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Comment by awrmc | Hacker News Reader

>Also gnome is so flawed in so many ways from leaking memory due to unfixable mismatch between js and compiled code, to nonsensical handling of multiple desktops, to add-ons that both rely on monkey patching your desktop due to lack of addon api and can with a single crash kill your whole session, to hostility towards themeing, to ugly header bars, to hostility towards support for non gnome desktops.

Most of these issues are just bugs, not issues with some vision. The gnome people I've talked to want them fixed and want help with fixing them. But I get that it's lot easier to complain on hacker news than it is to fix architectural issues in a large codebase.

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How they handle multiple monitors is a choice and the memory leaking is a design decision as is the lack of addon api and a system where any crashing addon takes out the whole session.

Bugs are inevitable but bad design is not.

The only one out of those that's a intentional design is multiple monitors. The other ones are known shortcomings that are just really hard to fix. The memory leak was fixed a few years ago: https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...

It is worth noting that the first release of Gnome 3 which had the leak from the outset was in 2011 and in 2018 they mostly "fixed" the problem by just constantly running the garbage collector and marveling at how not so horrible that is.

Unfortunately the problem actually continued for some at least into 2020.

In summary a broken design nearly completely ignored for 7 years and fixed with a band-aid that doesn't actually solve the underlying issue over the next 2 years. 11 years in and the design fail is still with us. I appreciate the fact that many of the contributors aren't paid for their efforts and I applaud their efforts to give to the community but large parts of gnome ought to regarded as learning experiences not something to build the rest of our software on top of.

I hope System76's work will be a better basis especially since their financial success could fund future efforts.

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