Have there been many examples of GNOME devs removing or substantially changing a feature, then reversing the decision based on community outcry?
This seemed to be a trend 10 years ago or so - I haven't used GNOME on a daily basis since then - and it seemed the GNOME team has almost always had a "this is how it will be, no arguments" attitude. It's probably a perception more than anything else, but perception is reality, don't they say? Trying to make radical changes then hiding behind "Human Interface Guidelines" - even when the new behaviour is demonstrably bad - seemed to be their MO all those years ago, but my memory may be a bit hazy now.
So... we'll have a thread here of people saying "no, don't do it!" or "give me an option to toggle!" but I suspect the damage is done and this is how it will be. What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?
Yes, sort of. Epiphany developers for a long time resisted adding tabs to the browser and instead insisted that handling multiple viewports was the job of the window manager. In theory, they were right, in practice it just doesn't work.
Then somewhere around GNOME 2.12 or so, Nautilus fell in love with the "spatial" concept. So each directory opened would open its own window and also remember the window position so it would be opened in the exact same location the next time. Leads to the user having 30+ windows open if you want to drill down to some files a few directories deep.
No way to undo the suckyness except to edit some gconf registry key.
The User Interface Designers thought it was great. Everyone else thought it was a disaster. Fortunately it was changed to something more sensible a few releases after and the spatial desktop horse is (for now) dead and buried.
Btw, while I sound really critical of GNOME, I'm not. I think it's great that they try new and wacky ideas that no one likes. Sometimes they strike gold and then progress is made benefitting all of us.
IMO, it's the perception of attitude when introducing new and wacky ideas. People seeing these new ideas say "that's wacky/bad/misguided/wrong/etc" and the defense (used to, anyway) fell back to "our HIG says this is the best way" (paraphrasing). To then recant years later and reverse things just makes it harder to accept any new ideas that come out as received wisdom.
If they had a 'wacky new ideas' branch for people to test on, I suspect the whole thing would be received a lot better.
> What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?
A few, AFAICS.
E.g. Gnome 3.10 is returning to a conventional multi-option power dialogue box[1], after the merging of 'suspend' & 'power off' into one menu item was roundly rejected by everyone (the extension giving them back as separate options is the 3rd most downloaded of all time on extensions.gnome.org).
Most obviously, Gnome 3.8's 'classic mode' (which is just a collection of extensions which replicate gnome 2 interaction models) wouldn't exist without community feedback (possibly combined with pressure from RH with an eye on conservative RHEL customers).
This seemed to be a trend 10 years ago or so - I haven't used GNOME on a daily basis since then - and it seemed the GNOME team has almost always had a "this is how it will be, no arguments" attitude. It's probably a perception more than anything else, but perception is reality, don't they say? Trying to make radical changes then hiding behind "Human Interface Guidelines" - even when the new behaviour is demonstrably bad - seemed to be their MO all those years ago, but my memory may be a bit hazy now.
So... we'll have a thread here of people saying "no, don't do it!" or "give me an option to toggle!" but I suspect the damage is done and this is how it will be. What decisions have been overturned by community feedback?