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Comment by SilverRed | Hacker News Reader

Reminder that gnome has a donations page: https://www.gnome.org/donate/

I'll be donating today because gnome has been my favorite DE for the last few years and the changes they made to gnome 40 are awesome.

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I will not be donating for the foreseeable future, because Gnome has repeatedly shown contempt towards their software's userbase by ignoring their feedback and releasing software that has poor quality and usability.

The gnome devs have built something almost exactly how I want. If the gnome devs listened to most of the feedback I see on HN, I would no longer like the DE.

Consider that different users have different preferences. I have tried almost all of the DE/WMs and have found gnome to be the most stable/best looking/best defaults.

I have the same feeling that you do. But for some reason some stuff has been broken on GNOME that did not require breaking. My three biggest pain points (both personally and for the non-tech people i provide tech support with) is alt-tab not switching between all open window in recent order usage, the disappearance of the venerable systray, and .desktop files not proposing to be executed (at least on Debian).

These three points are contrary to every other desktop environment there is, and it's confusing the hell out of people. I really wish GNOME the best and i really like some aspects of it (it's pretty and it's well-integrated) but over the years they've dumped core features like this, and made the overall experience super slow. If you've tried to run GNOME on second-hand hardware with HDD (not SSD) you know what i'm talking about.

A good reasoning. But rather negative in tone of voice.

Gnome is not for you; good! Because there's lot's of choice: POPos, Mint, KDE, LXDE, iwm, and so forth and so on. This is what OSS en Linux is all about: choices! freedom!

Why not use one of the alternatives that fits your requirements better and praise that alternative?

Clarification: At least until the next release, PopOS is still very much GNOME.

Certainly. As is Mint, IIRC.

But those may solve grandparents' issue with "ignoring their feedback" or "poor quality and usability.".

No, cinnamon is a fork of gnome but it's a heavy fork that has been diverged for a decade now. It's not really gnome anymore.

I think you are saying that only positive feedback is acceptable? If this is the case, I disagree. As for "just go make your own/ use your own", well, many people do. Personally I do use a different WM when I can, but still have to use GNOME from time to time.

What projects do you donate to?

same, setting up a recurring donation.

I have a lot of qualms about a lot of stuff, but I feel like there is a lot of great payoff for GNOME to continue being able to maintain/improve stuff, especially as its my daily driver.

(I know this is anathema to a lot of people but I would gladly support something like Canonical having an OSS fund that it pushed patreon-style on its desktop OS, though to be honest I don't know what the admin costs for something like that would be)

Can you expand on what you like about Gnome 40? I recently upgraded to Fedora 34 and hence have Gnome 40 installed, but I haven't really explored much.

It might sound a little silly but in the expanded mode where all windows are shown, the desktop wallpapers have a huge border radius on them and it makes me happy every time I see it. I have also had non GNOME using coworkers comment on this detail as well as how the windows sit slightly outside of the wallpaper in this mode. I also remember seeing a number of minor UI tweaks around the place but I have forgotten which ones as they just look normal now.

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