Comment by md8z | Hacker News Reader

Comment by md8z | Hacker News Reader

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"I've also infuriatingly gotten a 'patches welcome' response before, and then simply faced the 'that's not in our vision' response upon providing a patch."

That has been my experience on quite a few FOSS projects. I had to learn that the hard way (on other projects, not GNOME). Some are more conservative than others, some may delay making a decision until after they get a patch, etc. Ultimately, since it's your time, you have to do your research before you decide to spend months working on a patch or however much time you plan.

Since GNOME is a large umbrella project then it can vary between sub-projects, I have noticed the ones that are popular and user-facing tend to have a much higher bar for contribution and are much more "cathedral-like" in their design approach, and they kind of have to be if they want to have any kind of semblance of stability. So I don't think it really helps much to blame any project for this or call them "bad eggs", it's their choice of how they want to do things.

I doubt stability was their intentions. They completely destroyed 3.38 compatibility, and all the poor bastards like me who decided to update their distro got a completely broken desktop. And I mean completely broken, too: my wallpaper was gone, every single extension broke, apps would no longer appear system-native when I defined a stylesheet and GNOME apps themselves looked inconsistent and glued-together.

I really recommend reading Tobias Bernard and other GNOME representative's blogs. Not because they're insightful, but because the self-righteousness that they use to talk about fairly personal and benign things completely clouds their view of the community. People complain about inconsistent apps: his solution is to destroy the theming ecosystem instead of fixing the shit that's wrong in Adwaita. People complain about broken extentions: his solution is to tell people that extentions are dumb, and you shouldn't be using them anyways. People complain about a toxic working environment: his response is to draft an even more exclusive CoC with vaguer rules and no precedent for enforcement. There are so many of these little anecdotes that it blows my mind they even have a desktop left at this point.

Like you say, it's free software so I can't complain too much. Nevertheless, it's wild to see how a perfectly functional desktop has lost the majority of it's beloved features with nothing more than a few philosophy adjustments.

Sorry that was your experience but you should probably know, stylesheets and extensions have never actually been considered stable. I don't know what distribution you were using but if you were using those things, it would probably make sense to wait until they're fully tested before upgrading. If all the extensions/stylesheets you're using are complex then it seems it would take a lot more time to update those, sadly. Yes I know this thread is trying to make a comment about unstable software, there are plenty of "stable" desktops you could use but in my experience those have a lot less feature velocity than the big "umbrella" projects. So it's a really trade-off, it seems that at some point you will have to sacrifice some of those beloved features if you want to prioritize something else, such as stability or portability or design choices or anything else really.

I've read the blogs and I don't really agree with any of your comments in the second paragraph, especially the part about destroying themes. I'm currently developing against libadwaita and one of the benefits that it (already) brings is much better theming support. I also have never actually seen the code of conduct enforced on anybody, most people I interact with are very respectful. Although if you have something you want to ask to Tobias then you might consider asking him directly, I can't speak for him. Just please remember to be kind.

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