The closest modern desktop environment to Gnome 2 is KDE’s Plasma. It’s easy to use out of the box and doesn’t require any configuration (unless you want to do that kind of thing, and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+).
1. Not every feature is equally useful
2. No one is using the feature, and so maintaining it is a waste of time
3. Sometimes developers discover a better way to implement a feature
4. Some features can turn out to be just harmful and misleading
5. There is no one available who wants to maintain the feature and so it slowly deteriorates and breaks over time, and must be removed to prevent further breakage
And so on. If you program in your day job, I bet you can think of a few other valid reasons you have removed a feature at work, too. GNOME has not done anything out of the ordinary here, and it is incorrect to describe it this way. If you believe they have taken specific actions that were hostile towards you, then you should say what those actions are. But the mere act of changing or removing a feature that you happened to use is not a display of hostility, it is just the normal development process working as intended.
>and then it’s available — unlike in Gnome 3+
This is incorrect, Gnome 3+ can be configured with shell extensions.
I wish they would drop more features that I don't like. I have a 55" monitor, so I dont use workspaces. I also dont need every window to shrink and move about when I want to bring up the launcher. Also, drop the hiding the launcher feature.
In the other direction I would like the application menu back ;-)
Otherwise I'm still mostly content with it.
I'd argue that it's not necessarily user hostile. You can definitely do it in a way that is user hostile however.
I used to change the window decorations to something smaller than the default, because I like having more of my screen real estate available for actual content rather than useless UI padding. The current iterations of Gnome are unusable to me, when Gnome was visually appealing and highly usable 20 years ago. Window transitions and icon docks have done nothing to improve usability, and bigger borders are not better borders.
Thankfully other desktops have far better feature retention rates.
Writing everything in JS was a weird decision. I remember for the first few releases, having to constantly restart the shell because the JS engine leaked so badly. You could watch RSS grow indefinitely everytime you moused over the top left corner.
It's a lot better now, usable with a few extensions...but I still think what a waste it was tossing 2 like they did. Extensions are an OK idea, but because they're mostly JS and CSS, there doesn't seem to be much safety there. It's very common for them to break each release because of some obscure attribute change.
It's perfectly reasonable to prefer KDE because you like Plasma or it has the functionality you need. It's a nice desktop environment with a lot of functionality so I can see why it appeals to many people. What I don't get is why so many people feel the need to diminish open source projects they don't even use.
What is your end goal with a comment like this? Are you just expressing your opinion so that no one forgets that many people do not like Gnome 3? Are you hoping to better understand why the Gnome community has a different development philosophy than the KDE community? Are you trying to convince someone of something?
That being said I do have to give them some respect for XDG-desktop-portal, which has made my main complaint (gnome's filepicker being bad and non-optional for even basic software like firefox) no longer an issue.
> politely interjecting with the occasional "we don't like gnome"
From my perspective these comments seem neither polite nor occasional, and they result in Gnome threads devolving into partisan arguments rather than technical discussions. Of course Gnome isn't the only lightning rod -- posts that mention Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, US national politics, systemd, etc also seem to inspire an inordinate number of posts that are argumentative and off-topic.
It's mostly just disappointing. I was honestly hoping for a discussion about what kind of people contribute to a large open source project instead of rehashing the endless circular debate about whether the Gnome Community is user hostile or not.
As it is, most of the points made in this thread could have been made in any prior thread with "Gnome" in the title. And they will probably be made again in subsequent Gnome threads, like some kind of Sisyphusian performance art.
I would say that it is not reasonable. I have been seeing these type of "we don't like this" comments for around 20 years ever since GNOME 2. They have done nothing but incite more flame wars, making the developers even less likely to want to engage with any constructive comments that might be underneath. Please find a more productive way to contribute, either by volunteering to pick up some of the development load yourself, by forking the project, or by contributing to something completely different. That is how you get things done in open source. Making the same drive-by complaints repeatedly is not a way to change anyone's mind.
>If only to encourage new projects to use a toolkit that isn't so closely tied to the gnome experience.
This is exactly the opposite of what you want to do. If the desire is to improve the toolkit, then you want to encourage more outside contributors to join and bring it in a direction they like, not push them away.
The particularly awful disease the Gnome project has is the "rewrite everything" disease. No software project can retain features if they do large rewrites from scratch every major release. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to keep rewriting the toolkit every few years. The end result is that features the developers personally don't care for don't get implemented in the new release. That is why so many of us that once used Gnome are pissed off and have had to write off the project.
Then perhaps you can see how developers of a desktop also do not have time to listen to every person arguing for every feature, or to maintain every possible feature that ever gets suggested, or even to maintain the current feature set indefinitely without removing something at some point.
>The particularly awful disease the Gnome project has is the "rewrite everything" disease. No software project can retain features if they do large rewrites from scratch every major release.
You are confusing refactoring with rewriting. Very few parts of it have been rewritten from scratch. Refactoring things isn't a "disease". Refactors are actually necessary to keep the project in working order and to pay off technical debt so you can actually have a chance to implement new features while retaining older ones.
>The end result is that features the developers personally don't care for don't get implemented in the new release.
This is the same as any project. If there are no developers to maintain the feature then it stagnates and eventually gets cut. It makes no sense to be pissed off at this one particular project about this, every project is bound to do it eventually. If your company ever went through layoffs then you can probably name some times you have had to do this at work.
Like there is no alternative that does what GNOME does. It’s GNOME and forks of GNOME, a chasm, then KDE, another chasm, and then the DIY DEs/WMs dejour.
I gave up on Plasma. I still use kwin and several KDE applications, like Dolphin, but now I use those with LxQT instead of Plasma. It doesn't look as stylish, but it seems to be rock solid. Plus I still get all the nice compositing effects and configurability of kwin.
Very much in agreement.If my unix* history is correct, even the apple design copied(or let's say "was influenced") a lot from the gnome 2 UI.