The Truth they are not telling you about “Themes” | Hacker News Reader

The Truth they are not telling you about “Themes”

blogs.gnome.org

6 pointsmarcodiego7 comments

This might be relevant - (Solus devs voting with heir feet) https://joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-...

The GNOME devs sound like total asses. I went to the ticket linked in that post and then checked the Tweets that the GNOME guys didn't like. I actually thought for a second that I ended up linked to the wrong Tweets because nothing looks wrong with them!

This is not the time for the GNOME devs to be so hostile. People have been upset with the direction of GNOME since version 3. They're basically ensuring that people will jump ship now.

Yep. Significant mismatch between how important they are to the ecosystem and how self-centered they are.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/dayto8/comment/f2214...

They have every right to set and focus on their own goals, of course. And the community has every right to move on.

I don't get this criticism. That's one developer explaining their own development style, not representative of the whole project. And that mismatch and self-centeredness you describe is present in every open source community I've ever seen. Almost every project is underfunded despite being used by millions of people, sometimes even billions. So in order to make any progress, the developers have to laser focus on what they're doing. For example KDE developers won't make progress on KDE if they drop what they're doing and start spending a bunch of time working on GNOME.

It feels like they want to turn this open source product into a professional corporate solution, where there's no place for user choice.

I don't understand. There is no rule anywhere that says an open source product has to focus on user choice, or that says a corporate solution has to disregard user choice. It's up to any group of developers to decide if they want to support a certain level of user choice or not, for whatever purpose.

You may want to read the email thread on this website for a further explanation of this idea in how it relates to Linux: http://islinuxaboutchoice.com/

The problem with those tweets that you've liked is that they're misinformation. They may sound reasonable on the surface but what they're saying is factually wrong. Make sure to fact check any statements you read on Twitter, going with the most plausible-feeling explanation is a form of bias.

Now I don't think that excuses other bad behavior from GNOME developers. If they're saying rude and demeaning things while representing themselves as a GNOME developer then those should be reported to the code of conduct committee, even if they're on Twitter.

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