> When it comes to “my way or the highway”, I noticed that users mainly reference GNOME, far more than any other project. There is one main reason I can think of.
either this, or, bear with me for a second, maybe because GNOME unlike most big OSS projects has people going into issue tracker of other software and asking them to do things specifically for accomodating GNOME at the expense of other DEs (https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 for the most famous example - who the f* says this really: "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. It is my hope that you are a GNOME app. Yes this kind of fragmentation is unfortunate. I'm not happy about it either. Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up. Wish you the best."). Only other project I've ever seen this with is Rust people spamming RIIR issues on gh.
There's nothing wrong with that statement though. It's literally true. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have different APIs that conflict with each other. The situation is a bit better now that Ubuntu dropped Unity but that was a decision they had to make by themselves, GNOME couldn't do anything about it. What else do you expect them to do? Any time Ubuntu or XFCE decides to keep some API that breaks GNOME, or worse, decides to implement some new API, GNOME has to drop their own plans and maintain it forever? That doesn't make any sense no matter which way you look at it. You're shooting at some random GNOME dev for playing the role of messenger instead of addressing the root cause.
I also see nothing wrong with the second thread. GNOME is under no obligation to implement features they don't want to implement. You're posting that to push a narrative while ignoring the other hundreds (thousands?) of bugs that get fixed without any fanfare and without the HN crowd throwing a multi-year long tantrum. It's quite frankly embarrassing to see these brought up continually as an attempt to criticize GNOME. You can do better than this for the Linux community.
Freedesktop standards can't include everything, it only makes sense to standardize "lowest common denominator" features that you know every desktop won't have a problem implementing. And since this is all open source and everyone can do whatever they want, participation in freedesktop is voluntary anyway. You can do the best possible job you can writing a standard and some desktop can still reject it for any reason they want.
Sure, everything's made of and the standards don't matter. Sure, the gnome organization has the right to do whatever they want and no one can force them to do anything.
That doesn't make the immune to criticism though. It's they're right to shoot themselves in the foot, to break with freedesktop standard, to ignore community requests. But it's also everyone else's right to say that that kind of behavior is shitty and makes them poor stewards of the project.
Sure, I can't prove that their approach is doing immense damage to the "year of the linux desktop", but very rarely do I encounter people in real life who do more than tolerate gnome because it's the default.
Sure, no one owes anyone anything and there is no objective "right choice". Once again a post-modern view of truth doesn't make gnome immune to criticism.
Why Gnome defenders always jump straight to post modernism when criticism pops up is beyond me.
>Sure, I can't prove that their approach is doing immense damage
>that kind of behavior is shitty and makes them poor stewards of the project.
This is a perfect example of a useless, substance-free criticism. You can't prove what you're saying, you admit you don't really know what you're talking about, but you're happy to say they're shitty. It's like if you randomly walked into stores and said to the clerk "I can't prove it but you're a shitty person who's bad at your job" and then walked out. That would be like, ok? Do you think anyone is actually going to be motivated by that? Now just imagine you have a little website with your friends for your hobby and someone you don't know does this to you. They come along saying you're shit for not making everything exactly to their personal opinions. Can't you see how this is an awful way to participate in a supportive community?
Really now. Repeatedly making the same nonsensical requests and criticisms isn't going to help anyone. If you seriously expect them to improve their project then you should take the same advice: improve your own criticism. Make it so good and so respectful and so helpful they can't ignore your suggestions anymore. Avoid the personal attacks telling someone they're shitty and bad, instead think about how you can support that person and build them up to be better to accomplish great things.
>This is a perfect example of a useless, substance-free criticism.
I would argue that rather than being substance-free it is merely subjective. This thread points at plenty of real examples of problems, but they're mostly dismissed or ignored.
Unfortunately most things in life are subjective. I don't consider complaints that depend on subjective things (EX: was such and such a maintainer rude during such and such a thread) to be substance-free, even though we don't have a legal test for comparative rudeness.
>Make it so good and so respectful and so helpful they can't ignore your suggestions anymore.
I think the SDL developers in the lined thread did that, it didn't work.
Subjective as in, not based in any provable facts. Can you see why this isn't convincing? Is this really worth your time to go at it from that angle?
>This thread points at plenty of real examples of problems
No, you haven't mentioned any real problems. This discussion would have ended long ago if you did. I've been trying to point you in the direction where we talk about real problems and solutions but you're being very stubborn here. You keep trying to nit pick about perceived "rudeness" in comments from years ago that isn't even there. You're mistaking someone being short and to the point with being rude. Can you cut it out with this stuff already please? Why are you doing this? Please don't say something like "GNOME made me do it" because you know that's not true.
>I think the SDL developers in the lined thread did that
No, their suggestion wasn't convincing. Repeatedly making the same suggestion but louder each time isn't an improvement. You have to actually change the core of the suggestion and come up with new ideas, rather than continuously bringing up old ideas that it's already established they won't work.
I disagree, but given that it's a subjective technical decision I don't think we're going to be able to find any kind of objective call as to what the right decision was.
The problem is that all technical decisions involve balancing the requirements of multiple parties and if your ethical framework is "Gnome is all volunteers they can do what they want" that makes them completely immune to any sort of criticism. Yes, I concede that they are free to do whatever they want, but that doesn't free them from criticism.
But hey, if you want to come up with some kind of objective moral framework for us to work in that's fine.
>Subjective as in, not based in any provable facts.
Do you think that the choice to not implement XDG-decoration is based on probable facts? Because it is also a subjective call. Maybe go read some lesswrong until you have a better handle on how to deal with subjectivity in debate: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
>but given that it's a subjective technical decision
No, there's nothing subjective about it. The fact is, doing things the way they suggested won't fix anything. That's a fact of the code as it's written. They could change the code to fix it, but then they'd be breaking backwards compatibility. These are the objective facts.
>if your ethical framework is "Gnome is all volunteers they can do what they want"
That's not an ethical framework. It's a functional description of the way that open source projects work, by necessity. How do you propose volunteers make anything work if they're forced to program in every idea from every user, including all the impossible and nonsensical ideas? Or what if one user wants to expand a feature but another user wants to remove the same feature, what do they do?
>Yes, I concede that they are free to do whatever they want, but that doesn't free them from criticism.
Neither does it free the SDL developers from criticism from the GNOME developers, or from anyone else. It also doesn't free either me or you from criticism for making impossible suggestions.
>Do you think that the choice to not implement XDG-decoration is based on probable facts?
Yes, see above. The code that's currently written is an objective, provable fact. You can go look at the code right now, that's the code that's shipping on users' computers. Any decision they make is restricted by that code, unless they want users to be even more angry about how they broke backwards compatibility. You're getting confused, because the subjective part here is what they do to the code in the future. The code as it currently stands says objectively that your idea won't work without causing other problems.
I have to agree with your last point. The OP keeps saying that there are no provable facts, when there actually are. Saying the same thing over and over, only louder, is actually their complaint, yet that is what they are doing!
I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland. Weston and Mutter are probably going to wind up being basically the only two Wayland WMs that don't support it, making GNOME an unfortunate and avoidable edge case.
I think the CSD initiative is fine if it's a choice. However, I can't choose to not use GNOME on behalf of my users. Libdecor is a bad and C-centric solution to the problem. I know Mutter is designed in such a way that makes this hard; that was a pretty big misstep in my opinion.
Likewise for other things that GNOME Project pushes.
Here is a great example. Wayland has a protocol for inhibiting idle called inhibit-idle. GTK won't use it. Instead, they want you to use a DBus interface from the enormous XDG Desktop Portals API. They refuse to have any kind of discussion about it. End of story.
This pattern repeats for even silly things. Like the size of the mouse cursor on HiDPI screens? No problem bro, just use this bespoke DBus API.
This is all assuming you want to use DBus. Why? Wayland is already the thing that you speak to talk to the display server. Why use another protocol for basic functions like this? If DBus is so great, why do we even need the Wayland protocols in the first place? (Dbus is not great.)
Agreed. The blog post's author ignores that the GNOME project isn't willing to support basic interoperability with other software, and instead wants to make a GNOME-exclusive ecosystem. The GNOME project's refusal to support XDG-Decoration (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217) means that even if you're writing something like a game and not using any of the system's UI, you either have to add GTK as a dependency to get the "correct looking" titlebars or spend useful development time writing shitty, non-native looking window decorations just for GNOME users. It's not just "if you disagree with our UI decisions, don't use our DE", it's "we want the Linux desktop platform to match our uncompromised vision and we will make it as annoying as possible for GNOME users to run your software if you disagree".
> The blog post's author ignores that the GNOME project isn't willing to support basic interoperability with other software, and instead wants to make a GNOME-exclusive ecosystem.
Does it, though?
"My way or the highway" fits very well in this context. "My way or the highway" can also be interpreted as "we don't give a single shit about other software and other people, and we don't care about interoperating with them".
Basically GNOME is living in and pushing a world where there's only GNOME.
And this is where things get tricky and I feel for the supposed "haters": so now you (GNOME) are a big project and you're pushing your own incompatible and non-interoperable stuff. Some projects will adhere, some won't, for any reason.
So now if I'm using anything not GNOME my desktop experience is broken, because software that assume GNOME is running won't work well (if at all) in other environments.
It just wasn't this bad before GNOME3 and this mentality shift.
>Basically GNOME is living in and pushing a world where there's only GNOME.
No, that's false. I can't see why you'd even think that. GNOME wouldn't be using Wayland at all if that were true. GNOME uses standards where they make sense, this one optional non-standard part of Wayland just happens to not make any sense for GNOME. They don't have any issue with the rest of Wayland.
>you either have to add GTK as a dependency to get the "correct looking" titlebars or spend useful development time writing shitty, non-native looking window decorations just for GNOME users
That's a false dilemma. You don't have to do either of those. The alternate solution is mentioned in that issue: use libdecor. I'll also note, if you refuse to use any of the system's UI and you insist on implement everything yourself directly on libwayland then that's an entirely self-inflicted problem that you created. Libwayland is fairly low-level, it isn't a game development API. Besides window decorations, you'll have lots of other deficiencies and things you have to spend development time on. That's what you volunteered for, GNOME can't help you with that.
I mean, yeah, you don't need the whole GTK library for titlebars, but you still need to drag libdecor along to support a subgroup (Wayland users) of a subgroup (Gnome users).
Its pretty annoying to add another moving piece to the machinery just to do that.
That's the way it is with any optional X11 or Wayland extension. Either you implement the extension yourself, or you use a library to implement it for you. Typically the code to do this is put in a toolkit, but you decided to write your own toolkit so you get to deal with the annoyance. Nothing's changed in this regard. Actually, most optional things in Linux are like this and it's been this way since shared libraries were implemented. If you find the idea of this so off-putting, maybe you should be using a pre-made toolkit instead of writing your own?
Great feedback, I'm just gonna throw a "gtk-layer-shell" on top of the burning pile.
I just don't care though, I've resisted the GNOME-ire until recently (hoping it was "just" drama and would blow over or be fixed by technical decisions in the future) but now, I have given up on the idea that GNOME apps are going to continue to "seemlessly" co-exist in non-GNOME environments, like in the past. Fine.
Fortunately, between various Wayland tiling WMs, KDE, Cosmic on the way, there are other options that don't require GNOME, or even GTK+. Good riddance.
I too hate the way they deal with CSD and I'd wish they'd change their opinions, but the project is theirs to manage and I can only accept that if I don't like it I can just use KWin. For those wishing GNOME stuck more to its origins, there's always Cinnamon.
As for the API stuff: why does the display server need to deal with power management? That sounds like something the power management API should do. IMO, the display server should just display things, not manage power states or login states. Wayland draws the screensaver, but the session manager controls the actual session.
Still, there is an open MR to accept this API (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111) that needs to be rebased and needs a bug resolved. The solution falls perfectly in line with the GNOME way of doing things as well (forwarding the Wayland API to DBus so the DBus interface can do its thing), the only problem is that nobody is interested enough to do the hard work.
DBus is an excellent method to communicate anything that doesn't involve exchanging buffers. Many members of the Wayland project are trying to prevent going down the same path X11 went down, sucking up more and more features and API surface and becoming a huge, unstable, buggy mess because of its sheer code size.
As for your mouse cursor issue, Wayland's cursor_theme seems to be supported by at least. I can't find cursor_theme in the Wayland spec itself (there is a merge request at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... but I don't see much activity) so until that gets stabilized you can choose between using DBus or a bespoke, DE-specific API, pick a compositor that takes away cursor control from the application entirely, or switch back to X11.
> Many members of the Wayland project are trying to prevent going down the same path X11 went down, sucking up more and more features and API surface and becoming a huge, unstable, buggy mess because of its sheer code size.
I would argue that if you sum the code of all the Wayland compositors existing today + all the dependencies required for making them work as a proper desktop - dbus, wlroots, ... you likely have much more code (and thus much more bugs overall) than you had for X11.
xorg git repo is 400kloc of C, I've seen projects which were on the order of magnitude of 40 million lines of code and still were able to be managed, so to me "sheer code size" sounds a bit weird. Hell, the main project I work on, https://ossia.io and on which I do the huge majority of the swdev work alone is nearing 500kloc and it does not feel like a burden.
That's not a good comparison. To get a full picture, you have to compare the X server, all the Xorg drivers, the X client libraries, the X utilities, all the different X window managers and compositors, all the code from alternate X server implementations, etc. X11 desktops are all using dbus too so that one counts for both. All together added up it's significantly more code than Wayland, and that's even considering that the major Wayland compositors try to share as much as possible between the X and Wayland implementations. That is, Mutter and KWin didn't use wlroots. Wayland and X11 are just pluggable backends for them. Go and look there yourself if you want to make your own direct comparison. The Wayland backends are pretty small and they talk to the kernel directly, whereas the X backends have to go through all of that extra code just to talk a complicated protocol to the X server to accomplish the same task.
This is different situation for older non-compositing window managers that still use the old X11 drawing primitives. Compositors do all their drawing themselves using direct rendering to the GPU so are able to just swap out the backend without much trouble. That shift was happening in X11 in the years prior to Wayland and it's one of the reasons Wayland is even able to work.
One problem with dbus is that some compositors (for example sway) have a design goal of working in environments where dbus isn't available. And even if that weren't the case it means applications need to deal with multiple asynchronous protocols, which isn't that big of a deal if you are already depending on a big toolkit like gtk, but for a lightweight application that is working directly with wayland (or, say a game that draws everything itself and doesn't use a widget toolkit), it adds a lot of complexity.
Applications shouldn't use libwayland directly unless you're planning to implement your own toolkit and event loop and threading abstraction yourself. It's certainly a take to do things in the most complex way and then complain that you have to implement a lot of complexity. Off the top of my head, here are things that won't work that way unless you implement them yourself:
- Networking. The socket(s) will block your program loop.
- Audio. Has to be done on a separate thread with strict timing.
- Background loading. Get ready for your program to hang when loading a large file.
- Talking to any system services. Every common desktop uses dbus now. Really. Using sway on an embedded system without dbus is a niche.
- Power saving modes. Without an event loop you always have to use sleep to poll yourself manually, and that's wasteful.
- Simulations, physics, or anything else that requires a constant tick rate. These are dependent on running the rendering in another thread.
- Accurate timers. Any issues with any of the above will block a timer from firing.
There are probably a lot more too. What seems "lightweight" first can turn out actually not be lightweight at all.
The D-Bus focus is understandable if one recalls some of the early discussions on Wayland. Namely that all sorts of stuff were to be relegated to D-Bus interfaces instead of protocol extensions.
Essentially, GNOME project is going Wayland purist way.
I am not aware. I was on NVIDIA for a long time, so Wayland was a thing that I looked at from a great distance.
However, I can't recall that point ever really coming up specifically. Deciding what should be a standard Wayland protocol has a committee today though. And I understand that an optional protocol existing does not imply that all Wayland clients and servers must implement them, but things like idle-inhibit were added because it addresses a specific problem, and I think it's a real shame that the most popular toolkit on Linux will probably not get support for it.
I'm not trying to slander GNOME developers here, and they have no incentive to care about people's opinions who have nothing to do with them, but if they care a lot about their reputation as being a bully in the ecosystem, well, this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to this problem.
That "reputation" is complete nonsense. Outside of HN (and a few other places with low-quality moderation) I don't see anyone trying to push that "reputation" as a narrative. GNOME has no other option but to dismiss and ignore those claims. I mean it's literally "you're bullying me because you don't do what I'm demanding you to do right when I want you to do it."
The reputation is a real thing and it's why the only people who are choosing to use GTK for new projects are people who are already pretty deep into the gnome ecosystem (they've probably been to at least on gnome conference).
You can see this kind of effect by looking at toolkit preferences in things like the stack overflow surveys.
GTK has lower usage than Qt and Electron, but it's actually few percent higher on the "most loved" category than Qt and Electron. However all of them are below 50% loved. The percent GTK is above them is probably not enough to be important. And that's exactly what I'd expect: all these desktop toolkits have issues and are disliked. Electron and Qt are cross-platform so of course they would have higher usage than GTK, which has only ever really been popular on Linux. And none of it matters anyway. .NET wins it all by a large margin due to the popularity of Windows and the only other big GUI frameworks on there are Flutter and React Native. I'm honestly surprised GTK is even on the list at all, it wasn't there in previous years. I expected the list to be totally dominated by web frameworks and Python frameworks like it was before.
This is kind of along the lines of what I've been trying to communicate to you. Complaining about these minor issues and playing the blame game between open source projects is pointless. Microsoft, Facebook and Google are the big boys in town, that's not gonna change by GNOME fixing some random low-priority bug.
No, this particular "reputation" you're referring to is a lie and a fabrication based on nothing, in order to push a narrative. I mean you literally just walked it back right now, in literally the same sentence. The people choosing GTK are choosing to do that, they're not being bullied by anybody. I don't think anyone is developing anything for the express purpose of trying to "win" a stack overflow survey.
We could never have a fruitful conversation if all you were trying to do was trash talk some people. I won't engage you there. Once you abandon the idea that you need to tear other people down to make your point then you'll find our conversation will improve instantly.
>This is all assuming you want to use DBus. Why? Wayland is already the thing that you speak to talk to the display server. Why use another protocol for basic functions like this?
You have this completely backwards. Dbus was already standard on nearly every X11 desktop and was spoken by a lot of X11 window managers, before Wayland even existed. It was adopted during the X11 days because X11 is a poor IPC for anything outside of window management. It's notably bad at syncing settings where you commonly have an external process storing a settings database that sends notifications to interested applications. X11 is a poor fit for that, but dbus is great at handling that case with its signaling mechanism. Mouse cursor size being a good example of that type of setting.
>If DBus is so great, why do we even need the Wayland protocols in the first place?
Because they're two different protocols with different goals. Dbus is a general-purpose IPC that can be used for a lot of desktop tasks, like syncing settings. It's designed for many-to-many communication between every program on the system. Wayland is designed mainly for high performance between only one application (the window server) and its clients.
>Dbus is not great.
Dbus is the worst option except for all the others. I've seen a lot of dbus hate over the years but still no one has ever been able to propose a replacement. No, putting everything into Wayland protocols is not a suitable replacement.
I'm not sure if there's any point in arguing this but I am not suggesting the Linux ecosystem should just drop DBus. I can kind of see why it may read like I'm suggesting that, but it wasn't really my intent. Instead, I'm actually saying something much simpler; I think that not all users of Wayland will want DBus, and in those cases, the Wayland protocols is a very reasonable place to put functionality related to the display server. I understand that in the view of some folks, certain things do or do not belong in the Wayland protocol. However, I think that's moot. It's mostly philosophical where Wayland begins and ends. The truth is, idle inhibition is adjacent to the compositor, and thus reasonable to support. To their credit, GNOME does the much more reasonable thing in the Mutter side by supporting the idle inhibit protocol as a proxy for the equivalent desktop portals interface. This is a win-win-win, as it's not terribly difficult to do, it allows GNOME to still keep things organized mostly the way they want, it supports clients that don't want to use DBus for this, etc. It seems the GTK maintainers would be willing to merge support in GTK too, but it's not currently happening. This is a shame. I'd be willing to help make it happen, by either writing code or helping fund someone else to, though for the latter I have no idea where to begin. (except maybe bountysource or something, but I am uncertain of the effectiveness of that model.)
Now for something like syncing the cursor size, that belongs in Wayland. Duh. The Wayland compositor handles displays, their scale factors, and the hardware cursor. It's just common sense.
Wayland as a protocol is probably not good enough to replace DBus, but it is significantly simpler and lacks some DBus pitfalls. I think for things that could reasonably be handled by the compositor, it should be.
(I have other concerns about DBus, too, especially now that desktop stuff is moving to systemd user services. Aren't systemd user instances per user and not per session? How can you deal with DBus in that context?)
>This is a shame. I'd be willing to help make it happen, by either writing code or helping fund someone else to
You might consider joining the IRC/Matrix channel and making an offer to one of the maintainers.
>Now for something like syncing the cursor size, that belongs in Wayland. Duh. The Wayland compositor handles displays, their scale factors, and the hardware cursor. It's just common sense.
No, unfortunately it doesn't and it isn't. You're describing something that isn't Wayland. I've seen upstream Wayland developers following the rule of "it should only be a Wayland protocol if it requires access to Wayland object ids" and idle-inhibit does follow that rule (you can inhibit on a window id). Anything to do with mouse settings doesn't follow that rule. There was a conscious decision to keep settings handling out of Wayland protocols because, among other reasons, Wayland is designed for a specific thing (windowing) and is bad at being a settings database. It doesn't really even have a way to identify hardware devices, those are all abstracted away under "outputs" and "seats" which don't actually need to correspond to any physical device.
>Aren't systemd user instances per user and not per session? How can you deal with DBus in that context?
You only have one session bus per user and it's the one used by systemd. I mean, you can start more buses but why would you need to when none of the services you want will be using that?
> I don't think this belongs in the wayland protocol, but I'm not strongly opposed to using it as a fallback if not portal implementation is available.
Seems like a PR would be acceptable given Matthias' comment.
That's only one part of the discussion. Now I don't want to throw undeserved shade, but I'm already running two MRs on top of upstream GTK to work around issues where "patches are welcome" and I haven't checked in a while, but I'm guessing they're no closer to merging than before (edit: wrong; one of them WAS merged, and the other I stopped running due to FTBFS, though it's still not merged.) I understand that bandwidth is limited, but saying "patches welcome" as a project that is notorious for throwing that out even when it's probably not going to be merged feels kind of scummy, because it basically enables doing one thing and saying another without need to justify or discuss it. It's obviously the GNOME developer's volitions if they don't want spend any cycles on it, but the message sent to the Wayland ecosystem is not great, and it's going to be a thing I think about when I hear "GNOME Project" for a very long time.
(And frankly, soliciting patches for an issue then having the contributor sit for over a year rebasing without any substantial feedback is just kind of shitty.)
That said, I will retract: the main ones I was interested in have actually closed. I did not notice that !3898 was closed because it got superseded, but I had been applying that one for a long time. I am interested in !4672, but it broke my build so I don't currently have it on. Dunno if that one will get merged. It's in the unfortunate place of being neither approved nor denied. I can't blame the GNOME developers too much here, since everyone is pretty much a volunteer, but it's definitely not a fun experience. I have some in flight PRs that are going nowhere to other projects including Sway right now.
They used the open-source style goodwill generated by the old thing called GNOME, as it existed with Linux, to bootstrap their current popularity, and this is to me, dishonest.
They used a different style and direction. Had they changed the name and/or been clear and upfront about the fact that "this new my-way-or-the-highway thing isn't the Gnome you're used to," then I could defend them.
Call it something new and let MATE have the old name.
But they're not interested in doing or even acknowledging that. Let the mud slinging continue.
Honestly, they had jumped the shark back in GNOME 2 era, when the giant rewrite started being used as excuse to not bring back functionality from 1.x series.
My Canary in the coal mine was, IIRC, discussion about presenting certain printer options to end user around 2.2 to 2.4 switch, and some options getting discarded from GUI and into regedit-style tinkering, because GNOME team considered them superfluous. From what I recall, the options were ones that I would occasionally use on Windows (and not just I, but also people who wouldn't be considered techies).
In hindsight, it was impulsive of me - but I left Linux as a whole because of what GNOME did. They broke everything, and disrupted my way of doing things. I /could/ have switched DE or WM, but out of frustration, I switched to macOS (Mac OSX at the time) and didn't look back for over a decade.
I've only recently returned a few months ago and found KDE to be sufficient and stable enough for my uses (despite the few bugs I keep running into, but nothing breaking my usability too much).
I would understand the frustration I hear from some users if this were a paid product...but it isn't.
The GNOME project is a massive undertaking and completely free. It's written by volunteers, sponsored developers, and commercial developers who derive their revenue from elsewhere. They own the trademark, so of course they're going to use it.
The bottom line is that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people happily use GNOME every day (yes, I'm currently one of them). I did _not_ care for legacy GNOME, and back then I chose something else (usually dwm and xmonad).
I really don't see what this fuss is about. There is a vast selection of alternative desktop environments and window managers to choose from. Get over it.
Then maybe some of those project maintainers should start a DE, and see first-hand how it's really difficult and requires making a lot of tough decisions that don't apply to other projects?
"Not a paid product" is a gross oversimplification. In many ways it is a "paid product," or at least part of one.
This ain't just hobby stuff anymore. Businesses are catching on and using it, and so they're entrenching an older, stinky, take-it-or-leave-it way to do software, and what's worse, they're doing it on the back of a free-software-spirited labor.
It doesn't violate the letter of the GPL, but it sure as hell violates the spirit.
>It doesn't violate the letter of the GPL, but it sure as hell violates the spirit.
No it doesn't. The spirit of the GPL is essentially "do whatever you want with this as long as you keep distributing the source code." That's it. It says nothing about paid products or development style or keeping a certain style or direction or anything like that. The GNOME developers decided to change direction themselves, as the GPL says anyone can. It would no sense for them to give up their trademark to MATE when that was just a random offshoot that no one had any idea of whether it was serious or how long it would last. It's not even that active now, can you honestly say they would have benefited any more from having the GNOME name?
Like, come on my guy, you're flogging a horse that died more than a decade ago. You can continue this substance-free criticism of open source projects for as long as you want, just be aware that you get out what you put in.
>the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users
>When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)
>Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software.
And all of those parts are still the same. The "no warranty" here generally (and legally) means you don't get to complain if it doesn't work for you, unless you believe Stallman didn't understand what he meant when he wrote that.
> written by [...] sponsored developers, and commercial developers who derive their revenue from elsewhere.
I believe this is the likely root of the problem. Commercial developers who don't personally use GNOME at home and only only work on it because it's their job. The incentive of these developers is to keep GNOME minimal from their own perspective as developers, to make their jobs easier. They don't really care about GNOME users (despite their contrary rhetoric) and neither does their employer (Red Hat, etc). Their employer funds this GNOME development because they still sell workstation licenses or support contracts to big corps and workstations need a GUI environment that's viable from the point of view of salesmen, CTOs, and contract lawyers (none of whom will be using it.) GNOMES's style of user-hostile minimalism satisfies all these corporate interests.
>Commercial developers who don't personally use GNOME at home and only only work on it because it's their job.
You're acting like this is a bad thing but that's how open source is supposed to work. Every contributor works on their area of interest. For companies, they work on what helps their customers. There's a practical limit to how many users any contributor can support because developer time is a finite resource. With many contributors it's supposed to average out over time into something more general use. However the Linux desktop has historically been very bad at attracting a lot of corporate contributors. That's not specific to GNOME and it has nothing to do with corporate interests, plenty of other desktops are even more minimalistic and hostile to design changes.
Because it is the default desktop for at least the three biggest Linux distributions.
Why is it the default? Because GNOME was GPL when KDE depended on the non-free Qt, a long time ago. That is no longer relevant but it was the basis for it being blessed as default.
I too use GNOME, not because I particularly like it, but because Linux lets me be productive right out of the box with a minimum of fuss and therefore I want to stay close to default. But I dread every major update where I have google some obscure configuration options just to leave my productivity alone.
By that logic, Windows is the best operating system. After all, there are millions of PCs out there running Windows, and the vast majority of those people don't switch.
Yep. In fact, less developers are using GTK (and migrating their projects to Qt[0]), and less users are using GNOME, over time due to its self-imposed limitations. KDE usage, in what metrics I've seen, is somewhere at parity with GNOME for DE market share and growing while GNOME is declining, which is telling given that KDE is not the default DE in major distros.
Synthetic "popularity by default" vs. authentic popularity at work.
They used to do something well and they're riding the momentum, deceptively, and they happen to be doing it during a time where less-techy folk and business are beginning to more see the value.
> GNOME is designed to avoid overwhelming the user with information overload as much as possible, which is a really important topic for usability for the average computer user. Therefore, it does not follow the traditional desktop paradigm, where there is a taskbar, desktop icons, and others - everything is put away until the user needs them.
It almost reads as sarcasm. Even if we skip over the fact that an "average Linux user" isn't exactly an "average computer user," have you met... an average computer user? Try telling them that there are no desktop icons because it will only confuse them.
Yeah I don't understand this point either. I would like to even see where this is cited. If this was actually the case, GNOME would look like Cinnamon, Elementary, or KDE Plasma, which all have interfaces the average computer user is familiar with given the popularity of Windows and macOS.
Everything's going to become a tablet webapp, and Linux is finally going to be used by Average Folks. (That's why GNOME is basically a touch-based tablet DE.)
In my opinion, that's a doomed vision, both technologically and in what will occur. You can't have convergence; you can't collapse UIs or OSes down to the lowest common denominator (a mobile tablet) and have it be as good on a desktop as a UI or an OS meant for a desktop. Moreover, Linux is, and will (sadly?) remain, an "engineering OS", which is great for developers and technical people but comparatively alien and limited for Average Folk (probably for the same metaphysical reasons as the UI/OS problem).
You could say that Linux caters to the extremes: users who are SO simple that they don't even notice what OS they're on (they don't need to interface with AAA games or Netflix because they just "play sudoku") and users who are advanced enough to benefit from its technical focus. (But then again, the simple case is equally catered to by every OS, so I think "engineering OS" is the best way to look at it.) Average Folks are in the middle; they'll never touch a command line, and they want to play World of Warcraft or Call of Duty.
Your actual Linux user is either a programmer or a sysadmin, either professional or amateur. They're statistically the most likely segment of the population to actually be on a desktop computer with multiple monitors and to be finicky about DE features, and that's precisely the user GNOME targets the least due to some mix of fumes of the Converge era and the "developer first" convenience of just not having features and keeping things simple and changing them at will, downstream be damned (GTK4+).
Well, is the typical all-over-the-place windows desktop with 10 temporary folders, myDocFinalReallyFinal.docx, some no longer installed apps’ desktop icon and some installed apps no longer working desktop icon really useful?
The only thing you have to know is the super key, or the top left corner. Then you will see your open windows and the available app list.
There is plenty of bad things about gnome, but I think they do have a nice vision and they adhere to it well. On a laptop, to me Gnome is the most usable desktop environment out of any OS even.
Gnome 2 was great.
Gnome 3 was 10 steps back. And the arrogance of doing it their way just because they like to, not minding usefulness.
So I just am not been using Gnome anymore.
Cinnamon, which does what I want and need and doesn't get in my way. And if it does, an opened issue fixes that, quickly too.
Gnome is like everything from freedesktop.org opinionated, arrogant and ignorant
> I would like to explain where this mindset comes from, why this is an aggravated claim, and what you can do if you are negatively affected by the GNOME Project’s decisions.
> ....
> SOLUTION:
> If you dislike the GNOME Project’s philosophy, then the solution is to simply not use GNOME.
lol, is this supposed to somehow convince me that gnome does not have this attitude or the claim is misleading?
I don't even think "my way or the highway" is a bad philosophy in UI heavy software, but what is even the point in writing a response to this criticism if you are just going to end it with: my way or the highway (phrased differently)?
Having used GNOME 41-43 on a daily basis and having had to resort to extensions (and themes) to make it usable because I _need_ the UI affordances they keep hiding away, find the UX in Nautilus ludicrously bad and loathe the Adwaita theme, the one sentence that keeps popping up in my mind whenever I read (or write) about GNOME is:
“GNOME continues the war against its own users.”
That said, I will grant that its ecosystem and application suite is now good enough for me to not consider using Elementary any more, but I think that, in my case, is as much due to switching to Fedora as it is to GNOME.
1. Gnome has to keep things hidden and simple so it can be used by the masses.
2. Members of the masses (Windows & macOS users) switching to Linux annoyingly keep complaining that Gnome needs to change to make things less hidden and simple so they can use it.
3. These users need to be ignored so that Gnome can be used by the masses.
> It is also why other desktop environments, like Plasma, still exist. They are designed to be user-centric and powerful. GNOME, on the other hand, is designed to be user-friendly.
Since you brought up KDE.
This is many reasons why I like KDE - they seem to value interoperability over exclusiveness. Also, leave the user in control. GNOME removes control from me. As seen in their HIG[0], "Provide sensible defaults but consider optional functionality and customization options that don't interfere with the primary task."
From another comment:
> maybe because GNOME unlike most big OSS projects has people going into issue tracker of other software and asking them to do things specifically for accomodating GNOME
This is a pattern I dislike seeing. GNOME is fracturing the community by forcing their own way, or the highway.
On the other hand KDE isn't very pretty and is a bit unstable.
But Dolphin is the only file manager that I can tolerate and last time I tried Gnome (43 on Fedora 37 beta) it couldn't handle switching of my second monitor (it made a mess of my virtual desktops).
Honestly Gnome isn't bad, you just have to adapt your workflow: instead of putting apps to the foreground by clicking on them in the taskbar just use a virtual desktop for the different activities.
KDE looks good (the current version does, at least). It _is_ a bit stable, though.
Dolpin is excellent as a file manager. Nautilus was terrible when they introduced it. It's still terrible.
I don't like how GNOME handles multiple desktops. I can get very close to i3 with KDE, support for shortcuts and customization, and virtual desktops, but have a still full DE to go with it.
>Dolpin is excellent as a file manager. Nautilus was terrible when they introduced it. It's still terrible.
Like most GTK apps, Nautilus feels like a toy app.
Dolphin feels like a better app than what you have in any other OS.
Most of the best Linux apps seem like they're Qt, and that's because GTK is increasingly terrible to work with. The next runner up file manager to Dolphin, PCManFM, switched from GTK to Qt[0]:
```
Hong Jen Yee, developer of LXDE (the GTK version of which was dropped and all efforts focused on the Qt port), expressed disdain for version 3 of the GTK toolkit's radical API changes and increased memory usage, and ported PCMan File Manager (PCManFM) to Qt. PCManFM is being developed with a GTK and with a Qt backend at the same time.
```
I used to complain a lot about Gnome and the big changes they made. I still don't love some of their decisions, but it has become simple to use for the masses, and I consider that a win for Desktop Linux adoption.
The fundamental problem with Gnome is that it presumes that "the masses" (however defined) will use a GNU/Linux desktop. They will not. Insofar as the masses use Linux on the desktop it will be in the form of ChromeOS (or something like it). Instead of chasing Windows and MacOS's taillights, and infantilizing its desktop by continuing to remove features, Gnome should have continued with the Gnome 2 philosophy of focusing on power users, with an emphasis on stability and backwards compatibility. Instead, what we've ended up with is a Gnome desktop that has all of the customizability of MacOS, but with defaults that are nonsensical rather than (somewhat) thought out.
And yes, I'm aware that I can change a lot of Gnome with Gnome Tweak Tool and various extensions. But the fact that I have to install a third party tool, a browser extension, and then some extensions off a random website to get the same functionality that other desktop environments (such as KDE, MacOS and Windows) include by default is an absolute indictment of Gnome's design philosophy.
Instead of chasing after users who have never heard of Gnome, and barely know about Linux, Gnome should have focused on improving the experience existing users. They still can. A good start would be taking all the settings that Gnome Tweak Tool exposes and bringing them back into the main settings UI, so that I don't have swap between two settings applications, with no rhyme or reason dictating how settings are split between the two. Also, please give me the ability to hide the clock (like I can do in Windows 10) without having to install some random extension [1] to do so.
As far as I can tell, Gnome is way LESS customizable than macOS. macOS actually has a ton of customizability, even before you dig into hidden options, and then it also has a ton of hidden options you can modify in configuration files to alter its behavior.
The Gnome people seem to seriously just go around removing options because deleting working code used by actual humans makes them feel more powerful: they think they know better than sometimes decades of prior design or tons of existing projects (including Linux itself at times).
They think of themselves as Apple, sure: but they have neither the true vertical control of everything Apple does to pull off Apple's most "courageous" battles nor the distribution bottlenecks Apple can wield when they are being their most evil.
>The Gnome people seem to seriously just go around removing options because deleting working code used by actual humans makes them feel more powerful
They do it because open source projects don't have infinite resources to maintain infinite options forever. You can complain about it all you want, but 25 years of history shows that just because something was being used by humans doesn't mean that volunteers are going to magically show up to maintain that option for eternity. I'm sure if you've been working in this field for a while then you've deleted some unfortunate code in your day job and had to convince users to do things a better way. So why single out GNOME for this?
And yet, KDE, XFCE, even Gnome forks like MATE and Cinnamon manage to handle having loads more customization options than Gnome, despite having equivalent or inferior time and financial resources.
I have very little patience for the, "It's open source and maintained by volunteers," argument when other projects which are equally open source and maintained by fewer volunteers somehow manage to deliver more functionality.
All of those alternatives are notorious for having a release schedule slower than molasses, or for having outdated tech, or for having a lot of bugs. That's the price you pay, nothing is for free in this world. You mentioned they had more functionality in some ways but you neglected to mention why that is. Also it's funny that you think GNOME has any spare time or financial resources. Every GNOME developer I've ever talked to has been overloaded with low-paying or non-paying work, same as any open source developer.
The rest of your comment is dangerously close to toxic entitlement. You don't get to say you have no patience. Or rather, you can say it, but it's completely meaningless for you to do so unless you were trying to antagonize some volunteers. Avoid that line of thinking. These are all volunteers who can spend their time as they want.
Cinnamon is waaay more configurable than GNOME and they have far less dev resources, and they are fairly bug-free. KDE is still kind of janky but has improved very quickly and continues to improve due to more corporate funding over the last year or two.
Cinnamon is also way behind on the tech. They're still stuck on GTK3 and X11. The resources going to KDE to reduce jankiness is only going to KDE. It isn't going to GNOME. I can't see why you think that would have any effect on anything else.
I don't know about bugs. I haven't really noticed very many bugs in KDE, XFCE or MATE. Those pieces of software seem to be no buggier than Gnome. And I'm not sure why "modern tech" or a rapid release schedule is a good thing in and of itself. Modern tech and rapid releases are good only when they result in good things. Otherwise they're just churn. Change for the sake of change.
Maybe if Gnome didn't have so much "modern tech", (like DBus, for example) the Gnome devs wouldn't be so overworked.
The change may be in areas you don't see. Refactoring is something visible only to developers but it has to be done continuously to be able to pay down tech debt. FYI dbus is also used by KDE, XFCE and MATE. Please avoid making more criticisms like this. Volunteers really aren't going to listen to you if you can't even get the basic facts right.
No I'm just a user of GNOME who doesn't appreciate seeing the near-constant flames and misinformation from non-users of the software whenever I try to discuss it online in certain places. It's low-quality commenting and it poisons the discussion. You're misinterpreting an aversion to bad discussion as "defensiveness." If you were doing this same thing for KDE I'd be asking you to stop too.
This assumes that current Gnome is somehow bad for power users. I do consider myself a power user and I really like Gnome, even after having tried a fair share of WMs starting from.. well probably all of the ones one might now, ranging from tiling ones (dwm, i3/sway, but even obscure ones like musca wm, which I really liked (it is a tiling wm that will place programs into a predetermined frame, instead of dynamically re-layouting the screen) to more traditional desktops. After a point I came to the realization that you likely won’t tile 10 windows on a screen, having split views and many virtual desktops is more than enough. And especially on a laptop 3 finger swipes to switch between desktops is unbeatably good.
You can be certain "the masses" won't use it if it isn't simple. You seem to want everyone to give up on the idea that Linux Desktop could become mainstream. The Gnome project wants to pursue that goal, and so does Valve apparently. I see nothing wrong with that, given that there are many options to fill every other kind of users' needs/wants.
Valve doesn't want the Linux desktop to become mainstream. They want a viable Linux gaming ecosystem. That's a different task than ensuring that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows for the millions of HP/Dell/Lenovo laptops that people buy each year. As for what's wrong with Gnome pursuing "the masses", I'd have far less animosity towards Gnome if they pursued the masses without actively spitting on their existing users. However, they seem incapable of doing that.
What can GNOME do to still chase after power users? I genuinely don’t see what it has to add to powerusers. There’s great window managers and CLI/TUI tools, is there anything GNOME could offer for non-beginners that’s not already done better?
You genuinely don't see what Gnome has to offer power users because the Gnome developers removed all the configuration and customization options that would have been helpful for power users. Gnome 2 was just as customizable as KDE. Then with Gnome 3 they removed almost every option. Now, with a combination of Gnome 42, Gnome Tweak Tool and the aforementioned extensions, some (not all, some) of those customization options are back. Only, now, instead of having all customization options built-in and available from the beginning you have to understand that you have to install Gnome Tweak Tool in order to, for example, remap Caps Lock to Ctrl. That's something that MacOS offers out of the box. That's something that KDE offers out of the box. Gnome used to offer it out of the box too, but they deliberately removed the option.
Really, that's what gets me. It's not as if the world moved on and Gnome just didn't keep up. No. Gnome 2 was actually better than Gnome 3. The Gnome devs removed features for what, as far as I can tell, were purely aesthetic reasons.
Put another way, whenever we see Microsoft or Apple dumbing down their operating systems, do we not criticize them for unnecessarily making life more difficult for their users? Why should we give Gnome a free pass for doing exactly the same thing?
I've run into this problem. I consider Gnome to be completely unusable, so I'll suffer with some kind of workaround, any workaround, rather than use Gnome.
It has? I use gnome bits daily and it's a mess of inconsistent and zero-ux-background-so-i-came-up-with-my-own paradigms.
There's no reason why the gterminal, for example, should replace the top most item in the right click menu with hex/oct representation of a number you happen to have selected, or every gnome app keeping affordances in "fun" new places:
Compare gedit vs gnome-weather vs gnote vs gcontacts - sometimes there's a hamburger menu, other times there's contextual stuff under an icon, or a button, or a button with a contextual menu. Variety is the spice of life, right?
If you're crushing it usability, you certainly can gloat about my way or the highway type of philosophy, but gnome is in no danger of that.
> There's no reason why the gterminal, for example, should replace the top most item in the right click menu with hex/oct representation of a number you happen to have selected
I like it. It's useful during programming and it never gets in the way of anything. If you're going minimalist, why even use the right click menu at all?
> Compare gedit vs gnome-weather vs gnote vs gcontacts - sometimes there's a hamburger menu, other times there's contextual stuff under an icon, or a button, or a button with a contextual menu. Variety is the spice of life, right?
Most options with descriptions are behind the kebab menu on every app, quick controls are icon buttons. It all looks pretty consistent to me. gedit's open/save buttons are a bit weird, I suppose, but if that's all then I don't see the problem, really.
You'll find inconsistencies like these on every OS. KDE has its fair share of wonkiness as well if you switch. Even Windows, the most popular operating system in the world, has a range of hamburger menu icons and placements.
You seem pretty out of date on your opinion. gedit is not in GNOME anymore. GNOME Weather is definitely consistent with the test of the desktop since people did a lot of porting in 42 and 43 to implement designs. GNote is not even a core GNOME application. GNOME Contacts is probably under maintained, but I'm sure if you see design issues, you would bring them up on the issue tracker instead of rambling in a HN comment.
I didn't like it either, but I have accepted that just as Raku isn't the future of Perl 5, GNOME isn't the future of MATE. It's just the name changes were a little different.
No. I use Linux on headless servers all the time, and even I don't mess with Linux DEs. The mere fact that there's more than one widely used is undesirable, and even a popular one like GNOME changed way too drastically (2 to 3). Last time I bothered with all this was GNOME 2 before 3 existed, which was ok at the time.
The real Linux DE for the masses is ChromeOS, but people don't usually bucket it with the others. And that is Google's way or the highway.
This never made sense to me. Why is it bad there's several, especially at the current level of maturity, where both GNOME and KDE are perfectly viable options.
More moving parts when something goes wrong, which it will. You don't have to specify that you're using "macOS Ventura with the Glendale desktop environment and Hwy 101 window server" or something. Win2000 help might even be relevant in Win10 cause they prioritized familiarity.
Even at my job where gurus are managing our workstations full-time, Linux users randomly had to all switch desktop environments cause of X dependency getting too old, and the new one partially broke compatibility with our remote desktop. It's not a perfectly layered cake.
I also don't believe that people's use cases are really so different that there need to be so multiple widely-used Linux DEs. I'd get it if there were GNOME for almost everyone then other niche DEs for the rest. Again, so many people with a variety of use cases have managed ok with the basically unchanging Windows UI for decades.
I installed Fedora 37 on a relative's laptop yesterday, because their Windows install was in shambles. He is completely computer illiterate. But the fact that it resembled his phone somewhat, instantly made it easier for him to use. Gnome2 would have been more challenging.
Gnome complaining seems to be most common from people who spend all day tweaking window border radii and task bar widgets.
Some of us have actual work to get done and don't want to play the role of UI designer. I trust that the Gnome people put the work in and get something that's mostly right.
I use kde with the default theme, but was quite happy with Gnome 2. Honestly most of my complaints aren't about gnome, gnome can do what it wants, they're about gtk apps (like Firefox) that are forced to adopt to terrible gnome conventions just because they use gtk. For example gnomes Terri terrible file picker.
Or people who work at government agencies that are forced to use open source software. Or schools or universities or hospitals. Some users have disabilities and accessibility is a requirement.
I'm not aware of schools, universities, or hospitals using Linux/Gnome. I've heard of it for some US Government systems, where they seem wedded to Red Hat. All the medical computers I've ever seen are running Windows.
Maybe RH has a bunch of institutional customers I'm completely unaware of, but as far as I can tell, the Gnome devs seem to be trying to build a GUI aimed at mythological users: non-technical users they somehow think are going to switch to Linux Real Soon Now if only they can entice them with their holy ultra-simplified GUI. The real world doesn't work this way.
That user isn't mythical. I'm a developer and I like GNOME's simplifications. I prefer to spend less time messing about with my window manager and more time actually, you know, developing. If you ask me, the idea that technical people need to spend months hacking around their desktop and fighting with thousands of mutually incompatible config settings just to get it to work is a harmful stereotype perpetuated by the more toxic aspects of the Linux community.
Yeah that's fine if you prefer the default KDE workflow. If you prefer a different workflow, you have to either spend a lot of time configuring it, or use something else.
The vision stinks. Usually the solution w/ open source is to roll up one’s sleeves and help out, but since help isn’t allowed (on that subject) people are going to complain loudly.
I don't understand. They have said they want to make a desktop that has a certain set of properties X. They have repeatedly said that they will only make a desktop with a certain set of properties X, and any proposals to the contrary will be rejected. Yet people outside the project still persist in trying to make it into a desktop with some other properties Y. Continuing to tilt at that windmill seems irrational.
FWIW, I love Gnome as is. I don't know how many people like me exist. The only thing I miss is the tree view in Nautilus, which is coming back in 44.
>But, currently, I prioritize ease of use and distraction-free, so I use GNOME.
Wew, there we go!. At least it's being said plainly and openly at this point. GNOME is for GNOME OS, we have plenty of other choices in its absence. Sorry to authors of GTK apps caught in the middle!
This line coming from the project that took what 10+ years to add thumbnails to the file picker? Do y'all not realize how this comes off? It's really something.
> This type of behavior is consistent with numerous projects, including Firefox, the Linux kernel, KDE and many, many others.
No, it's not. KDE will work with you to add any reasonable feature that most people would find useful, even at risk of introducing a few bugs here and there. (Gnome ends up having a similar amount of bugs anyway). You can very easily turn KDE into any other desktop you want, even gnome or windows. It provides one preferred oob experience however
If you ask them to remove things that confuse some users they won't do it because that would be against their philosophy. That is what 'my way or the highway' means.
I'm not talking about configurations or defaults. I'm talking about removing features and settings so my grandfather doesn't get confused, but I'm afraid that would go against their philosophy.
It's configurable. You can remove virtually any feature yourself. Now if you want to remove the configuration option itself, that becomes a very different question
This sounds like a Russian-style argument: "you won't remove everyone else's choices and just force everyone to do everything my way, so you're being obstructionist!"
If they made an additional trimmed down KDE version for non-technical users, that would be more not less choice.
Regarding "Russian-style argument": Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
The vast majority of people do not want to configure anything. They want it to just work. They don't want software where it's possible to pick wrong configurations as well. There are only a few exceptions to this like accessibility. Configuration should be the last resort where there are different kinds of users who absolutely must have the software work in one way and it isn't possible to help both at the same time. It should not be used for menial UI layouts and visual design.
Don't just support Gnome: add a couple of paid devs to the Gnome project to help out, but more importantly make it even more antagonistic towards users and other non-Gnome devs. Have your undercover devs become highly-placed "visionaries" in the Gnome project, insulting and belittling anyone who opposes their One True Vision for desktop Linux and throwing a wrench into any attempts to get along with anything in the Linux ecosystem that isn't part of the Gnome project.
The task force's original top priority was convincing the world that they don't exist, but they apparently gave up any pretence of that last year when they rewarded Lennart Poettering with a job at the company.
Let me jump to the conclusion. I already don't use GNOME. My problem with their "my way or the highway" attitude is its impact on the broader linux ecosystem. A great example of this is client side decoration (CSD). Since gnome uses client side decoration, non gnome apps often don't have any window controls in gnome, and conversely gnome apps draw unwanted, redundant client side window decorations in environments with server side decorations (or in my case, no decorations).
Another example is, from what I've seen gnome has had a lot more resistance to standardizing new wayland protocols from wlroots than KDE, because minimal compositors have a very different paradigm than gnome, and gnome isn't interested in supporting other paradigms.
I feel kinda bad for Gnome. I don’t use their main program, but I’m sure it’s fine for what it is (Desktop environments seem like a kind of over-complicated unnecessary idea).
They seem to have, by sticking to their guns, become an absolute punching bag for the type of person who cares to complain about tedious UI issues.
It strikes me that they provide a pretty major community service by distracting that group.
I suppose that’s nice for people in that set of users. I suppose it is also a nice thought for the Gnome developers on the receiving end of the anger — at least there’s a large quiet population out there happily using their code. But it seems like a kind of abstract consolation.
The real problem with Gnome is that the user that they are targeting simply doesn't exist. People who need a user friendly environment probably don't need Linux in the first place.
I would still say that the targeted user does not exist but for the opposite reason.
The mass basic non nerd lambda user wants clear explicit interface with buttons. Not secret keyboard shortcut interfaces and functions hidden in secret hamburger menus.
In addition, the "tablet" interface with just a single window does not work well enough for most users, or everyone will only use a tablet and not a computer.
I use Gnome and it's my preferred DE. I'm perfectly capable of ricing i3-gaps or whatever. But I have better things to be doing. Gnome just works which is more than I have experienced from any of the others. And yes I have tried XFCE, KDE Plasma, and i3.
I also have no citations, but Fedora and Ubuntu are each more popular than OpenSUSE, KDE Neon, Arch and Manjaro, so assuming that the same proportion of users of each distro stick with the default DE, it's probably true.
(Arch doesn't have a "default" DE, but https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun puts KDE at 36% and GNOME at 22%, so I put it in the KDE camp.)
It's because it is the default on more of the most popular distros. Ubuntu is the most popular distro. Fedora is the third. Both have GNOME. Linux Mint is second with Cinnamon.
For Linux, when you exclude Android and ChromeOS. So for desktop GNU/Linux. And even then I'm not sure now, because Steam Deck and Manjaro use KDE, and Linux Mint uses not-gnomish-fork-of-gnome.
Its the default on those distros because those distros invest on GNOME and GTK and GTK is SW.
QT has an history of being connected with non-free SW licenses, therefore commercial (or company sponsored) for those distros to rely and invest on such project is risky.
I'd bet most CentOS and RHEL installations don't use any desktop environment at all.
However, why argue if we can check the actual stats? [1] GNOME seems to be well ahead for now for desktop GNU/Linux. But the dip in the February, when the Steam Deck was released, is interesting.
> However, why argue if we can check the actual stats?
Because nobody has actual stats. Your link is from one attempt to find some stats, but unless every major distro activates it by default (which they will probably never do on account of privacy issues), it's a tiny and biased sample.
I'd say, it means "they have no faults". It follows that anything that has gone wrong in the past would not be their fault, though I could imagine that they could still establish faults in the future.
The only reason I'm still using Gnome is because their UI is consistent plus it's easy to theme it as well(through Gradience), but I can't deny that I hate the CSD initiative. I'm eagerly waiting for the new Cosmic DE from PopOs!
Did you actually bother reading any of the arguments on that page? They don't want distros to use themes because themes always break apps. This is unavoidable. There's no practical way to make those kind of themes in a way that won't break apps eventually. Tinkering is completely different from a distro shipping broken apps by default, it's understood that's your responsibility when you break everything yourself by tinkering after-the-fact. If you wonder why they might also make it harder for this kind of tinkering, it's because tinkerers also don't like to use something that will just break everything else!
Somehow kde manages to largely avoid that problem. It strikes me as trying to solve technical problems socially, almost as bad as trying to solve social problems technologically.
No it really doesn't. I've seen tons of Qt themes that break apps. Their theming system is similar to the design of GTK's, so it has most of the same problems. This isn't a technical problem, it's entirely a social problem: users want these themes but the same users are also under the false impression that you can ever have this type of theme that won't also break apps. When that isn't technically possible and it never will be.
My desire to theme my desktop has declined linearly with age (along with my general desire to spend time futzing around with things for no material gain). I suspect 99% of people follow the same path.
Whoever wrote this managed to poorly express the design philosophy and also didn't mention that the fork of the earlier version
exists. At first it wasn't even clear about what version of Gnome they were even talking about.
If you don't like Gnome, and it doesn't cater to your requirements, there's plenty of other options that may.
I don't really understand people who keep saying they wish gnome was much more like KDE, for example - there's already KDE existing in that space for users.
And it's not like Gnome are paying distros to ship it as default - they ship it because the maintainers think it's a sane default. Petitioning the distro maintainers would likely be a much more direct path if you disagreed with that and want to change it.
Firefox's file picker moving from a generic gtk file picker that blends into any DE reasonably well to one that's very eccentric and gnome specific does kind of piss me off.
They did implement a way for people to use non-gnome file pickers with gtk programs (like firefox), but then they made it a lot more difficult to actually use that feature outside of flatpak...
It's not healthy to find yourself getting angry at decisions made by random open source projects. I really doubt anyone working on that has as strong opinions as you on what the file picker looks like, or they would have written one themselves by now. None of these projects owe anybody anything anyway, that's kind of the point of open sourcing things for free without any warranty.
>None of these projects owe anybody anything anyway
Do I owe them anything? Do I owe them silence, or to not complain, or to not tarnish their name?
Clearly as human beings we both owe each-other something, there is a social contract at play here. I'm sure you've seen the infamous "you have to decide if you're a gnome app or an everybody else app", and clearly that developer thought other projects owed them something.
But if you're just going to say "well gnome is immune from criticism because they're (paid) open source volunteers", well then what's the point of even talking to anyone? It's an amazing example of a thought-terminating cliche.
Somehow when I'm bad mouthing gnome I owe the gnome project my silent support though. It is a mystery.
There's a difference between honest criticism and low-effort rage bait. Helpful critique is about settling differences and finding a common ground to move forward. It's not about getting mad at others and holding a grudge. Do your best to avoid being that kind of angry internet person with a chip on the shoulder. You also don't owe anyone anything but just remember what goes around comes around. If you spend your time amplifying mistrust and resentment, instead of trying to build and repair trust and appreciation for one another, then you'll always be in a miserable place where you can't trust anybody.
And let me make it clear. I don't care if you honestly criticize GNOME or any other project. I'm pointing out that this style of angry, substance-free criticism is less than useless, it's actually damaging to you and everyone around you because it's the classic short-sighted us-vs-them mentality. It purposely discards the truth in favor of always looking for an "enemy" to blame for everything. Open source isn't a zero-sum game, acting that way is counterproductive towards getting what you want.
>I'm sure you've seen the infamous "you have to decide if you're a gnome app or an everybody else app", and clearly that developer thought other projects owed them something.
No, that's a bad faith misinterpretation of the statement. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have different APIs that conflict with each other. Acknowledging this fact isn't a demand that anyone owes anyone anything, it's simply a fact. If developers want to use these APIs they have to pick which ones they're going to use.
>I'm pointing out that this style of angry, substance-free criticism is less than useless
There is a lot of substance in the various criticisms by people in this comment thread, now some of it is heated at this point and there's a lot of frustration involved, but there is a lot of legitimate criticism. If you don't believe me believe the SDL dev, or the LXQT devs (formally LXDE, but they had a falling out with gnome), or the many many other devs that do have legitimate criticism. There's a lot of legitimate criticism, it just keeps being dismissed as "well gnome can do whatever it wants". It can, but if it does then it should expect to lose social capital and good will. No one owes the Gnome project any good will, and it's rapidly burning through it's remaining supply. The good news is that it's a comparatively well connected and well funded open source project, so probably it doesn't need that much good will.
on the topic of "finding a common ground to move forward", well that's almost exactly the advice I'd give the Gnome project in regards to rebuilding some of that social capital and good will. But I really do think the ball is in their court at this point, and the claims that they are un-interested in cooperation, or in any supporting the broader open source community, well I'd say that's fair. Most open source software has a certain amount of good will towards other open source software, SDL is a backbone of open source and if they ask you to please reconsider well then... you reconsider. They've helped the broader open source community out a lot so you help them out.
But with gnome it's very clear that we're not all in this together. Gnome is one team, and the broader open source community is another team. They won't help us out, so why should we help them out. Even the basic appearance of compromise would help this out tremendously, something like "well this doesn't really help Gnome but we'll do it anyway" for a few relevant features. Make it a GSoC project or something.
No one owes anybody anything but there is a social contract, and while gnome doesn't have to abide by it they do get to suffer the consequences of violating it. Mostly right now those consequences are people bitching on the internet and mostly not writing new stuff in GTK unless they're part of the gnome community.
I'm not the author of this blog post. If I was, I would tell you.
>If you don't believe me believe the SDL dev, or the LXQT devs (formally LXDE, but they had a falling out with gnome), or the many many other devs that do have legitimate criticism.
That isn't valid criticism because the whole reason that situation came about is because those devs also wanted to do what they wanted, and it conflicted with what GNOME wanted. No one's at fault here, it's just a normal healthy disagreement. When you start saying "I'm angry, this disagreement means the side I disagree with is shitty bad people, now they owe me" then you're the one pulling the discussion into an unhealthy, toxic territory. So please check yourself and avoid that.
>It can, but if it does then it should expect to lose social capital and good will.
>The good news is that it's a comparatively well connected and well funded open source project
Again, it's really funny that you think any of these open source projects are well-funded or that they ever had social capital to spare. I've seen near constant trolling and bad faith accusations leveled at these volunteers for years, at the same time I've seen nearly all of them struggle with money, and comparatively few people willing to raise a hand to help out. Your problem here is you're not focused on helping rebuild any of this social capital. You're trying to take more of it away and replace it with nothing. It's destructive instead of constructive. I don't know how you can expect anyone to make progress here to rebuild when you're actively taking more of it away with the trash talk.
>on the topic of "finding a common ground to move forward", well that's almost exactly the advice I'd give the Gnome project in regards to rebuilding some of that social capital and good will. But I really do think the ball is in their court at this point, and the claims that they are un-interested in cooperation, or in any supporting the broader open source community, well I'd say that's fair. Most open source software has a certain amount of good will towards other open source software, SDL is a backbone of open source and if they ask you to please reconsider well then... you reconsider. They've helped the broader open source community out a lot so you help them out.
This paragraph is more meaningless fluff. Avoid this. "The GNOME Project" isn't a person that can just decide to do something. It's a loose group of volunteers working on what they want to work on. If an individual (for example, you) wants to go and start cooperating then they just do it. Continuously asking other people to do it for you is an empty gesture. It's time for you to stop thinking like you're a cop or a lawyer throwing accusations around and trying to calculate just how much social capital others have that you can take away from them. Instead think like a diplomat, think how you can help others reconsider and patch things up. Think how you can give back social capital to everyone around you including those you disagree with. Think how you can inspire others to do the same. That's how we make good community members who aren't perpetually starting and continuing these pointless fights with one another. That's how we avoid the toxic obsession with attacking all the small decisions made by some project, and instead we focus on uplifting all projects.
>But with gnome it's very clear that we're not all in this together. Gnome is one team, and the broader open source community is another team. They won't help us out, so why should we help them out.
Please, stop with this nonsense. Again you're viewing this as "GNOME vs SDL" when pitting these projects against one another has never been a reasonable way to approach this. These are just free projects on the internet, they're not in competition for anything. Maybe you think they're in competition for developer time, but they actually aren't. Developer time isn't fungible, you can't take a KDE developer and tell them to work on GNOME, or vice versa. They just won't do that.
>Even the basic appearance of compromise would help this out tremendously, something like "well this doesn't really help Gnome but we'll do it anyway" for a few relevant features. Make it a GSoC project or something.
They do actually do that for GSOC projects, you probably just didn't notice because they didn't do it for the few small areas you apparently care about. With GSOC the intern has to select the project they want to work on, or make a proposal themselves. If no intern ever wanted to work on it then maybe you can understand it was probably a bad idea or not that important or interesting? I should stress that the areas you're talking about are like less than 0.1% of the project as a whole. They might be high priority for you but they aren't for most other people.
>but there is a social contract
No, there isn't. The entirety of these projects could disappear off the internet tomorrow and nobody would do a thing about it. It happens all the time, developers lose interest and open source projects just die. The users might complain but they can't force any developer to do something they don't want to do. If you honestly believe there's a social contract, you would do better to take the first step and start helping everyone, instead of demanding that some volunteer does everything for you.
> Your problem here is you're not focused on helping rebuild any of this social capital. You're trying to take more of it away and replace it with nothing.
Gnome as a project isn't entitled to that social capital, they have to earn it.
>Instead think like a diplomat, think how you can help others reconsider and patch things up.
The ball really is in gnome's court for this one. Some olive branched they could extend would be some kind of dconf setting to enable typeahead in the file picker, being able to double click the filepicker bread crumbs to show file paths (don't force me to learn gnome specific shortcuts for common functionality), or dozens of other small compromises that don't effect me personally.
It's not my responsibility to be nice to Gnome, or to try to improve Gnome's reputation or community good will.
>they're not in competition for anything. Maybe you think they're in competition for developer time,
Did you read the thread? No one claimed Gnome and SDL/GLFW/Allegro were in competition. That would be insane, to try and say that the simple-directmedia-layer and a DE/gui-toolkit were in competition.
You know who does the window handling for 99% of commercial games on linux? SDL. Also volunteer run.
You may think that's a reasonable response to a technical discussion involving like a half dozen maintainers of other open source software, but it's really not. It's a very rude response to a half dozen very maintainers of very prominent open source projects. SDL alone is a pretty big deal, if SDL is saying that your solution won't work for them then you listen, since basically all commercial application on linux use SDL.
Ultimately libdecor was produced which solved this problem in a way that isn't really great, but is at least acceptable even if it makes all those developers do a bunch of extra work just for gnome. It's a compromise, it means that everybody needs to create an extra special solution just for Gnome and if any other DE tried that SDL would rightly tell them to frig off. You don't think that interaction had any affect on Gnome's good will? It may very well be why the steam deck shipped with KDE by default.
Sure, maybe Gnome's image problem isn't their fault, maybe it's all bullshit and stuff taken out of context, but it's still their problem to solve and the first step is admitting they have a problem.
>Think how you can give back social capital to everyone around you including those you disagree with.
I don't think you understand what I mean by social capital. It means how much people respect the project, basically. How much good will Gnome has in the community. Gnome has, through their actions and decisions, lost my respect. They can earn that back, but it has to come from them.
While we may not be forced to use it, they do throw their weight around and have significant effects on the open source community as a whole, so when they break stuff for people who don't even use gnome that does earn them some enmity.
And that's fine, they don't need my respect, or the respect of any of the other detractors in this thread. They can clearly get along fine without it.
But you're acting like we all owe the Gnome project our respect, and that's something I really don't get. I do think it's recoverable for what it's worth, but stuff like that XDG-decoration thread and seeing how Matthias treated respected members of the open source community, completely disregarding their points and smugly refusing to engage in any technical discussion, well that burns lot of community good will.
>Gnome as a project isn't entitled to that social capital, they have to earn it.
It's evident that every time they earn some, the haters invent new reasons to take it away by creating a new meme about how terrible GNOME is. The old meme about thumbnails in the file picker finally got fixed and you're just as angry at them as ever. Do you understand why they won't ever waste time trying to "earn" things from a group that's perpetually unhappy? I wish you would do yourself a favor and leave that group, it's not a group that's focused on actually solving any problems.
>The ball really is in gnome's court for this one. Some olive branched they could extend would be some kind of dconf setting to enable typeahead in the file picker
No it's not in their court. It's completely in yours. This is all open source, so you can just implement that if you want it, or use one of the many patches floating around. GNOME developers aren't under any obligation to pick up random patches off the internet that would increase their own support burden just because someone keeps asking, you can take those for yourself if you really want to deal with the mess. Like, come on. At what point will you stop blaming them and take responsibility for your own choices? At what point would you ever accept "no" for an answer? If the answer is "never" then you should be able to understand, it's you who's refusing to compromise.
That's a completely civil response based on facts. Core Wayland requires apps to support client decorations. The server side decorations are an optional extension. This hasn't changed in the four years since that response was posted. It makes no sense for you to be bringing this up again.
>It's a very rude response to a half dozen very maintainers of very prominent open source projects. SDL alone is a pretty big deal, if SDL is saying that your solution won't work for them then you listen, since basically all commercial application on linux use SDL.
No, nothing was rude about it. The only way I can interpret this attitude is "SDL is more important than you so they should get to strongarm everyone else into doing things the way they insist" and that's definitely a take. Is that what you meant? If that's true then you're saying SDL is the real bully, not GNOME.
>it means that everybody needs to create an extra special solution just for Gnome and if any other DE tried that SDL would rightly tell them to frig off.
It's not a special solution for GNOME, this is required by the core Wayland protocol.
>You don't think that interaction had any affect on Gnome's good will?
No, I think people who already had a negative opinion of GNOME and think GNOME is responsible for all evils in Linux would use that as fodder for their anger. If it wasn't that, they'd find something else to be mad and blame GNOME about. Like, my friend, you're doing it now.
>While we may not be forced to use it, they do throw their weight around and have significant effects on the open source community as a whole, so when they break stuff for people who don't even use gnome
No, every issue you've said so far only affects GNOME or GTK.
>But you're acting like we all owe the Gnome project our respect, and that's something I really don't get.
Yes, you do owe them some basic respect and dignity if you want them to cooperate with you. What's the part of this you don't get? Your disrespect is pointless and damaging to yourself because it's leading you to make nonsensical uninformed decisions and fail to understand other people's actual positions. If you have some disagreement with Matthias then you can talk it out with him like a human being and offer to help, instead of trash talking behind someone's back. These developers are real people you know? They're not code-writing robots who all obey a hive mind. I can guarantee you're not seeing the full picture here. If your reaction to this is "no, I will never talk to those evil GNOME developers until they fulfill my list of demands" then again, please consider that it's you who's being the unreasonable one.
>but stuff like that XDG-decoration thread and seeing how Matthias treated respected members of the open source community, completely disregarding their points and smugly refusing to engage in any technical discussion
There's no technical discussion to be had and no one was being smug or treating anyone badly. You're shooting the messenger. Again, this is required by the core Wayland protocol. You can be upset about this but the decision was already made years prior by other people outside of GNOME's control. GNOME can't change the core Wayland protocol because that would break existing apps. I'm telling you right now. The thing you're asking for is unreasonable. If you keep making this request, you'll only end up disappointed and you'll just piss more people off for no reason. Please approach this from a different angle and avoid the trap of saying "these developers are always right and must be listened to but these other developers are always wrong and must never be listened to" because that's what you're getting into and I think you're smart enough to see that's obviously a toxic way to think about anything.
>Yes, you do owe them some basic respect and dignity if you want them to cooperate with you.
You only owe people the respect they give you, I guess is the take away from that. Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects.
Basic respect and dignity, for sure, but that doesn't extend to not criticizing Gnome. Respect can mean treating someone like a person or treating someone like an authority, or a competent subject matter expert.
Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate, and on to the point where if Gnome gets sufficient market share they're going to make their own custom extensions and extinguish the competition, or at least make a bunch of extra work for everyone. I don't want a future where Gnome is dominant, I believe that they'll abuse that position. Once again that's subjective, but I don't think it's unreasonable from looking at their past behavior.
>If it wasn't that, they'd find something else to be mad and blame GNOME about. Like, my friend, you're doing it now.
It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem. It's sad, but it's still Gnome's problem to fix.
>Again, this is required by the core Wayland protocol.
I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground.
To be clear, there are a number of points where I am hopeful about Gnome. Libdecor was an acceptable compromise, and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps, but I'm reserving judgement until I see how it plays out.
I'm not a zealot, I can see a handful of things that has caused my respect for the Gnome project to go up. Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this. Makes it every hard to find any common ground. I think we both want open source to succeed, and we should both be on the same side, but that's hard under the circumstances.
>Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects.
No. You're confusing a normal disagreement with disrespect. There's nothing disrespectful about saying "no we're not going to implement this." I assume from this confusion that you don't work in this field. If you work as a developer you get used to saying things like that all the time. Most users don't understand code. Why would they? Users come at developers with all kinds of requests, some good and some bad, and it's the developers' job to make a decision to say yes or no.
>Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate
Cooperate with who? If you want them to cooperate with you, then you need to respect them. That way they'll owe you the respect you give them. That means putting aside all the past anger you might have and practicing forgiveness. Put aside any old opinions you had and start fresh. This isn't related to GNOME by the way, this is for any project that you may have a disagreement with. Just think how this would be if the situations were switched and somebody wanted something from you for free. The ball is completely in your court because they're not the ones going on social media making long posts about how you should write some code for them!
>It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem.
Unfortunately in this case it's neither. I can name some times when GNOME screwed up communications but this one isn't that.
>I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground.
There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. I see the problem, what you're not seeing is that the problem isn't fixable in the way you think it is. You still seem to think this is a "stance" or "opinion" that some developer has and not an unchangeable fact of the code. Why? If you can't explain this well then maybe consider that you're not qualified to be commenting on it?
>and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps
This already happened, have a look at what ElementaryOS is doing.
>Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this.
I can list a bunch but I don't want to. I don't bother discussing my own opinions about GNOME on HN any more because every time I do, people who hold opinions like yours use it as an excuse to turn it into a GNOME hate-fest flamewar and start harassing the developers, calling them shitty bad people who deserve to get their reputations trashed. That stuff is unacceptable. I'm serious here when I say this. In my opinion it's your attitude that's poisoning the well. And this is why I use a throwaway account to discuss this by the way. For whatever reason the moderators here think it's ok for this to be a place where trolls and conspiracy theorists run amok. I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end.
> I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end.
That negativity has been for the most part earned. Obviously "toxic" negativity is a problem, by very definition, but I truly don't think anything in this thread (before you started commenting and things got heated at least) crossed the line into being toxic. You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate.
Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate and, while demonstrating an underlying frustration, isn't toxic. Especially in a non-professional setting like this one. That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine. It even uses passive voice! (Note that I attribute a lot of things to "Gnome" as if that was a person, I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name, not because I don't understand that Gnome is an organization composed of a bunch of people)
>There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it.
No, that's a statement of opinion. Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here. XDG-decoration is subjective, and most non-gnome linux DEs have decided to implement it. It's a choice not to.
There's a lot of things you're saying are facts that seem to me to be subjective calls by the Gnome team. Adding a dconf setting for typeahead instead of recursive search would be another example of a subjective call.
Now their stance may be supported by facts, facts like the wayland spec requires you to implement CSD, or adding more dconf settings goes against Gnome design guidelines, but that doesn't make their conclusion some kind of immaculate fact. It's still subjective opinion, it's just supported by some facts.
So this is where it gets tricky, even something like "should gnome prioritize implementing the XDG-decoration spec" is highly highly subjective. When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff. To debate that kind of subjective stuff we need some kind of framework, and if we can't agree on any sort of community standards aside from "I do what I want" we're going to have a hard time with that.
>That negativity has been for the most part earned.
No, it hasn't. It's unacceptable for you to make personal attacks calling them "shitty people" because they closed a bug report. It's unacceptable for you to demand that open source developers spend their time addressing your concerns for free. Period. End of story. This isn't up for debate and you're acting like a troll by constantly coming back on this. So I'm asking as person, can you just stop this behavior, please. If you can't agree this is unacceptable, you'll always be a toxic participant in open source. I'm not even exaggerating here. Open source developers will never owe you anything, the entire point of it is it's all voluntary and any contributor can come and go at any time they please. Read this article if you want to know more about why this type of toxic entitlement is always harmful: https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/
>You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate.
And I'm telling you it's not. You're sitting in a place with incorrect information.
>Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate
First of all, that's not what you said originally. You're walking it back again. I wish you would just be honest and apologize and say you were out of line before. Second of all, they're not doing that. Your statement is incorrect and misleading. GNOME isn't opposed to anyone else implementing server side decorations in Wayland. There's just no point to them implementing it in GNOME.
>That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine
Well you need to imagine harder because that wasn't passive. You're framing it like GNOME is actively standing in the way blocking someone from implementing server side decorations, when they've never done that. You can put server side decorations in your own Wayland implementation, or use another one like KDE that already has it. GNOME can't "oppose" anyone from doing that.
>I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name
You already did call them out by name. Again, if you have a disagreement with an individual contributor, you should talk it out with them instead of trash talking them behind their back on social media. Trash talking makes your behavior frustrating to deal with because nobody can trust you not to start fights.
>Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here.
There's no "opposition," this isn't a fight or a debate and it never was. Open source is a team sport and the other team you play against is the computer. It's not about people vs other people. Either you're helping out the team working on the code or you're not. You're still framing this in needlessly confrontational and combative terms, this needs to stop.
>When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff
No, there's no debate to be had here. If you were serious about discussing these issues you'd take it up with the GNOME design team. In a sense their decisions are subjective but they don't just make them at random. They're trying to make a consistent system within a particular framework targeted at a particular set of users. And the same things about development apply to them too. Nobody on the design team gets to "win" every debate. Some ideas are just bad and they lose and get thrown out. All the things you're saying have been discussed to death already. Do you think the design team hasn't heard this already in the years previously when these were brought up before? They have, you're not making any new arguments that would ever be convincing. You're just saying "I wish they would implement this" and that's like, ok? All the GNOME designers have about 1000 features they want to implement too, but time is limited so realistically they can only pick a few and they have to throw out the rest.
> It's unacceptable for you to demand that open source developers spend their time addressing your concerns for free. Period.
Do you understand the difference between that and general criticism of a project?
If you had to write guidelines on criticizing a project like Gnome in an acceptable way, what would they be?
My suspicion is that you think any criticism is unacceptable, but if you have some actual guidelines other than "people are mean to Gnome" I would be interested in hearing them.
Personally I think you've been very disrespectful during this thread, but as I generally enjoy debate I've been willing to put up with it until now.
I think I've already explained multiple times what good criticism is. I'll repeat it with some other tips. Always present criticism in a helpful way. Be as respectful as possible every time. Only give feedback that you yourself would be willing to hear from someone else. Make sure the other person is comfortable with you before offering criticism. Never offer criticism unless you're also willing to offer to help. Acknowledge that sometimes your criticism could be wrong and apologize when it is. Accept that sometimes you have no useful criticism to give and in those cases, the best course of action is to stay quiet. Present new information each time instead of repeating old information. Use the "feedback sandwich" and always pair your criticisms with equal or higher amounts of praise. Avoid criticizing in areas that you're not qualified in. For code, that means don't talk about it unless you've personally studied that code in detail. Avoid personal attacks. Avoid trash talking. Avoid starting fights. Avoid continuing old fights. Avoid holding grudges. Avoid rumors and hearsay. Avoid "ranking" people against each other. Never look at anything in terms of "opposing sides." Avoid creating situations where one person wins and the other loses. Remember that everyone is on the same team and as a good community member, the ultimate goal of your criticism is to support others and create situations where everyone can win.
This is fairly generic advice and it all isn't even related to GNOME. This is a general guideline for any healthy community. You can read about all this in random books about community building. If you want to be part of open source you just have to be a good community member, there's literally nothing else to open source. That's why I say it's unacceptable to do those negative things. There just isn't any other way this works. These are communities of equals, you aren't the boss and no one else is your boss either, so it's on you to manage your own conduct.
I'm trying to be kind to you but you're making it difficult when you lead by saying nasty things about people I know, like they're acting shitty just because they declined to implement a feature that you were personally invested in and they weren't. And you keep insisting that they have to do this or they deserve it or something like that. Please just don't do that, it makes it extremely hard to engage with you when I have to keep going through this wall of "but don't you see this other person sucks" or that type of thing. You're automatically putting everyone else on defense when you do that and it messes up the whole conversation.
That's how you criticize a person, sure. How do you criticize Adobe for the issues around Pantone support? How do you criticize wizards of the coast for the OGL issues that are going on right now?
I don't see how these questions are related. Those are businesses. Volunteer open source projects aren't businesses. There's no barriers for anyone to join the project and start changing it from the inside. And they're specifically set up so you don't have to boycott them when disagreements happen, you just fork the project.
>There are a bunch of barriers, you don't have to go far to see people asking if pull requests would be welcomed for a particular feature.
That isn't a barrier and you don't need to do that. You just implement the feature in your own fork. I can tell from this you're not a developer because this is a common confusion. When you ask for a pull request you're not trying to get through a social barrier. You're actually asking someone else to do you a huge favor by taking time out of their day to review your code for free. And then if they merge it you're also asking them to maintain it for free and fix future bugs in it for free. Normally you would have to pay to get other developers to do that.
>but it is a business
No, this is false and you're getting confused again. Some businesses can contribute by volunteering their employees' time, but that's different from the project itself being a business. The project itself (as in the collection of all the contributors) isn't deciding what those people are paid or what they work on. The project itself doesn't have the customers or answer to them, the business does and that's a separate entity both legally and functionally. Do you see how this is fundamentally different from a business?
>I don't think it gets a pass just for being open source, any more than the linux kernel or Wikipedia does.
A pass on what, exactly? You're coming back to this combative language again, please stop.
Gnome is a business, same as Wikipedia. They have a charter and a board of directors and almost one million dollars in revenue in 2020. Lot less in 2021 though, and I don't see any newer reports (I'm not looking in depth right now).
>A pass on what, exactly?
Criticism, in the same style as you'd criticize any business, or at least Wikipedia.
So I ask again, what guidelines would you give for criticizing companies like Adobe, wizards of the coast, Wikipedia, the linux foundation, etc?
>You said "changing the project from the inside", which a fork isn't.
Yeah, it is. The inside of the project being the code. You just fork it and change whatever you want. What else do you think that means in the context of software?
>Gnome is a business, same as Wikipedia
No, GNOME and Wikipedia are both non-profits. They're not businesses. "Business" usually means a for-profit company. In both GNOME and Wikipedia, the money is mostly all going to administration costs and costs to run the servers. Currently no GNOME developers are paid by the non-profit, and Wikipedia editors aren't paid either. Ask any of them and they'll verify this. I think you're confused as to how most non-profits actually operate.
I haven't said anyone gets a pass on criticism, I'm not sure why you're pushing that point. I don't think you should throw bad, low-effort angry criticism at businesses either. But open source projects aren't businesses, so I can't answer your question because it doesn't make any sense. Please ask a different question or rephrase it.
As an aside, I'm going through some of "theEvilSkeleton's" writings (who I presume isn't you since you're using a throwaway, even though you have a very similar writing style) in an effort to better understand their viewpoint. I won't enumerate the various points that I disagree with, but I will note one thing.
In the "why hasn't the linux desktop won" post, they (presumably not you) say
>Without a doubt, systemd was (and still is) one of the most controversial projects in the Linux desktop. This is because its creator, Lennart Poettering, is known to have many controversial positions on the Linux ecosystem and UNIX philosophy.
Which is... pretty much completely missing the point, and rather showing their bias. The reason why systemd is controversial is because it was made by someone who makes controversial decisions? That's the worst kind of tautology.
Like it's a really bad piece of logic, and is makes for some very bad persuasive writing. I'm saying this not to attack theEvilSkeleton, just it stood out as a really big example of clear bias to the point where I felt the need to bring it up.
That's not bias it's just bad writing. You could say there is bias if it was ever explained what the controversy was but it wasn't explained in that quote. If you think that's bad, you should see some of the really terrible incoherent anti-systemd and anti-GNOME rants I've seen over the years, that are completely riddled with insults and conspiracy theories. Please do your best to not be like that kind of ranting person.
I figured that was obvious and I didn't need to detail the relationship. Obviously, Gnome isn't paying anyone; they're funded and paid (through dev salaries) by RH and friends, who exercise a lot of control over the project's direction. Of course the distro maintainers are going to ship Gnome, because it's theirs.
> "The goal is for the user to be able to do their job without being distracted"
Please, enlighten me how notifications position on the top center of the screen is supposed to help with concentration on some task? It'll rather distract and annoy me (as sometimes I accidentally misclick while switching browser tabs etc).
> There is one main reason I can think of. GNOME is the most used desktop environment, therefore it is the most susceptible to gain demands and pressure from users and companies.
Being the biggest isn't cause enough for this perception.
GNOME, in the past decade, put itself in a remarkable position of prioritizing a perpetual-neophyte persona, who did not & didn't want to understand computers, and rebuilt the product around that persona. For a corporate desktop, where random people are handed GNOME & told they have to use 1 app or maybe 2 or 3 on a computer, this is perhaps reasonably well calibrated. Look at many who fund GNOME Project, and this vision makes sense. But GNOME is a Linux desktop environment, and they have Linux users, and it turns out this chosen persona GNOME Project fixated on doesn't only not line up very well, it actively rejects the premise of supporting the explorer, the tinkerer, the hobbyist, the learner. GNOME Project is quite literally the most visible open-source project on the planet, yet it has the most actively anti-open behavioralism & targeting of probably any open-source project. It's chosen a bounded mission, a narrow one, with incredibly bounded behaviors, and that runs counter to the open-source spirit of possibility & exploration.
> If you dislike the GNOME Project’s philosophy, then the solution is to simply not use GNOME.
In case you missed it the first time the author said it, the author comes back to re-confirm: GNOME is "my way or the highyway."
GNOME is uniquely unflexible in almost all open source software in being so narrowly focused. Unlike most open source software, where adding features & options is usually acceptable in some form or another, given compromise, GNOME believes in their one and only one persona, in the overarching vision of an extremely limited capabilities user. I can think of no other project that makes anti-flexibility such a priority, except maybe suckless, and frankly their extreme conservatism & excess of attitude & loudless is quite a turn off as well.
I've painted a pretty grim picture of what I think of GNOME Project, and I'm sorry to shove them under the bus like this because I think there are noble ideas mixed in with the totalitarianism. But I think their objectives are delusional & off-base, and need re-assessing dearly, not just because many users don't fit their model, but because their model of what a user is is actively bad & harmful & condescending & makes things worse.
To give a nod to GNOME though, the author's other article on the GNOME libadwaita controversy[1] is fairly good in many ways, & talks through some of the pain & complexity & how difficult it is being such a highly visible project that other folks push-the-boundaries on. Freedom leads to "mis-use," what GNOME Project seemingly lives in mortal fear of. The article isn't perfect; I think their KDE examples are 98% horseshit justification (the first qt5ct example feels like strong support that themes work to me, not that they are bad, and most of the rest of the examples are of bad hardcoding that apps should fix, not systematic issues. And the net positive of not needing fractional scaling & being able to adjust your theme seems enormous.). But the support burden experienced by GNOME seems legitemate & real: flexibility has problems. Being an absolutist project that believes in yourself & picks a way & tells everyone else to hit the highway, we don't want to do it is indeed a powerful technique to maintain quality & reduce support burden.
This all circles back to a topic I mention time and time again: the Cathedral and the Bazaar. The "Bazaar" model of software development is complex & hard & there's always unpolished things happening at the edge & sometimes pieces of it stop making sense. There's a alluring temptation to centralize, to pull in, to stop exploring, to obstruct users from going off the careful paths you've built for them, to marshal control. Many people in the world cry out that we must give up the Bazaar and instead build "Cathedrals." GNOME Project decided at some point to become Cathedral builders. And that means telling a lot of people to hit the highway. And alas, it often seems like a Cathedral built primarily corporate users, not actual living flesh & blood humans.
Postscript: as with most do-we-or-don't-we software discussions, I highly recommend "Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus"[2] for more framing, that talks about stances of acceptance vs control. It's helpful to think of GNOME in this framing & it's helpful to think of your own & others around you's approach to code. Recommend.
Gnome keeps making big changes that hurt users and app developers, at least in the short term. (Presumably in pursuit of the Gnome developers' vision.) If you do that often enough, users and app developers find themselves basically in a continual state of pain, always adapting to the latest change. But the Gnome developers either don't recognize this or don't care (or care more about other things), because they keep doing it. Thus: "My way or the highway".
I got tired of it, and the relentless dumbing-down of everything, and switched to KDE (in the form of Kubuntu). It's nice! And the developers seem to understand that it mostly works OK, and they don't need to force a UI paradigm shift on you (and their third-party app developers) every few years.
GLib 2.0 was released on 2002-03-08. There's not a whole lot you'd be using on the desktop that's maintained ABI for longer; mainly X11 libraries, glibc, NSS, zlib, libxml2 (latter one is also a GNOME project).
(Anything using C++ would have a libstdc++.so.6 related ABI break at a later date.)
Linux devs will ignore a feature going obsolete and complain 10 years later when it's removed. It doesn't matter how long you give because they were never actually working on it in the mean time.
>The GNOME Project has a vision that it wants to push and perfect. Their philosophy, simply put, is “stay out of my way”.
Who's way are they trying to stay out of? Like why do I need a keyboard shortcut in order to type out a file path when I try to upload a file in Firefox?
There's some imagined user Who's way they're trying to stay out of, and it's not my way, and it's not any of my family Who's computers I set up...
It's also weird to claim the philosophy is "stay out of my way" when things like the application menu take over the entire screen, the basically abandoned notion of tablet/laptop/desktop gui convergence has left gnome fairly modal, which makes for a desktop that is frequently throwing itself at you.
> Like why do I need a keyboard shortcut in order to type out a file path when I try to upload a file in Firefox?
You don't? Just start typing a path (starting with / or ~ or .) and the path picker will switch to a path editor for you. Typing other characters will start a (recursive) search which is what I want to use most of the time myself.
I'd also like them to let you double click the breadcrumbs to switch, but adding an extra action is not necessary in most cases.
either this, or, bear with me for a second, maybe because GNOME unlike most big OSS projects has people going into issue tracker of other software and asking them to do things specifically for accomodating GNOME at the expense of other DEs (https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 for the most famous example - who the f* says this really: "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. It is my hope that you are a GNOME app. Yes this kind of fragmentation is unfortunate. I'm not happy about it either. Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up. Wish you the best."). Only other project I've ever seen this with is Rust people spamming RIIR issues on gh.
Or stuff like this insane thread: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217