For people who identify things primarily by color rather than shape, I can totally see a temporary palette swap causing that. Others might go mostly by the shape, and care less. (I'm one of those people, though the way Google's apps changed colors three years ago was an exception: they basically ended up applying the principles of camouflage to break the shapes in a way that completely destroyed my ability to distinguish them at a glance.)
And then there are people who just go by spatial location, or by the text, and couldn't tell you the first thing about the icon itself. I assume those people would instead be driven up the walls if the icons were re-arranged automatically by app popularity, or if apps were constantly being renamed.
> Getting a useful app for free (!)
The author did say these were "likely" apps they had paid for.
Here's what comes up on my (Fedora, obviously) machine when I run VIM with no filename specified:
VIM - Vi IMproved
version 8.2.5052
by Bram Moolenaar et al.
Modified by <bugzilla@redhat.com>
Vim is open source and freely distributable
Help poor children in Uganda!
type :help iccf<Enter> for information
type :q<Enter> to exit
type :help<Enter> or <F1> for on-line help
type :help version8<Enter> for version info
No technical measures exist to stop you from removing this call for donations, but it's more work to patch it out then it is to just ignore it. This makes FOSS software a pretty good vehicle for political activism. Not just the fact that organizing a hostile fork to remove a message like this one is too much trouble and makes you look like a jerk, but also because political activism is a good way to motivate people to write and release software for free in the first place, making up for how difficult it is to really monetize FOSS software.
This doesn't bother me too much and I don't even seem to notice it consciously, but I am really glad that every utility doesn't have an unrelated charity pitch (or other advertisement) built into it. Though I think a number of GNU programs do contain free software advocacy messages/advertisements, those don't bother me too much either.
What really irritated me though was the nagware message in GNU parallel soliciting bogus citations (or money, which may be less ethically problematic but is still annoying.) I didn't hate it enough to fork the code and remove the nag message myself (or fight for it as a patch to the Debian packages or something) but I quit using GNU parallel because it left a bad taste. I imagine a nightmare Linux shareware edition distro where every program (and library, driver, kernel module, etc.) prints out a nagware message that you have to turn off.
set shm+=IWhen I’m at work I expect people to mostly talk about work, not divide the office by broadcasting controversial political views via their avatar and posting hot takes in their status messages.
With developers I expect the apps to solve some problem I have. That’s it. I know a person, or team of people, wrote it but their politics are completely irrelevant to their ability to solve my problem via and app. I also don’t need to know about their family, hobbies, religion, or dreams.
But if a defragmentation tool suddently rubs some "Free Tibet" activism into your face by changing their app logo and prompting a message, one can rightfully wonder what the developer is trying to achieve aside from alienating part of the userbase.