is going to want to use. Yes I understand that it's frustrating these things are not supported and can break sometimes but the reason it is like that is because of lack of resources. If there was a lot more people working on themes and testing them and fixing the issues then maybe it would go faster and some more theming options could become officially supported. But in order to do that and have it work then people are going to have to compromise here and only focus on a few things at a time, like I said it's not going to be technically possible to support infinite combinations of themes and have all of them work well.
"If I level a complaint about KDE, XFCE, or hell, even the goddamn Elementary desktop, I generally get a thoughtful response with someone showing me how to resolve the issue, or pointing to an upstream patch that fixes it"
I don't think I can point you towards working upstream patches but I can point you towards people that are thinking about the issues and working on them. I referred to this before but part of the problem here is that the things you're asking for are technically challenging, it's not a matter of just here's a 100 line patch and it's fixed. These are conversations and projects that need to happen over long periods of time with collaboration from many people. And when many of them are volunteers that are only available sporadically then it can be tough to get them all aligned in a timely manner.
"You can call things like thumbnails in the filepicker inconsequential"
I have never said it's inconsequential, in fact my feeling is the opposite. It should be fixed but that is another thing that's not technically easy to do. There actually is a much longer technical conversation we could have here about this but it's not possible to have it when someone is just bringing it up as a talking point against GNOME.
"The issue starts with attitude, and the culture of GNOME is quite obviously not improving. No amount of CoC pull requests can fix that, especially when project leaders are flying off the handle at System76 for trying to improve on their desktop."
Please don't assume the opinions of one or two developers is shared by everyone. I wasn't happy with how the System76 situation was handled and I've actually been trying to help reduce the heat, and I know that some GNOME developers also weren't happy with it either and wish it could have gone down better. But I am not a project leader so maybe that doesn't matter to you.
"Why even have these discussions if we're just going to end them with a pointless us-vs-them fight where you ultimately tell me to stop using GNOME if I disagree."
I don't understand what this has to do with GNOME. If you use KDE and you find you really don't like it, then you'll stop using it and use something else. If you use Windows 11 and you find you really don't like it, then you'll stop using it and use something else. And so on. Or would you force yourself to use them and be miserable? I wouldn't want you to do that. I'm not telling you this like it's a fight, every one of us has a real choice to make about what our preferences are and it's a personal decision that nobody else can make for us. If something is going to take years to fix then I'm trying to do the responsible thing and tell you that you'll have to either change your expectations, or you'll have to go spend your time elsewhere because waiting is not going to be worth it. Yeah I understand that's not what you want to hear but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that everything is fine and it's going to be finished tomorrow. You are going to have to exercise some patience here. That's just me being honest and not trying to bullshit you.
And I want to reiterate, I have no personal attachment to GNOME. I think it's good at some things. KDE is also good. I've praised KDE several times in this comment thread. If you really like KDE then that's what you should use. I'm very happy to recommend it. It has helped me when GNOME was not able to do some things I wanted, and GNOME has helped me when KDE was not able to do some other things I wanted. I don't think it's feasible to expect them both to do all the same things, they are two different projects with two different goals.
I see many comments to this effect, but I think it's a misconception. I really doubt changing the governance is going to get issues like thumbnails fixed. From my perspective, what is actually missing is a lack of money and/or qualified volunteers.
Maybe if they'd quit genuflecting to boondoggles like OPW to the point of bankruptcy they'd have more money? And even better, maybe more people would donate?
I don't understand how this is related, the FAQ explains that was a one time accounting error that was resolved.
"As a result of these issues, we have only just now finalized our 2014 budget. In the meantime, we made assumptions based on previous years' incomes and expenditures, and we authorized expenditures for this year based on those assumptions. Those assumptions proved to be more optimistic than reality. In addition, while our outgoing payments to interns must be strictly timed, the incoming payments from sponsoring organizations are very fluid, thus we have had to front the costs of OPW. Fronting these costs has resulted in a budget shortfall.
"The situation has already improved as some 2014 Advisory Board fees and outstanding OPW invoices have been paid. The board expect more to be paid within the next 4 weeks. If there are no unexpected issues and no delays, the freeze should be lifted by July."
The foundation didn't go bankrupt. Also:
1. The foundation doesn't (currently) even fund any developers despite having resolved those issues, because developers are pretty expensive.
2. I wasn't referring to the foundation specifically anyway. If you don't want to support the foundation you can just donate to a developer/project individually, if they are open to it.
3. I don't think the issue can be reduced to lack of donations. Donations are good but aren't really a reliable funding source. A healthy project usually needs other funding sources than just donations.
"There's definitely a war, but it's mostly a war of attrition at this point. You're with one or the other"
I really can't agree with this, I think both are great with their own unique strengths. Both projects can and do co-exist and don't really compete for resources.
There actually are a good number of paid contributors from small companies, and also a good number of volunteers too. That's what I have seen.
Don't feel discouraged if your first contributions didn't make it in, GNOME is a big project so I'm sure you could find some other areas to contribute to if you really wanted. Keep in mind that core areas such as the shell and GTK are probably bad places for first time contributors as they tend to be very complex, it's best to start with a smaller app/library and go from there. Of course if you don't want to contribute then you don't have to either, but I think all of this applies to most large open source projects that I have seen.
I'm not mad that my patches were rejected, the GNOME team is notorious for neglecting basic functionality like thumbnails in the filepicker for almost two decades, even with literally hundreds of pull requests with suggested fixes. I'm mad because the current maintainers have no interest in extending the discussion around what GNOME should be. For all their talk of inclusion and diversity, their attitude runs in the complete other direction. They're encroaching on the same issues that systemd made, where their software's scope is expanding way too far with far too little substance. I've been told to "not bother" making apps that I don't plan to distribute via Flatpak. I've been told that disliking Adwaita is paramount to fascism, and when I try to reason with people and explain myself I get told to read the Code of Conduct.
You're painting this out to be a personal issue, which it isn't. The culture among GNOME developers is one of the most toxic I've ever seen, and it's continuing to poison a desktop environment I desperately want to love. Every time I suggest something I get shut down though, so why bother? Why would I willingly hurt myself in the process of trying to make a usable desktop? The only thing I can do now is share my experience as a warning to other developers who want to make Linux-native experiences: GNOME does not want your help, don't waste your time trying.
Sorry to hear that but I think on some level it is personal. I have never experienced any of what you're talking about, everyone I've talked to has been pretty respectful and open to collaboration. It's a large project so experiences may differ, we may not have ever interacted with the same people, or you may have caught them on a bad day, etc.
On those individual things, you can certainly make apps outside flatpak although on a technical level I think that flatpak (or a similar packaging mechanism) is going to be the best option for a great number of apps, and I would expect that to become the focus for many app developers just because it's a lot easier and saves time. I think that comment about Adwaita is pretty inflammatory and may be seen as being against the code of conduct, not sure, but it certainly isn't my view and I doubt it is the view of the majority of contributors.
"neglecting basic functionality like thumbnails in the filepicker for almost two decades, even with literally hundreds of pull requests with suggested fixes."
I mentioned this elsewhere but I'm very disappointed to see this issue get continuously brought up, I don't think there is much we can say that is productive at this point. I've never seen a pull request from this that was actually finished to completion. Is there someone in particular you're waiting for to approve this? If so, can you think of something that could help them out? Or do you think they don't want help at all? Because from my perspective, that is not the case.
Edit: Also, hundreds of pull requests to implement thumbnails? Is that an exaggeration? I'd like to see a list of all of those if possible.
Keep in mind, it's not unusual for a large patch to go through many revisions before finally making it in. Take a look at the Linux kernel for another example, you don't have to look far to see many patches that take a long time to go through review or just never make it in because of various reasons. I don't think you are being fair by painting this as a GNOME behavior, it is simply reality on large projects with a lot of complexity and moving parts. It sounds like you are also saying systemd suffers from the same issues (it probably does) but unfortunately it seems that is another area where it's a complex problem space, so that's the trade-off that you make.
I'm making an honest offer to reach out and help and correct past wrongs, I am sorry if it's patronizing, if you want me to do something else then just ask. I'll be here if you change your mind. Please understand that if you refuse to take anything but complete agreement for an answer then it is going to be very difficult for anyone to help you, I can relate to your experiences but I'll never be able to experience them fully myself. So in that way, the ball is in your court.
Don't worry about my project, I'm only commenting here to help you and to explain that those other opinions are not shared by everyone. In fact commenting on social media is usually a waste for my projects as it only seems to attract more negative/toxic comments from people who (incorrectly) assume that I share all my opinions with an upstream project or something like that.
"They're not supposed to be tightly integrated, the gnome team seems to have forgotten all of this."
That is a misconception that I've noticed, maybe it's because KDE uses different APIs for a lot of things, or maybe it's because of the way some distributions package it. But none of the Linux desktops are really that tightly coupled when you actually dig into it. For example managing the desktop settings is handled by its own daemon appropriately called "gnome-settings-daemon" that loads all its settings modules via a plugin system. KDE is structured similarly in that its code is split across a great number of small support libraries. If there is no secondary consumer of those APIs it's probably because nobody has bothered yet to make and test additional combinations of packages that actually work.
It also doesn't seem to really matter whether you call it open source or free software. Either way the projects that I see are all struggling for cash in the same way. It's not easy to fund a product when the entire point is you're giving away your labour for free to everyone on the internet.