Is this https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2366 ? It really bothers me as well.
The GTK file chooser dialog is easily the most garbage piece of fucking shit. Honestly, sometimes, if I want to post something online I just copy the file to my Mac first just to avoid dealing with the fucking piece of shit GTK file chooser. If I need to sort through a bunch of files, easier to run Samba and sort through them on my Mac, because Nautilus was scooped out of the same fucking pile of shit than the GTK file chooser was scooped from.
As far as I can tell, the last time that browsing files on macOS really changed was 2007, when 10.5 came out and had Quick Look. Since then, browsing files on Linux has somehow gotten worse. Do you know what it’s like on macOS? Every once in a while, Apple quietly adds support for previewing a couple more formats.
Here's the thing that convinced me, a while back: https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...
I'm sure there's people here who are long-time contributors and/or supporters. Just ignore me, I'm not your target audience. ... I'm really not sure who your target audience is, though.
We should ask Havoc Pennington about this, he must have names for all the personas that he came up with, after reading "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum": https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2002-Dece...
I actually have a copy of the book, and it is indeed a good book. The problem is that it somehow empowers GNOME developers to keep creating/maintaining/rewriting broken software, all in the name of "usability".
And it is exactly to let themselves yell that, they work hard to alienate few normal devs left in the project.
I understood now that Gnome 3.0 was from the start Redhat's fully intentional attempt to appropriate the project, and is not dissimilar to Microsoft's embrace, extend, extinguish.
1. Get command of some more abandoned parts of the project.
2. Push a series of guaranteedly unpopular sharp direction changes which will lead to loss of devs.
3. As devs leave, you get more reinforcement to your casus belli, saying that "nobody maintains this pile of garbage, so now I am taking it over too"
4. Rinse, and repeat.
Worse yet, its developers consciously make design decisions that make it hard to write applications that play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it - their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a platform, and their main interest is supporting "GNOME apps", even to the detriment of all the rest.
Between these two things, deficiencies in GNOME affect a lot of people who didn't necessarily choose to be affected.
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685
"I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately ... It is my hope that you are a GNOME app."
And because I have to keep saying this, that is a non-issue now anyway. XFCE supports the new app indicator protocol, and since Ubuntu dropped unity their support for it is available as a standard GNOME extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-supp...
If you sincerely believe that it's okay to have a single DE be a self-contained app platform with no interop, that's up to you - but do understand that this is a very debatable premise, and people who don't agree with it have very good reasons to be annoyed with GNOME.
I would tell the same to Poettering, Clasen, and co.
There is really nobody who obligates them to work on their "innovations" in GNOME with religious zeal if the rest of the project showed no interest, speaking lightly.
If nobody wants to work on their stuff, they can't claim "victimhood" as if that happens as a result of somebody's ill intents.
I have to reference Torvalds vs. SystemD here as an example how Sievers, Poettering, and co. instantly drew up a picture of kernel community being some kind of a bullying ring when the only thing they did to them was to ignore their (bad quality) patches.
Again, if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. You do not have to work on anybody else's stuff if you don't want.
Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians, I've never worked with one but I certainly feel entitled to have harsh opinions about some of them.
If the advice is limited in scope to professional peers, then I have to disagree with it; having double standards for people like yourself isn't great advice.
These developers do not wield power over anyone and they are not filing lawsuits. They are developing code, either as their job, or as volunteers. And in either case, contributing their work as open source.
It might help to take a little perspective before publicly passing judgement on _individuals_ and what you imagine their intentions to be rather than merely judging the merit of their contributions. Those are completely different things.
I get that the two things have some overlap and aren't cleanly divisible. What we do is a major part of who we are.
But I mean, it's one thing to say "I think it [his architecture] is awful", or even "I think his architecture had a negative impact on people/society/cherished values/whatever" but quite another to say "I think he sought the ruination of everything good and decent because he was a demented and feeble mind." Because, yes, I do think the last one would only be appropriate if you actually knew something about the guy...
Edit: And yeah, of course, I'm not trying to censor anyone's opinions. Of course you can _have_ the opinion, you can even express it. I just think that it's not what engaging in productive/civil discourse looks like and, depending on the venue, people may call that out or whatever.
I suspect that, in many instances, people who do that are not trying to convince anybody of anything. If they expected to be greeted everywhere with agreement then they would not go around saying things which they know perfectly well are not likely to result in a vigorous and healthy debate if they were said to strangers in the street :)
If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.
I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many people love to theorize about what these are, making correlations which are usually driven more by their feelings than reality.
I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not considering that person like they are more likely to do so if they were in person.
I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt by some people in a community where there is freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired (I know that not everyone has this option).
I do think however that the article of this thread expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it explains how it effects them without resorting to emotional attacks towards the project and it's something I really liked about reading it.
In such case disjoint between users and developers is even further. I am professional developer, yet I have zero contributions to my framework and just a few contributions to libraries. After 10 years my contributions to Linux community limited to bug reports, few patches and manuals.
In reality there is not enough community support to maintain existing systems. "Freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired" by individual is overrated, that's TempleOS.
EDITED: Some bragging about making a difference
There are a lot of projects with less corporate influence. No systemd on BSD, but hardware support is not as good. Generic distributions is something that works for most of the users. There are a lot of niche distributions and projects (Void Linux runit!). Current state is just a reflection of users priorities.
You can literally take millions of lines of code that they may have written wholesale, and change a single word in it that you don’t like.
In open source, they have nowhere to hide. If you disagree with a certain decision they have made, you are welcome to take the effort they have put in to implement the hundreds and thousands of other decisions they have made that you do agree with, with a simple “git clone”.
That would be best said to persons named above.
They were free to fork GNOME into their touchscreen based imaginary future, and experiment with it even more freely as a minority group, rather than trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback.
Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be hostile towards any specific developers for any specific project, I will have to decline to get involved with that. You don't have to resort to character assassination, if you have some ideas on a good technical direction for a project, just make the argument and write the code: people will listen if your arguments are sound and your code works.
GNOME 2 was a project of 100+ developers.
TOPAZ was a half-baked tablet UI tech demo from a dozen Red Hat employed devs, later dropping to 7-9 regularly active ones.
Tell me what is more to explain about this?
> The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous.
> And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012.
> By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.
I think, in their view, all comes after taking hold of the project. But here, they got that, and now what? Now, all lofty plans have to meet the cold reality.
It's like a mutunineers on a ship throwing officers overboard, just to realise hours later that they are in the middle of an ocean, and they have no idea how to sail a ship without skilled crew.
I saw that happening in public companies: a single asshole activist with puny few percents of the company keeps throwing big radical decisions onto every shareholder meeting, until he gets everybody so discombobulated, or the company so disfunctional that others either leave the company to him for taking, or he gets a legal casus belli to sue the company to try to wreck it further, and then seize it.
For such people, it doesn't matter if the company in question dies, as long as they come out with gain. Some are plainly idiots with too much legal education, and some are genuine degenerates doing it with full knowledge of consequences.
they'd be the only left able to offer (paid) support?
There fewer people contributing because programming in C is no longer fun or hip. It is not Gnome problem but the whole Linux ecosystem. Gnome is slowly adopting rust but the core framework is still C. There is plenty of active forks of Gnome2 people can contribute there.