This is bad, I should do whatever some dude decided I should do? Example from yesterday , I am testing Chrome and I discovered this browser does not have an option(not even a super hidden one) for "prompt me before quitting" except for Macs where this option exists and it is very visible in the menus. Why Windows and Linux does not have this option? Because designers think so, they know better then the users, they prefer some people getting frustrated, installing weird extensions or stop using the application because their giant EGO tells them that this option is too much, they read in a book somewhere that most users are idiots so the solution is to treat everyone as idiots.
Explain me how it makes sense, please Google the issue with Chrome, read the user issues and then figureout why this things are how they are. Don't waste your time if you don't want to be changed your mind though, the short story is;
1 users need this option, someone with a touch screen was having issue closing the tabs and he was quiting the browser
2 the code exist(and is enabled on Mac)
3 Firefox,Vivalid and other browsers have this option
4 not all Chrome/Chromium users are button licking designers or low RAM idiots that an option somewhere in about:config is too much
5 there was no UX study to support hiding this option.
Sure, I will not use Chromium but you can't stop me complain when I see stupid decision made by designers or developers to satisfy their ego, so I will NOT stop complaining, Chromium UX is bad, GNOME UX is bad, you can
1 accept the criticism, yes sometimes designers/leaders are bad, see Apple reverting the keyboard changes after years of fanboys pretending Apple is perfect and users are the problem
2 ignore the criticism, probably you have better things to do then defending some random designer
3 copy/paste some shit excuse like "only 5% users use that so removing is fine" where the numbers are fake , and the rule applies selectively to only whatever the big ego designer decides to remove (other excuses are : is too much work, is too hard for our developers to maintain it, use a third party insecure extension/patch, don't use that, etc.
1. Evidence of that
2. Other more accurate statistics that do show it affects more than 5% of users
3. An explanation as to why 5% is a meaningful threshold. Why shouldn't it be lower? Higher?
4. Suggestions on how to reduce workload if it's too much work or it's too hard
Or any other data that you think could back up the conclusion. I understand that this is not easy to do. But if it's not done, then it will continue to be a battle of egos as you describe, and that's not helpful. You don't have to stop complaining but in my experience it pays off to always improve your complaints and make sure they're done in a fully convincing manner. It also helps to avoid insults and personal comments about others, those just distract from the issue. It pays to make sure your complaints are as fact-based as possible. In a big project the original person who made the decision may not even be there anymore, so it's really everyone else that you need to convince.
Edit: And please don't just show them to me, show them to the stakeholders who matter and can get things done. I may think some of your info is interesting but that's about as much as I can do, I am not the person you need to be convincing and neither are other random commenters on social media. I get that it's fun to rant on social media but the real hard work doesn't happen there.
About the percentage based excuses, there are several issues:
1 this big ego projects never shown the statistics/telemetry data so I can't prove them wrong since I am not the one that has the data.
2 it is easy to lie with statistics (or studies) so you need to keep an open mind when the source of the statistics is the big ego person and this statistic is supporting his point.
3 I bet that Chrome dev tools are used by less then 5% of users but you don't see the big ego dude removing those super complex features and moved them into a dev version of Chrome only. Why is a super small option super important for this designer person but this super complex and scary and not cool looking feature is there in the menus for a random clueless users to open? The stats are only used when the dude wants to impose his vision.
Complaining is important, see Apple new laptop changes, the big ego designers forgot to do actual UX and test with real users/customers and that costed Apple a lot of time. I understand that for open source project I can't apply same demands for good UX research with real users but GNOME has the money from RedHat and it's toxic community forced it as default on distros over DEs with actual real UX research.
Conclusion, I as a simple user that just tested Chromium I can't open a ticket and put in it real world data to maybe convince the big ego dudes that are wrong, I can at most put a me too there and get ignored for decades like the File Picker GNOME meme issue, and I will probably get spammed each time an upset user will add it's me too comment and the developers repeat again "you are using it wrong".
But I use Chromium/Chrome as minimum as needed, I avoid GNOME and the entire Linux community social media , just the comment I responded was complaining about X and Y browser and I added the Z browser there too to complete the list, and I was salty sicne the solution is to install some "chrome extension" to fix it - it reminds me of the install a GNOME extension excuse too.
Apple I think is a good example. It only mattered to Apple when it cost them a non-significant amount of resources. Ultimately they are a company and they respond to profit, if people buy or don't buy the product then that's the strongest fact that will influence them. Also I think it is a misconception that GNOME has a lot of money from Red Hat. They don't really from what I've seen, most of the Red Hat people I know are pretty strapped for time. I also have no idea what you mean by forced it as default. Distros don't have to choose it, I've seen many distros that choose other things or just don't have a default. If you mean things like Ubuntu, IIRC they chose to retire Unity and go with GNOME because Unity wasn't profitable for them. So with companies it always comes back to that...
I also don't really think it is useful to call out people for imposing their vision. On a certain level, everyone who builds things is doing that. They have their point of view and that's the only thing they can express, because well, what else would they express? If they expressed your point of view all the time, then they wouldn't be themselves, they would be you. It's possible to change someone else's vision but that's usually done by presenting new information, i.e. convincing facts.
About the "vision" comment, at my work there is always a support team, they get feedback from users and we never give a response "it is our designer vision or our dev leader vision that things are like this". The differences are that
1 we care for each and even one of our users so we never say "go use our competitors because we don't care about your problem"
2 we do not have a big birocracy or a tyrant with a big vision, so we can think for ourselves, propose solutions and implement them. Sure it happen that later the designers demand we simplify the GUI but we know that each complex feature is still used by some power users and w propose ways to keep it in, but more hidden so designers don't complain.
Maybe GNOME does not have enough money for their big ambitions but they have a lot more then other DEs.
My summary would be, vision is fine in your hobby toy project, GNOME, Chrome, Apple's OSX are not toys, if you do a radical change only based on a dudes vision IMO you are doing it wrong, you forgot about the users and are only thinking at your ego/CV.
"About the 'vision' comment, at my work there is always a support team, they get feedback from users and we never give a response 'it is our designer vision or our dev leader vision that things are like this'."
Yeah you may not actually say those words exactly but I've many times heard support staff essentially state the same thing. They might say "sorry the product is not designed to do that" or "we don't sell that here", e.g. if you go to a car dealership and what you really want to buy is a helicopter, they will say sorry we don't sell flying cars, these cars were not designed to fly. Maybe they don't use the word "vision" but it's all the same, if you decide you are going to build a car a certain way then you have to stick to that, once you decide to add helicopter blades then it's a different product for a different market. So you could just exchange the word "vision" with "plan" if that helps to understand it.
For a big project, yeah, they can obviously afford to do more and to put more features in a product but they still have to draw the line somewhere.
1 having the thing but hiding it for Windows or Linux users because "vision"
2 having the thing, everyone else having same thing but you remove it because of vision.
So is not about just 1 dude demanding Gnome or Chrome to add say something weird like "vim" keyboard support , but many users asking something basic present in similar products and in previous version of same product or for the Chrome issue I mentioned the feature is visible but only on Mac.
Btw I appreciate our conversation, is refreshing to disagree with someone that puts effort int he comments and is maintaining respect, thanks
EDIT: about wayland, we will have to disagree, in my opinion Wayland could have been implemented much better like
1 have a protocol
2 implement this protocol and share the implementation with all DEs, like Xorg , so only say Rust guys could have a go and create their own version in their cool language
3 define the extensions and implement them, not do "X11 did this but it is stupid, it is not our job, go figure it out yourselves"
Edit: Or say maybe I am a startup founder and I design and build my own car exactly how I want and turn it into a company. It's perfect for me but then someday I get bored of driving my car and I retire. Then I hire someone else to design the cars and pass responsibility on to them and they change some stuff. Well, now the cars are different and everyone pretty much has to accept it because the original designer is gone, and as much as people liked the old one, nobody else can really copy them exactly because it was really their personal vision that made it what it was.
For Wayland, I think all of that is happening already? There is somebody making an implementation in Rust. They did try to make a shared implementation (Weston) but it turned out that people didn't actually want that, they preferred to write their own implementations.
It is software, in Chrome case is just a simple popup, the code is there and it only is visible for OSX because the platform forced the vision guy's hand. The bullshit excuses that is hard to code and test and maintain do not work here.
Also excuses do not work even if valid if you destroy your users workflow, you don't remove system tray, server side decorations and just tell your users to find replacement applications because the ones they use do not conform to the GNOME vision.
Again, if is not a toy you target some users, is your duty to listen to this users and not to impose your vision on them, I am upset when there is no actual testing/research involving actual users and real world work, say when you test your app with "hello world" simple workflows that fail in real world with real users, or you make your app look cool on your expensive screen but looks like shit on real users hardware.
But you are right, GNOME has decided they don't want a part of the users and they are cultivating the perfect GNOME type user, a user that adapts to the software and not the reverse.
I get your frustration about your workflow but I'm still upset about my cupholders :) For the system tray and server side decorations, there are technical reasons for those to have gotten removed. Their existence may enable some workflows but it also breaks some other workflows so that's not an area where everyone can win. And if you want to bring them back then I can guarantee you that's not just a matter of flipping a switch, there is real work that needs to be done there and it won't happen if nobody is willing to pay the cost. It doesn't really make sense to blame volunteers for not being able to afford that either when this is something that's so expensive that the bigger contributors like Red Hat don't even want to pay for it.
Your DE has 10 features and 10 users, we decide we remove any feature that is only used by 1 or 0 users. We look around and find that 1 feature F1 is used only by user U1 , we remove F1 and we push user U1 to go away.
2 feature F2 was used by 2 users but now that U1 left , F2 is used only by 1 user, so we remove F2 and kck out the user U2 , we left with 8 users now from 10 and 8 feature
3 feature F3 was used by 3 users including U1 and U2 , but since we kicked this 2 users ut only U2 left using it , so now we remove F3 , kick out user U3 (U3 regrets now that he was a dick to U2 and U2 accusing them of beeing snowflackes and using it wrong)
4 ... repeat until you reamin with 2 users, the designer and the developer (the dev uses other DE on his personal machine anyway)
My second point, GNOME team should just pause and reflect at Apple, see that vision without a connection with users is wrong, Apple has sales numbers and other ways to detect when their big ego vision dude has messed up but GNOME needs to reflect (not change, not implement features just reflect), are we going to far? how do we know when our vison dude has gone too far since we don't have sales number and shareholders keeping the bullshit in check?
There is a chance that GNOME vision is wrong and it can take much more years then it took Apple to do the "courageous" thing and undo the stupidity and replace the vision individual.
Since I stopped using GNOME i switched to KDE and a few years back Plasma also had a big ego dude in charge, we had similar issues there with the Plasma vision , one example is
- removing the cachew ugly widget, the dude refused to give us the option to hide it even if we contribute the 3 lines patch ... but guess what the cachew is gone or hidden by default now ... my point is that I have an example that is not GNOME where big ego caused issue and when big ego person left things were solved.
My experience contributing to small KDE project was great though, there was no big vision people that needed to approve a feature or adding a new menu, the maintainers were developers that were happy to help the users, help debugging and were super happy to receive bug fixes and improvements. I would conclude(but without serious evidence) that big projects with big visibility will attract the individuals with big ego, like Plsama or GNOME , the big ego people will be attracted to this very visible projects so they canpush their vision into many peoples faces/lives.
But on the other hand if GNOME can double they contributors at the same time they lose half of the users is a metric they prefer then I hope they got their contributers, though by the number of GNOME forks that appeared it is possible their contributors got fragmented too.
I don't really have any other comments on "ego guys", every maintainer has their own style. I have seen leadership with a strong vision work for some projects but not work for others.
About GNOME forks, they don't need many developers, they just need enough to fork the shell UX so it screws with the vision of the GNOME team, you still won't get the missing features but you get a different experience because GNOME refused to give you options to customize stuff.
I think Ubuntu were fixing soem of GNOME problems for their users but still give you the option for a vanila setup but I don't know what happened in recent years, is Cinemon still continuing? Pop os was forking GNOME but I read here they jumped on the Rust hype so I expect a lot of disappointment when their DE will not be faster,cooler and bugs free.
1. Go with the flow and accept the limitations.
2. Try to fight the design.
3. Use a different product.
All I'm trying to say is that 2 is a losing strategy. If the design is bad, 3 is probably your best bet. If it's good, 1 might actually be pretty rewarding and even make you embrace what you used to consider a limitation, or it might just be one of the downsides of the product since nothing is perfect.
So in your case, I'd indeed use a different product and for good measure complain about it on Hacker News :) But what I probably wouldn't do is try to find some hacky workaround to make it work somewhat, until the designer screws me over again.