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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

I can see some people being rubbed the wrong way by the language in this post but it sounds like a reasonable criticism by someone who has gotten tired and annoyed, and seems to mostly represent accurately the discussion in that ticket.

Does anyone know a decent counterpoint to this? Or an argument why Gnome is being reasonable?

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Well, I don't really think the Gnome is being reasonable since they've ditched 2.34 for 3.0 pre-pre-pre-alpha and started to shove their "supremacy" to everyone. I do really think this has nothing to do with normal community open source project but more like being thightly controlled by a corporation that focuses on tickets and changes for sake of doing something because someone (and their managers) has to report and prove being sallary-worthy. So the project is dissolving (itself; the linux "desktop"; and the public view about it; and what is the most important - the at least somehow unified user experience we used to have across major gui toolkits) in a highly-toxic-and-radioactive-"opinionated" egos.

> Well, I don't really think the Gnome is being reasonable since they've ditched 2.34 for 3.0 pre-pre-pre-alpha and started to shove their "supremacy" to everyone.

Do you by chance know of an article that documents that? I remember seeing one back then that compiled discussions with gnome developers from multiple sources showing that, but I've lost it since then.

I am very sorry, I don't have any. It's been a long time since then

> "You are only supposed to run GNOME apps on GNOME"

This summarizes the problem quite well, not only that GNOME apps are often broken outside GNOME, but if you try to run non-GNOME app on GNOME (even Gtk based) you might get broken apps because system tray (AppIndicator) isn't there or some other random bs where the functionality is removed for the sake of making users frustrated. This is somewhat similar to deletionist culture of wikipedia, delete delete delete. Basically work done outside of GNOME junta isn't valued and even if accepted might be removed in the next release.

I looked into GNOME's gitlab discussions linked here and in the article, and I was appalled at GNOME maintainers' behavior on each and every one of them. Whenever app developers raise concerns that they don't have the adequate means to integrate with the GNOME desktop, GNOME maintainers consistently fault the developers and close the ticket without addressing the issue at all.

The worst part is that despite all this, a GNOME Foundation community manager even lied about the whole thing [1], claiming that MPV never even contacted GNOME before dropping support. He also talked about how the lack of cooperation was hurting the FOSS community [2], even though many app developers including MPV did in fact share their concerns on GNOME's gitlab issue tracker [3][4] and it was GNOME maintainers that chose to ignore them.

I've been using the GNOME for quite some time, but it's time for me to switch. Some applications didn't look quite right recently, and now I know the reason why.

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/hn1s3r/mpv_is_not_an...

[2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/hn1s3r/mpv_is_not_an...

[3]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/wm4

[4]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

The discussions indeed look harsh.

But as for the idle inhibiting API, there is some (slow) progress in the form of two MRs. And they weren't closed outright, some code review took place instead:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/2226

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111

This message also looks relatively encouraging: https://old.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/hn1s3r/mpv_is_not_an...

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