On the Gnome project and “my way or the highway”
theevilskeleton.gitlab.io
theevilskeleton.gitlab.io
either this, or, bear with me for a second, maybe because GNOME unlike most big OSS projects has people going into issue tracker of other software and asking them to do things specifically for accomodating GNOME at the expense of other DEs (https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 for the most famous example - who the f* says this really: "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. It is my hope that you are a GNOME app. Yes this kind of fragmentation is unfortunate. I'm not happy about it either. Anyway, I just wanted to give you a heads up. Wish you the best."). Only other project I've ever seen this with is Rust people spamming RIIR issues on gh.
Or stuff like this insane thread: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217
I also see nothing wrong with the second thread. GNOME is under no obligation to implement features they don't want to implement. You're posting that to push a narrative while ignoring the other hundreds (thousands?) of bugs that get fixed without any fanfare and without the HN crowd throwing a multi-year long tantrum. It's quite frankly embarrassing to see these brought up continually as an attempt to criticize GNOME. You can do better than this for the Linux community.
That doesn't make the immune to criticism though. It's they're right to shoot themselves in the foot, to break with freedesktop standard, to ignore community requests. But it's also everyone else's right to say that that kind of behavior is shitty and makes them poor stewards of the project.
Sure, I can't prove that their approach is doing immense damage to the "year of the linux desktop", but very rarely do I encounter people in real life who do more than tolerate gnome because it's the default.
Sure, no one owes anyone anything and there is no objective "right choice". Once again a post-modern view of truth doesn't make gnome immune to criticism.
Why Gnome defenders always jump straight to post modernism when criticism pops up is beyond me.
>that kind of behavior is shitty and makes them poor stewards of the project.
This is a perfect example of a useless, substance-free criticism. You can't prove what you're saying, you admit you don't really know what you're talking about, but you're happy to say they're shitty. It's like if you randomly walked into stores and said to the clerk "I can't prove it but you're a shitty person who's bad at your job" and then walked out. That would be like, ok? Do you think anyone is actually going to be motivated by that? Now just imagine you have a little website with your friends for your hobby and someone you don't know does this to you. They come along saying you're shit for not making everything exactly to their personal opinions. Can't you see how this is an awful way to participate in a supportive community?
Really now. Repeatedly making the same nonsensical requests and criticisms isn't going to help anyone. If you seriously expect them to improve their project then you should take the same advice: improve your own criticism. Make it so good and so respectful and so helpful they can't ignore your suggestions anymore. Avoid the personal attacks telling someone they're shitty and bad, instead think about how you can support that person and build them up to be better to accomplish great things.
I would argue that rather than being substance-free it is merely subjective. This thread points at plenty of real examples of problems, but they're mostly dismissed or ignored.
Unfortunately most things in life are subjective. I don't consider complaints that depend on subjective things (EX: was such and such a maintainer rude during such and such a thread) to be substance-free, even though we don't have a legal test for comparative rudeness.
>Make it so good and so respectful and so helpful they can't ignore your suggestions anymore.
I think the SDL developers in the lined thread did that, it didn't work.
Subjective as in, not based in any provable facts. Can you see why this isn't convincing? Is this really worth your time to go at it from that angle?
>This thread points at plenty of real examples of problems
No, you haven't mentioned any real problems. This discussion would have ended long ago if you did. I've been trying to point you in the direction where we talk about real problems and solutions but you're being very stubborn here. You keep trying to nit pick about perceived "rudeness" in comments from years ago that isn't even there. You're mistaking someone being short and to the point with being rude. Can you cut it out with this stuff already please? Why are you doing this? Please don't say something like "GNOME made me do it" because you know that's not true.
>I think the SDL developers in the lined thread did that
No, their suggestion wasn't convincing. Repeatedly making the same suggestion but louder each time isn't an improvement. You have to actually change the core of the suggestion and come up with new ideas, rather than continuously bringing up old ideas that it's already established they won't work.
I disagree, but given that it's a subjective technical decision I don't think we're going to be able to find any kind of objective call as to what the right decision was.
The problem is that all technical decisions involve balancing the requirements of multiple parties and if your ethical framework is "Gnome is all volunteers they can do what they want" that makes them completely immune to any sort of criticism. Yes, I concede that they are free to do whatever they want, but that doesn't free them from criticism.
But hey, if you want to come up with some kind of objective moral framework for us to work in that's fine.
>Subjective as in, not based in any provable facts.
Do you think that the choice to not implement XDG-decoration is based on probable facts? Because it is also a subjective call. Maybe go read some lesswrong until you have a better handle on how to deal with subjectivity in debate: https://www.lesswrong.com/rationality
No, there's nothing subjective about it. The fact is, doing things the way they suggested won't fix anything. That's a fact of the code as it's written. They could change the code to fix it, but then they'd be breaking backwards compatibility. These are the objective facts.
>if your ethical framework is "Gnome is all volunteers they can do what they want"
That's not an ethical framework. It's a functional description of the way that open source projects work, by necessity. How do you propose volunteers make anything work if they're forced to program in every idea from every user, including all the impossible and nonsensical ideas? Or what if one user wants to expand a feature but another user wants to remove the same feature, what do they do?
>Yes, I concede that they are free to do whatever they want, but that doesn't free them from criticism.
Neither does it free the SDL developers from criticism from the GNOME developers, or from anyone else. It also doesn't free either me or you from criticism for making impossible suggestions.
>Do you think that the choice to not implement XDG-decoration is based on probable facts?
Yes, see above. The code that's currently written is an objective, provable fact. You can go look at the code right now, that's the code that's shipping on users' computers. Any decision they make is restricted by that code, unless they want users to be even more angry about how they broke backwards compatibility. You're getting confused, because the subjective part here is what they do to the code in the future. The code as it currently stands says objectively that your idea won't work without causing other problems.
I think the CSD initiative is fine if it's a choice. However, I can't choose to not use GNOME on behalf of my users. Libdecor is a bad and C-centric solution to the problem. I know Mutter is designed in such a way that makes this hard; that was a pretty big misstep in my opinion.
Likewise for other things that GNOME Project pushes.
Here is a great example. Wayland has a protocol for inhibiting idle called inhibit-idle. GTK won't use it. Instead, they want you to use a DBus interface from the enormous XDG Desktop Portals API. They refuse to have any kind of discussion about it. End of story.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2202
This pattern repeats for even silly things. Like the size of the mouse cursor on HiDPI screens? No problem bro, just use this bespoke DBus API.
This is all assuming you want to use DBus. Why? Wayland is already the thing that you speak to talk to the display server. Why use another protocol for basic functions like this? If DBus is so great, why do we even need the Wayland protocols in the first place? (Dbus is not great.)
> I don't think this belongs in the wayland protocol, but I'm not strongly opposed to using it as a fallback if not portal implementation is available.
Seems like a PR would be acceptable given Matthias' comment.
(And frankly, soliciting patches for an issue then having the contributor sit for over a year rebasing without any substantial feedback is just kind of shitty.)
That said, I will retract: the main ones I was interested in have actually closed. I did not notice that !3898 was closed because it got superseded, but I had been applying that one for a long time. I am interested in !4672, but it broke my build so I don't currently have it on. Dunno if that one will get merged. It's in the unfortunate place of being neither approved nor denied. I can't blame the GNOME developers too much here, since everyone is pretty much a volunteer, but it's definitely not a fun experience. I have some in flight PRs that are going nowhere to other projects including Sway right now.
Essentially, GNOME project is going Wayland purist way.
However, I can't recall that point ever really coming up specifically. Deciding what should be a standard Wayland protocol has a committee today though. And I understand that an optional protocol existing does not imply that all Wayland clients and servers must implement them, but things like idle-inhibit were added because it addresses a specific problem, and I think it's a real shame that the most popular toolkit on Linux will probably not get support for it.
I'm not trying to slander GNOME developers here, and they have no incentive to care about people's opinions who have nothing to do with them, but if they care a lot about their reputation as being a bully in the ecosystem, well, this is exactly the kind of thing that leads to this problem.
You can see this kind of effect by looking at toolkit preferences in things like the stack overflow surveys.
They are, presumably, not the people that Gnome are bullying. But I think we're past the point where you can I can have a reasonable conversation.
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-popular-t...
https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#section-most-loved-dre...
GTK has lower usage than Qt and Electron, but it's actually few percent higher on the "most loved" category than Qt and Electron. However all of them are below 50% loved. The percent GTK is above them is probably not enough to be important. And that's exactly what I'd expect: all these desktop toolkits have issues and are disliked. Electron and Qt are cross-platform so of course they would have higher usage than GTK, which has only ever really been popular on Linux. And none of it matters anyway. .NET wins it all by a large margin due to the popularity of Windows and the only other big GUI frameworks on there are Flutter and React Native. I'm honestly surprised GTK is even on the list at all, it wasn't there in previous years. I expected the list to be totally dominated by web frameworks and Python frameworks like it was before.
This is kind of along the lines of what I've been trying to communicate to you. Complaining about these minor issues and playing the blame game between open source projects is pointless. Microsoft, Facebook and Google are the big boys in town, that's not gonna change by GNOME fixing some random low-priority bug.
As for the API stuff: why does the display server need to deal with power management? That sounds like something the power management API should do. IMO, the display server should just display things, not manage power states or login states. Wayland draws the screensaver, but the session manager controls the actual session.
Still, there is an open MR to accept this API (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/111) that needs to be rebased and needs a bug resolved. The solution falls perfectly in line with the GNOME way of doing things as well (forwarding the Wayland API to DBus so the DBus interface can do its thing), the only problem is that nobody is interested enough to do the hard work.
DBus is an excellent method to communicate anything that doesn't involve exchanging buffers. Many members of the Wayland project are trying to prevent going down the same path X11 went down, sucking up more and more features and API surface and becoming a huge, unstable, buggy mess because of its sheer code size.
As for your mouse cursor issue, Wayland's cursor_theme seems to be supported by at least. I can't find cursor_theme in the Wayland spec itself (there is a merge request at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... but I don't see much activity) so until that gets stabilized you can choose between using DBus or a bespoke, DE-specific API, pick a compositor that takes away cursor control from the application entirely, or switch back to X11.
- Networking. The socket(s) will block your program loop.
- Audio. Has to be done on a separate thread with strict timing.
- Background loading. Get ready for your program to hang when loading a large file.
- Talking to any system services. Every common desktop uses dbus now. Really. Using sway on an embedded system without dbus is a niche.
- Power saving modes. Without an event loop you always have to use sleep to poll yourself manually, and that's wasteful.
- Simulations, physics, or anything else that requires a constant tick rate. These are dependent on running the rendering in another thread.
- Accurate timers. Any issues with any of the above will block a timer from firing.
There are probably a lot more too. What seems "lightweight" first can turn out actually not be lightweight at all.
I would argue that if you sum the code of all the Wayland compositors existing today + all the dependencies required for making them work as a proper desktop - dbus, wlroots, ... you likely have much more code (and thus much more bugs overall) than you had for X11.
xorg git repo is 400kloc of C, I've seen projects which were on the order of magnitude of 40 million lines of code and still were able to be managed, so to me "sheer code size" sounds a bit weird. Hell, the main project I work on, https://ossia.io and on which I do the huge majority of the swdev work alone is nearing 500kloc and it does not feel like a burden.
This is different situation for older non-compositing window managers that still use the old X11 drawing primitives. Compositors do all their drawing themselves using direct rendering to the GPU so are able to just swap out the backend without much trouble. That shift was happening in X11 in the years prior to Wayland and it's one of the reasons Wayland is even able to work.
I just don't care though, I've resisted the GNOME-ire until recently (hoping it was "just" drama and would blow over or be fixed by technical decisions in the future) but now, I have given up on the idea that GNOME apps are going to continue to "seemlessly" co-exist in non-GNOME environments, like in the past. Fine.
Fortunately, between various Wayland tiling WMs, KDE, Cosmic on the way, there are other options that don't require GNOME, or even GTK+. Good riddance.
Does it, though?
"My way or the highway" fits very well in this context. "My way or the highway" can also be interpreted as "we don't give a single shit about other software and other people, and we don't care about interoperating with them".
Basically GNOME is living in and pushing a world where there's only GNOME.
And this is where things get tricky and I feel for the supposed "haters": so now you (GNOME) are a big project and you're pushing your own incompatible and non-interoperable stuff. Some projects will adhere, some won't, for any reason.
So now if I'm using anything not GNOME my desktop experience is broken, because software that assume GNOME is running won't work well (if at all) in other environments.
It just wasn't this bad before GNOME3 and this mentality shift.
No, that's false. I can't see why you'd even think that. GNOME wouldn't be using Wayland at all if that were true. GNOME uses standards where they make sense, this one optional non-standard part of Wayland just happens to not make any sense for GNOME. They don't have any issue with the rest of Wayland.
That's a false dilemma. You don't have to do either of those. The alternate solution is mentioned in that issue: use libdecor. I'll also note, if you refuse to use any of the system's UI and you insist on implement everything yourself directly on libwayland then that's an entirely self-inflicted problem that you created. Libwayland is fairly low-level, it isn't a game development API. Besides window decorations, you'll have lots of other deficiencies and things you have to spend development time on. That's what you volunteered for, GNOME can't help you with that.
Its pretty annoying to add another moving piece to the machinery just to do that.
You have this completely backwards. Dbus was already standard on nearly every X11 desktop and was spoken by a lot of X11 window managers, before Wayland even existed. It was adopted during the X11 days because X11 is a poor IPC for anything outside of window management. It's notably bad at syncing settings where you commonly have an external process storing a settings database that sends notifications to interested applications. X11 is a poor fit for that, but dbus is great at handling that case with its signaling mechanism. Mouse cursor size being a good example of that type of setting.
>If DBus is so great, why do we even need the Wayland protocols in the first place?
Because they're two different protocols with different goals. Dbus is a general-purpose IPC that can be used for a lot of desktop tasks, like syncing settings. It's designed for many-to-many communication between every program on the system. Wayland is designed mainly for high performance between only one application (the window server) and its clients.
>Dbus is not great.
Dbus is the worst option except for all the others. I've seen a lot of dbus hate over the years but still no one has ever been able to propose a replacement. No, putting everything into Wayland protocols is not a suitable replacement.
Now for something like syncing the cursor size, that belongs in Wayland. Duh. The Wayland compositor handles displays, their scale factors, and the hardware cursor. It's just common sense.
Wayland as a protocol is probably not good enough to replace DBus, but it is significantly simpler and lacks some DBus pitfalls. I think for things that could reasonably be handled by the compositor, it should be.
(I have other concerns about DBus, too, especially now that desktop stuff is moving to systemd user services. Aren't systemd user instances per user and not per session? How can you deal with DBus in that context?)
You might consider joining the IRC/Matrix channel and making an offer to one of the maintainers.
>Now for something like syncing the cursor size, that belongs in Wayland. Duh. The Wayland compositor handles displays, their scale factors, and the hardware cursor. It's just common sense.
No, unfortunately it doesn't and it isn't. You're describing something that isn't Wayland. I've seen upstream Wayland developers following the rule of "it should only be a Wayland protocol if it requires access to Wayland object ids" and idle-inhibit does follow that rule (you can inhibit on a window id). Anything to do with mouse settings doesn't follow that rule. There was a conscious decision to keep settings handling out of Wayland protocols because, among other reasons, Wayland is designed for a specific thing (windowing) and is bad at being a settings database. It doesn't really even have a way to identify hardware devices, those are all abstracted away under "outputs" and "seats" which don't actually need to correspond to any physical device.
>Aren't systemd user instances per user and not per session? How can you deal with DBus in that context?
You only have one session bus per user and it's the one used by systemd. I mean, you can start more buses but why would you need to when none of the services you want will be using that?
The problem is simple:
They used the open-source style goodwill generated by the old thing called GNOME, as it existed with Linux, to bootstrap their current popularity, and this is to me, dishonest.
They used a different style and direction. Had they changed the name and/or been clear and upfront about the fact that "this new my-way-or-the-highway thing isn't the Gnome you're used to," then I could defend them.
Call it something new and let MATE have the old name.
But they're not interested in doing or even acknowledging that. Let the mud slinging continue.
My Canary in the coal mine was, IIRC, discussion about presenting certain printer options to end user around 2.2 to 2.4 switch, and some options getting discarded from GUI and into regedit-style tinkering, because GNOME team considered them superfluous. From what I recall, the options were ones that I would occasionally use on Windows (and not just I, but also people who wouldn't be considered techies).
I've only recently returned a few months ago and found KDE to be sufficient and stable enough for my uses (despite the few bugs I keep running into, but nothing breaking my usability too much).
The GNOME project is a massive undertaking and completely free. It's written by volunteers, sponsored developers, and commercial developers who derive their revenue from elsewhere. They own the trademark, so of course they're going to use it.
The bottom line is that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people happily use GNOME every day (yes, I'm currently one of them). I did _not_ care for legacy GNOME, and back then I chose something else (usually dwm and xmonad).
I really don't see what this fuss is about. There is a vast selection of alternative desktop environments and window managers to choose from. Get over it.
There's such a thing as too opinionated (and it's coming from someone that likes opinionated).
I extensively use Gnome but I think it might be time for me to consider switching.
This ain't just hobby stuff anymore. Businesses are catching on and using it, and so they're entrenching an older, stinky, take-it-or-leave-it way to do software, and what's worse, they're doing it on the back of a free-software-spirited labor.
It doesn't violate the letter of the GPL, but it sure as hell violates the spirit.
No it doesn't. The spirit of the GPL is essentially "do whatever you want with this as long as you keep distributing the source code." That's it. It says nothing about paid products or development style or keeping a certain style or direction or anything like that. The GNOME developers decided to change direction themselves, as the GPL says anyone can. It would no sense for them to give up their trademark to MATE when that was just a random offshoot that no one had any idea of whether it was serious or how long it would last. It's not even that active now, can you honestly say they would have benefited any more from having the GNOME name?
Like, come on my guy, you're flogging a horse that died more than a decade ago. You can continue this substance-free criticism of open source projects for as long as you want, just be aware that you get out what you put in.
You seem to grossly misunderstand what "spirit" means here, because you described the letter.
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.en.html
>the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users
>When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish)
>Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software.
And all of those parts are still the same. The "no warranty" here generally (and legally) means you don't get to complain if it doesn't work for you, unless you believe Stallman didn't understand what he meant when he wrote that.
I believe this is the likely root of the problem. Commercial developers who don't personally use GNOME at home and only only work on it because it's their job. The incentive of these developers is to keep GNOME minimal from their own perspective as developers, to make their jobs easier. They don't really care about GNOME users (despite their contrary rhetoric) and neither does their employer (Red Hat, etc). Their employer funds this GNOME development because they still sell workstation licenses or support contracts to big corps and workstations need a GUI environment that's viable from the point of view of salesmen, CTOs, and contract lawyers (none of whom will be using it.) GNOMES's style of user-hostile minimalism satisfies all these corporate interests.
You're acting like this is a bad thing but that's how open source is supposed to work. Every contributor works on their area of interest. For companies, they work on what helps their customers. There's a practical limit to how many users any contributor can support because developer time is a finite resource. With many contributors it's supposed to average out over time into something more general use. However the Linux desktop has historically been very bad at attracting a lot of corporate contributors. That's not specific to GNOME and it has nothing to do with corporate interests, plenty of other desktops are even more minimalistic and hostile to design changes.
Why is it the default? Because GNOME was GPL when KDE depended on the non-free Qt, a long time ago. That is no longer relevant but it was the basis for it being blessed as default.
I too use GNOME, not because I particularly like it, but because Linux lets me be productive right out of the box with a minimum of fuss and therefore I want to stay close to default. But I dread every major update where I have google some obscure configuration options just to leave my productivity alone.
They used to do something well and they're riding the momentum, deceptively, and they happen to be doing it during a time where less-techy folk and business are beginning to more see the value.
Synthetic "popularity by default" vs. authentic popularity at work.
It almost reads as sarcasm. Even if we skip over the fact that an "average Linux user" isn't exactly an "average computer user," have you met... an average computer user? Try telling them that there are no desktop icons because it will only confuse them.
Seems like a misinterpretation by the author.
* rounded up to the nearest billion
The only thing you have to know is the super key, or the top left corner. Then you will see your open windows and the available app list.
There is plenty of bad things about gnome, but I think they do have a nice vision and they adhere to it well. On a laptop, to me Gnome is the most usable desktop environment out of any OS even.
She just use Firefox and a couple Sudoku apps, so not exactly a power user.
Before she was a Windows user and I had to regularly maintain her computer. Not anymore since Linux. Thanks Linux.
May be it's right strategy for their goals.
Everything's going to become a tablet webapp, and Linux is finally going to be used by Average Folks. (That's why GNOME is basically a touch-based tablet DE.)
In my opinion, that's a doomed vision, both technologically and in what will occur. You can't have convergence; you can't collapse UIs or OSes down to the lowest common denominator (a mobile tablet) and have it be as good on a desktop as a UI or an OS meant for a desktop. Moreover, Linux is, and will (sadly?) remain, an "engineering OS", which is great for developers and technical people but comparatively alien and limited for Average Folk (probably for the same metaphysical reasons as the UI/OS problem).
You could say that Linux caters to the extremes: users who are SO simple that they don't even notice what OS they're on (they don't need to interface with AAA games or Netflix because they just "play sudoku") and users who are advanced enough to benefit from its technical focus. (But then again, the simple case is equally catered to by every OS, so I think "engineering OS" is the best way to look at it.) Average Folks are in the middle; they'll never touch a command line, and they want to play World of Warcraft or Call of Duty.
Your actual Linux user is either a programmer or a sysadmin, either professional or amateur. They're statistically the most likely segment of the population to actually be on a desktop computer with multiple monitors and to be finicky about DE features, and that's precisely the user GNOME targets the least due to some mix of fumes of the Converge era and the "developer first" convenience of just not having features and keeping things simple and changing them at will, downstream be damned (GTK4+).
Gnome is like everything from freedesktop.org opinionated, arrogant and ignorant
> ....
> SOLUTION:
> If you dislike the GNOME Project’s philosophy, then the solution is to simply not use GNOME.
lol, is this supposed to somehow convince me that gnome does not have this attitude or the claim is misleading?
I don't even think "my way or the highway" is a bad philosophy in UI heavy software, but what is even the point in writing a response to this criticism if you are just going to end it with: my way or the highway (phrased differently)?
“GNOME continues the war against its own users.”
That said, I will grant that its ecosystem and application suite is now good enough for me to not consider using Elementary any more, but I think that, in my case, is as much due to switching to Fedora as it is to GNOME.
https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2022/12/22/1300 (A year using Linux on the desktop)
2. Members of the masses (Windows & macOS users) switching to Linux annoyingly keep complaining that Gnome needs to change to make things less hidden and simple so they can use it.
3. These users need to be ignored so that Gnome can be used by the masses.
Makes perfect sense.
Since you brought up KDE.
This is many reasons why I like KDE - they seem to value interoperability over exclusiveness. Also, leave the user in control. GNOME removes control from me. As seen in their HIG[0], "Provide sensible defaults but consider optional functionality and customization options that don't interfere with the primary task."
From another comment:
> maybe because GNOME unlike most big OSS projects has people going into issue tracker of other software and asking them to do things specifically for accomodating GNOME
This is a pattern I dislike seeing. GNOME is fracturing the community by forcing their own way, or the highway.
But Dolphin is the only file manager that I can tolerate and last time I tried Gnome (43 on Fedora 37 beta) it couldn't handle switching of my second monitor (it made a mess of my virtual desktops).
Honestly Gnome isn't bad, you just have to adapt your workflow: instead of putting apps to the foreground by clicking on them in the taskbar just use a virtual desktop for the different activities.
Dolpin is excellent as a file manager. Nautilus was terrible when they introduced it. It's still terrible.
I don't like how GNOME handles multiple desktops. I can get very close to i3 with KDE, support for shortcuts and customization, and virtual desktops, but have a still full DE to go with it.
Like most GTK apps, Nautilus feels like a toy app.
Dolphin feels like a better app than what you have in any other OS.
Most of the best Linux apps seem like they're Qt, and that's because GTK is increasingly terrible to work with. The next runner up file manager to Dolphin, PCManFM, switched from GTK to Qt[0]:
``` Hong Jen Yee, developer of LXDE (the GTK version of which was dropped and all efforts focused on the Qt port), expressed disdain for version 3 of the GTK toolkit's radical API changes and increased memory usage, and ported PCMan File Manager (PCManFM) to Qt. PCManFM is being developed with a GTK and with a Qt backend at the same time. ```
Was it not before? is it actually now? have the masses noticed?
The real Linux DE for the masses is ChromeOS, but people don't usually bucket it with the others. And that is Google's way or the highway.
Even at my job where gurus are managing our workstations full-time, Linux users randomly had to all switch desktop environments cause of X dependency getting too old, and the new one partially broke compatibility with our remote desktop. It's not a perfectly layered cake.
I also don't believe that people's use cases are really so different that there need to be so multiple widely-used Linux DEs. I'd get it if there were GNOME for almost everyone then other niche DEs for the rest. Again, so many people with a variety of use cases have managed ok with the basically unchanging Windows UI for decades.
Is that thanks to their decisions, or despite their decisions?
And yes, I'm aware that I can change a lot of Gnome with Gnome Tweak Tool and various extensions. But the fact that I have to install a third party tool, a browser extension, and then some extensions off a random website to get the same functionality that other desktop environments (such as KDE, MacOS and Windows) include by default is an absolute indictment of Gnome's design philosophy.
Instead of chasing after users who have never heard of Gnome, and barely know about Linux, Gnome should have focused on improving the experience existing users. They still can. A good start would be taking all the settings that Gnome Tweak Tool exposes and bringing them back into the main settings UI, so that I don't have swap between two settings applications, with no rhyme or reason dictating how settings are split between the two. Also, please give me the ability to hide the clock (like I can do in Windows 10) without having to install some random extension [1] to do so.
[1]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1110/hide-clock/
Really, that's what gets me. It's not as if the world moved on and Gnome just didn't keep up. No. Gnome 2 was actually better than Gnome 3. The Gnome devs removed features for what, as far as I can tell, were purely aesthetic reasons.
Put another way, whenever we see Microsoft or Apple dumbing down their operating systems, do we not criticize them for unnecessarily making life more difficult for their users? Why should we give Gnome a free pass for doing exactly the same thing?
The Gnome people seem to seriously just go around removing options because deleting working code used by actual humans makes them feel more powerful: they think they know better than sometimes decades of prior design or tons of existing projects (including Linux itself at times).
They think of themselves as Apple, sure: but they have neither the true vertical control of everything Apple does to pull off Apple's most "courageous" battles nor the distribution bottlenecks Apple can wield when they are being their most evil.
They do it because open source projects don't have infinite resources to maintain infinite options forever. You can complain about it all you want, but 25 years of history shows that just because something was being used by humans doesn't mean that volunteers are going to magically show up to maintain that option for eternity. I'm sure if you've been working in this field for a while then you've deleted some unfortunate code in your day job and had to convince users to do things a better way. So why single out GNOME for this?
I have very little patience for the, "It's open source and maintained by volunteers," argument when other projects which are equally open source and maintained by fewer volunteers somehow manage to deliver more functionality.
The rest of your comment is dangerously close to toxic entitlement. You don't get to say you have no patience. Or rather, you can say it, but it's completely meaningless for you to do so unless you were trying to antagonize some volunteers. Avoid that line of thinking. These are all volunteers who can spend their time as they want.
Maybe if Gnome didn't have so much "modern tech", (like DBus, for example) the Gnome devs wouldn't be so overworked.
Tbh there's no excuse, especially when GNOME devs REMOVE features that are already there that have no maintenance cost for no reason (https://discourse.gnome.org/t/icon-view-sizes-in-nautilus-43...).
Did you bother to read that whole thread? The developer gives a long explanation with the reasons: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/icon-view-sizes-in-nautilus-43...
It has? I use gnome bits daily and it's a mess of inconsistent and zero-ux-background-so-i-came-up-with-my-own paradigms.
There's no reason why the gterminal, for example, should replace the top most item in the right click menu with hex/oct representation of a number you happen to have selected, or every gnome app keeping affordances in "fun" new places:
Compare gedit vs gnome-weather vs gnote vs gcontacts - sometimes there's a hamburger menu, other times there's contextual stuff under an icon, or a button, or a button with a contextual menu. Variety is the spice of life, right?
If you're crushing it usability, you certainly can gloat about my way or the highway type of philosophy, but gnome is in no danger of that.
I like it. It's useful during programming and it never gets in the way of anything. If you're going minimalist, why even use the right click menu at all?
> Compare gedit vs gnome-weather vs gnote vs gcontacts - sometimes there's a hamburger menu, other times there's contextual stuff under an icon, or a button, or a button with a contextual menu. Variety is the spice of life, right?
Most options with descriptions are behind the kebab menu on every app, quick controls are icon buttons. It all looks pretty consistent to me. gedit's open/save buttons are a bit weird, I suppose, but if that's all then I don't see the problem, really.
You'll find inconsistencies like these on every OS. KDE has its fair share of wonkiness as well if you switch. Even Windows, the most popular operating system in the world, has a range of hamburger menu icons and placements.
The only people using desktop Linux these days are Linux fans, or software developers who need it for work.
Maybe RH has a bunch of institutional customers I'm completely unaware of, but as far as I can tell, the Gnome devs seem to be trying to build a GUI aimed at mythological users: non-technical users they somehow think are going to switch to Linux Real Soon Now if only they can entice them with their holy ultra-simplified GUI. The real world doesn't work this way.
Some of us have actual work to get done and don't want to play the role of UI designer. I trust that the Gnome people put the work in and get something that's mostly right.
FWIW, I love Gnome as is. I don't know how many people like me exist. The only thing I miss is the tree view in Nautilus, which is coming back in 44.
>But, currently, I prioritize ease of use and distraction-free, so I use GNOME.
Wew, there we go!. At least it's being said plainly and openly at this point. GNOME is for GNOME OS, we have plenty of other choices in its absence. Sorry to authors of GTK apps caught in the middle!
This line coming from the project that took what 10+ years to add thumbnails to the file picker? Do y'all not realize how this comes off? It's really something.
No, it's not. KDE will work with you to add any reasonable feature that most people would find useful, even at risk of introducing a few bugs here and there. (Gnome ends up having a similar amount of bugs anyway). You can very easily turn KDE into any other desktop you want, even gnome or windows. It provides one preferred oob experience however
If you say that having any particular default means "my way or the highway" then that term becomes meaningless, no?
Regarding "Russian-style argument": Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
Another example is, from what I've seen gnome has had a lot more resistance to standardizing new wayland protocols from wlroots than KDE, because minimal compositors have a very different paradigm than gnome, and gnome isn't interested in supporting other paradigms.
They seem to have, by sticking to their guns, become an absolute punching bag for the type of person who cares to complain about tedious UI issues.
It strikes me that they provide a pretty major community service by distracting that group.
The mass basic non nerd lambda user wants clear explicit interface with buttons. Not secret keyboard shortcut interfaces and functions hidden in secret hamburger menus. In addition, the "tablet" interface with just a single window does not work well enough for most users, or everyone will only use a tablet and not a computer.
I find that pretty hard to believe without a citation.
However, why argue if we can check the actual stats? [1] GNOME seems to be well ahead for now for desktop GNU/Linux. But the dip in the February, when the Steam Deck was released, is interesting.
Because nobody has actual stats. Your link is from one attempt to find some stats, but unless every major distro activates it by default (which they will probably never do on account of privacy issues), it's a tiny and biased sample.
QT has an history of being connected with non-free SW licenses, therefore commercial (or company sponsored) for those distros to rely and invest on such project is risky.
(Arch doesn't have a "default" DE, but https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun puts KDE at 36% and GNOME at 22%, so I put it in the KDE camp.)
GNOME's number is buoyed by the numbers of Fedora and Ubuntu (since they use GNOME or variant as their 'default' DE).
I'm pretty sure that should be "While the GNOME Project isn't without their faults".
While they've walked it back and said they're fine with tinkering the mechanisms they propose would make it much harder for tinkering.
I don't really understand people who keep saying they wish gnome was much more like KDE, for example - there's already KDE existing in that space for users.
And it's not like Gnome are paying distros to ship it as default - they ship it because the maintainers think it's a sane default. Petitioning the distro maintainers would likely be a much more direct path if you disagreed with that and want to change it.
They did implement a way for people to use non-gnome file pickers with gtk programs (like firefox), but then they made it a lot more difficult to actually use that feature outside of flatpak...
Do I owe them anything? Do I owe them silence, or to not complain, or to not tarnish their name?
Clearly as human beings we both owe each-other something, there is a social contract at play here. I'm sure you've seen the infamous "you have to decide if you're a gnome app or an everybody else app", and clearly that developer thought other projects owed them something.
But if you're just going to say "well gnome is immune from criticism because they're (paid) open source volunteers", well then what's the point of even talking to anyone? It's an amazing example of a thought-terminating cliche.
Somehow when I'm bad mouthing gnome I owe the gnome project my silent support though. It is a mystery.
And let me make it clear. I don't care if you honestly criticize GNOME or any other project. I'm pointing out that this style of angry, substance-free criticism is less than useless, it's actually damaging to you and everyone around you because it's the classic short-sighted us-vs-them mentality. It purposely discards the truth in favor of always looking for an "enemy" to blame for everything. Open source isn't a zero-sum game, acting that way is counterproductive towards getting what you want.
>I'm sure you've seen the infamous "you have to decide if you're a gnome app or an everybody else app", and clearly that developer thought other projects owed them something.
No, that's a bad faith misinterpretation of the statement. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have different APIs that conflict with each other. Acknowledging this fact isn't a demand that anyone owes anyone anything, it's simply a fact. If developers want to use these APIs they have to pick which ones they're going to use.
There is a lot of substance in the various criticisms by people in this comment thread, now some of it is heated at this point and there's a lot of frustration involved, but there is a lot of legitimate criticism. If you don't believe me believe the SDL dev, or the LXQT devs (formally LXDE, but they had a falling out with gnome), or the many many other devs that do have legitimate criticism. There's a lot of legitimate criticism, it just keeps being dismissed as "well gnome can do whatever it wants". It can, but if it does then it should expect to lose social capital and good will. No one owes the Gnome project any good will, and it's rapidly burning through it's remaining supply. The good news is that it's a comparatively well connected and well funded open source project, so probably it doesn't need that much good will.
on the topic of "finding a common ground to move forward", well that's almost exactly the advice I'd give the Gnome project in regards to rebuilding some of that social capital and good will. But I really do think the ball is in their court at this point, and the claims that they are un-interested in cooperation, or in any supporting the broader open source community, well I'd say that's fair. Most open source software has a certain amount of good will towards other open source software, SDL is a backbone of open source and if they ask you to please reconsider well then... you reconsider. They've helped the broader open source community out a lot so you help them out.
But with gnome it's very clear that we're not all in this together. Gnome is one team, and the broader open source community is another team. They won't help us out, so why should we help them out. Even the basic appearance of compromise would help this out tremendously, something like "well this doesn't really help Gnome but we'll do it anyway" for a few relevant features. Make it a GSoC project or something.
No one owes anybody anything but there is a social contract, and while gnome doesn't have to abide by it they do get to suffer the consequences of violating it. Mostly right now those consequences are people bitching on the internet and mostly not writing new stuff in GTK unless they're part of the gnome community.
>If you don't believe me believe the SDL dev, or the LXQT devs (formally LXDE, but they had a falling out with gnome), or the many many other devs that do have legitimate criticism.
That isn't valid criticism because the whole reason that situation came about is because those devs also wanted to do what they wanted, and it conflicted with what GNOME wanted. No one's at fault here, it's just a normal healthy disagreement. When you start saying "I'm angry, this disagreement means the side I disagree with is shitty bad people, now they owe me" then you're the one pulling the discussion into an unhealthy, toxic territory. So please check yourself and avoid that.
>It can, but if it does then it should expect to lose social capital and good will.
>The good news is that it's a comparatively well connected and well funded open source project
Again, it's really funny that you think any of these open source projects are well-funded or that they ever had social capital to spare. I've seen near constant trolling and bad faith accusations leveled at these volunteers for years, at the same time I've seen nearly all of them struggle with money, and comparatively few people willing to raise a hand to help out. Your problem here is you're not focused on helping rebuild any of this social capital. You're trying to take more of it away and replace it with nothing. It's destructive instead of constructive. I don't know how you can expect anyone to make progress here to rebuild when you're actively taking more of it away with the trash talk.
>on the topic of "finding a common ground to move forward", well that's almost exactly the advice I'd give the Gnome project in regards to rebuilding some of that social capital and good will. But I really do think the ball is in their court at this point, and the claims that they are un-interested in cooperation, or in any supporting the broader open source community, well I'd say that's fair. Most open source software has a certain amount of good will towards other open source software, SDL is a backbone of open source and if they ask you to please reconsider well then... you reconsider. They've helped the broader open source community out a lot so you help them out.
This paragraph is more meaningless fluff. Avoid this. "The GNOME Project" isn't a person that can just decide to do something. It's a loose group of volunteers working on what they want to work on. If an individual (for example, you) wants to go and start cooperating then they just do it. Continuously asking other people to do it for you is an empty gesture. It's time for you to stop thinking like you're a cop or a lawyer throwing accusations around and trying to calculate just how much social capital others have that you can take away from them. Instead think like a diplomat, think how you can help others reconsider and patch things up. Think how you can give back social capital to everyone around you including those you disagree with. Think how you can inspire others to do the same. That's how we make good community members who aren't perpetually starting and continuing these pointless fights with one another. That's how we avoid the toxic obsession with attacking all the small decisions made by some project, and instead we focus on uplifting all projects.
>But with gnome it's very clear that we're not all in this together. Gnome is one team, and the broader open source community is another team. They won't help us out, so why should we help them out.
Please, stop with this nonsense. Again you're viewing this as "GNOME vs SDL" when pitting these projects against one another has never been a reasonable way to approach this. These are just free projects on the internet, they're not in competition for anything. Maybe you think they're in competition for developer time, but they actually aren't. Developer time isn't fungible, you can't take a KDE developer and tell them to work on GNOME, or vice versa. They just won't do that.
>Even the basic appearance of compromise would help this out tremendously, something like "well this doesn't really help Gnome but we'll do it anyway" for a few relevant features. Make it a GSoC project or something.
They do actually do that for GSOC projects, you probably just didn't notice because they didn't do it for the few small areas you apparently care about. With GSOC the intern has to select the project they want to work on, or make a proposal themselves. If no intern ever wanted to work on it then maybe you can understand it was probably a bad idea or not that important or interesting? I should stress that the areas you're talking about are like less than 0.1% of the project as a whole. They might be high priority for you but they aren't for most other people.
>but there is a social contract
No, there isn't. The entirety of these projects could disappear off the internet tomorrow and nobody would do a thing about it. It happens all the time, developers lose interest and open source projects just die. The users might complain but they can't force any developer to do something they don't want to do. If you honestly believe there's a social contract, you would do better to take the first step and start helping everyone, instead of demanding that some volunteer does everything for you.
Gnome as a project isn't entitled to that social capital, they have to earn it.
>Instead think like a diplomat, think how you can help others reconsider and patch things up.
The ball really is in gnome's court for this one. Some olive branched they could extend would be some kind of dconf setting to enable typeahead in the file picker, being able to double click the filepicker bread crumbs to show file paths (don't force me to learn gnome specific shortcuts for common functionality), or dozens of other small compromises that don't effect me personally.
It's not my responsibility to be nice to Gnome, or to try to improve Gnome's reputation or community good will.
>they're not in competition for anything. Maybe you think they're in competition for developer time,
Did you read the thread? No one claimed Gnome and SDL/GLFW/Allegro were in competition. That would be insane, to try and say that the simple-directmedia-layer and a DE/gui-toolkit were in competition.
You know who does the window handling for 99% of commercial games on linux? SDL. Also volunteer run.
The SDL developers involved have some very concrete problems that they were trying to discuss civilly. The response from the maintainer? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217#note_3568...
You may think that's a reasonable response to a technical discussion involving like a half dozen maintainers of other open source software, but it's really not. It's a very rude response to a half dozen very maintainers of very prominent open source projects. SDL alone is a pretty big deal, if SDL is saying that your solution won't work for them then you listen, since basically all commercial application on linux use SDL.
Ultimately libdecor was produced which solved this problem in a way that isn't really great, but is at least acceptable even if it makes all those developers do a bunch of extra work just for gnome. It's a compromise, it means that everybody needs to create an extra special solution just for Gnome and if any other DE tried that SDL would rightly tell them to frig off. You don't think that interaction had any affect on Gnome's good will? It may very well be why the steam deck shipped with KDE by default.
Sure, maybe Gnome's image problem isn't their fault, maybe it's all bullshit and stuff taken out of context, but it's still their problem to solve and the first step is admitting they have a problem.
>Think how you can give back social capital to everyone around you including those you disagree with.
I don't think you understand what I mean by social capital. It means how much people respect the project, basically. How much good will Gnome has in the community. Gnome has, through their actions and decisions, lost my respect. They can earn that back, but it has to come from them.
While we may not be forced to use it, they do throw their weight around and have significant effects on the open source community as a whole, so when they break stuff for people who don't even use gnome that does earn them some enmity.
And that's fine, they don't need my respect, or the respect of any of the other detractors in this thread. They can clearly get along fine without it.
But you're acting like we all owe the Gnome project our respect, and that's something I really don't get. I do think it's recoverable for what it's worth, but stuff like that XDG-decoration thread and seeing how Matthias treated respected members of the open source community, completely disregarding their points and smugly refusing to engage in any technical discussion, well that burns lot of community good will.
It's evident that every time they earn some, the haters invent new reasons to take it away by creating a new meme about how terrible GNOME is. The old meme about thumbnails in the file picker finally got fixed and you're just as angry at them as ever. Do you understand why they won't ever waste time trying to "earn" things from a group that's perpetually unhappy? I wish you would do yourself a favor and leave that group, it's not a group that's focused on actually solving any problems.
>The ball really is in gnome's court for this one. Some olive branched they could extend would be some kind of dconf setting to enable typeahead in the file picker
No it's not in their court. It's completely in yours. This is all open source, so you can just implement that if you want it, or use one of the many patches floating around. GNOME developers aren't under any obligation to pick up random patches off the internet that would increase their own support burden just because someone keeps asking, you can take those for yourself if you really want to deal with the mess. Like, come on. At what point will you stop blaming them and take responsibility for your own choices? At what point would you ever accept "no" for an answer? If the answer is "never" then you should be able to understand, it's you who's refusing to compromise.
>The SDL developers involved have some very concrete problems that they were trying to discuss civilly. The response from the maintainer? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217#note_3568...
That's a completely civil response based on facts. Core Wayland requires apps to support client decorations. The server side decorations are an optional extension. This hasn't changed in the four years since that response was posted. It makes no sense for you to be bringing this up again.
>It's a very rude response to a half dozen very maintainers of very prominent open source projects. SDL alone is a pretty big deal, if SDL is saying that your solution won't work for them then you listen, since basically all commercial application on linux use SDL.
No, nothing was rude about it. The only way I can interpret this attitude is "SDL is more important than you so they should get to strongarm everyone else into doing things the way they insist" and that's definitely a take. Is that what you meant? If that's true then you're saying SDL is the real bully, not GNOME.
>it means that everybody needs to create an extra special solution just for Gnome and if any other DE tried that SDL would rightly tell them to frig off.
It's not a special solution for GNOME, this is required by the core Wayland protocol.
>You don't think that interaction had any affect on Gnome's good will?
No, I think people who already had a negative opinion of GNOME and think GNOME is responsible for all evils in Linux would use that as fodder for their anger. If it wasn't that, they'd find something else to be mad and blame GNOME about. Like, my friend, you're doing it now.
>While we may not be forced to use it, they do throw their weight around and have significant effects on the open source community as a whole, so when they break stuff for people who don't even use gnome
No, every issue you've said so far only affects GNOME or GTK.
>But you're acting like we all owe the Gnome project our respect, and that's something I really don't get.
Yes, you do owe them some basic respect and dignity if you want them to cooperate with you. What's the part of this you don't get? Your disrespect is pointless and damaging to yourself because it's leading you to make nonsensical uninformed decisions and fail to understand other people's actual positions. If you have some disagreement with Matthias then you can talk it out with him like a human being and offer to help, instead of trash talking behind someone's back. These developers are real people you know? They're not code-writing robots who all obey a hive mind. I can guarantee you're not seeing the full picture here. If your reaction to this is "no, I will never talk to those evil GNOME developers until they fulfill my list of demands" then again, please consider that it's you who's being the unreasonable one.
>but stuff like that XDG-decoration thread and seeing how Matthias treated respected members of the open source community, completely disregarding their points and smugly refusing to engage in any technical discussion
There's no technical discussion to be had and no one was being smug or treating anyone badly. You're shooting the messenger. Again, this is required by the core Wayland protocol. You can be upset about this but the decision was already made years prior by other people outside of GNOME's control. GNOME can't change the core Wayland protocol because that would break existing apps. I'm telling you right now. The thing you're asking for is unreasonable. If you keep making this request, you'll only end up disappointed and you'll just piss more people off for no reason. Please approach this from a different angle and avoid the trap of saying "these developers are always right and must be listened to but these other developers are always wrong and must never be listened to" because that's what you're getting into and I think you're smart enough to see that's obviously a toxic way to think about anything.
You only owe people the respect they give you, I guess is the take away from that. Members of the Gnome project have a long history of being disrespectful to their users and to other open source projects.
Basic respect and dignity, for sure, but that doesn't extend to not criticizing Gnome. Respect can mean treating someone like a person or treating someone like an authority, or a competent subject matter expert.
Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate, and on to the point where if Gnome gets sufficient market share they're going to make their own custom extensions and extinguish the competition, or at least make a bunch of extra work for everyone. I don't want a future where Gnome is dominant, I believe that they'll abuse that position. Once again that's subjective, but I don't think it's unreasonable from looking at their past behavior.
>If it wasn't that, they'd find something else to be mad and blame GNOME about. Like, my friend, you're doing it now.
It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem. It's sad, but it's still Gnome's problem to fix.
>Again, this is required by the core Wayland protocol.
I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground.
To be clear, there are a number of points where I am hopeful about Gnome. Libdecor was an acceptable compromise, and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps, but I'm reserving judgement until I see how it plays out.
I'm not a zealot, I can see a handful of things that has caused my respect for the Gnome project to go up. Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this. Makes it every hard to find any common ground. I think we both want open source to succeed, and we should both be on the same side, but that's hard under the circumstances.
No. You're confusing a normal disagreement with disrespect. There's nothing disrespectful about saying "no we're not going to implement this." I assume from this confusion that you don't work in this field. If you work as a developer you get used to saying things like that all the time. Most users don't understand code. Why would they? Users come at developers with all kinds of requests, some good and some bad, and it's the developers' job to make a decision to say yes or no.
>Honestly? I think we're past the point where Gnome is going to really cooperate
Cooperate with who? If you want them to cooperate with you, then you need to respect them. That way they'll owe you the respect you give them. That means putting aside all the past anger you might have and practicing forgiveness. Put aside any old opinions you had and start fresh. This isn't related to GNOME by the way, this is for any project that you may have a disagreement with. Just think how this would be if the situations were switched and somebody wanted something from you for free. The ball is completely in your court because they're not the ones going on social media making long posts about how you should write some code for them!
>It can be hard to dig yourself out of a reputational hole, but I do think it's largely a Gnome attitude problem. Or maybe just a Gnome communication problem.
Unfortunately in this case it's neither. I can name some times when GNOME screwed up communications but this one isn't that.
>I think better developers than me explained why, while technically correct, that stance is harmful to the open source community as a whole. (they do get some points for libdecor) I can't do a better job of explaining it than those developers, and if you don't see the problem there than I don't think we're going to be able to reach any sort of common ground.
There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it. I see the problem, what you're not seeing is that the problem isn't fixable in the way you think it is. You still seem to think this is a "stance" or "opinion" that some developer has and not an unchangeable fact of the code. Why? If you can't explain this well then maybe consider that you're not qualified to be commenting on it?
>and honestly I hope that libadwaita makes GTK more useful for non-gnome apps
This already happened, have a look at what ElementaryOS is doing.
>Where as you seem to need to find a reason to dismiss every single Gnome criticism there is, I don't think you've admitted to any Gnome flaws throughout all of this.
I can list a bunch but I don't want to. I don't bother discussing my own opinions about GNOME on HN any more because every time I do, people who hold opinions like yours use it as an excuse to turn it into a GNOME hate-fest flamewar and start harassing the developers, calling them shitty bad people who deserve to get their reputations trashed. That stuff is unacceptable. I'm serious here when I say this. In my opinion it's your attitude that's poisoning the well. And this is why I use a throwaway account to discuss this by the way. For whatever reason the moderators here think it's ok for this to be a place where trolls and conspiracy theorists run amok. I'm glad you have some good things to say about them but the toxic negativity really needs to end.
That negativity has been for the most part earned. Obviously "toxic" negativity is a problem, by very definition, but I truly don't think anything in this thread (before you started commenting and things got heated at least) crossed the line into being toxic. You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate.
Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate and, while demonstrating an underlying frustration, isn't toxic. Especially in a non-professional setting like this one. That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine. It even uses passive voice! (Note that I attribute a lot of things to "Gnome" as if that was a person, I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name, not because I don't understand that Gnome is an organization composed of a bunch of people)
>There's no "stance" it's just a statement of facts. This is the way things are. Call it harmful or not, GNOME developers can't change it.
No, that's a statement of opinion. Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here. XDG-decoration is subjective, and most non-gnome linux DEs have decided to implement it. It's a choice not to.
There's a lot of things you're saying are facts that seem to me to be subjective calls by the Gnome team. Adding a dconf setting for typeahead instead of recursive search would be another example of a subjective call.
Now their stance may be supported by facts, facts like the wayland spec requires you to implement CSD, or adding more dconf settings goes against Gnome design guidelines, but that doesn't make their conclusion some kind of immaculate fact. It's still subjective opinion, it's just supported by some facts.
So this is where it gets tricky, even something like "should gnome prioritize implementing the XDG-decoration spec" is highly highly subjective. When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff. To debate that kind of subjective stuff we need some kind of framework, and if we can't agree on any sort of community standards aside from "I do what I want" we're going to have a hard time with that.
No, it hasn't. It's unacceptable for you to make personal attacks calling them "shitty people" because they closed a bug report. It's unacceptable for you to demand that open source developers spend their time addressing your concerns for free. Period. End of story. This isn't up for debate and you're acting like a troll by constantly coming back on this. So I'm asking as person, can you just stop this behavior, please. If you can't agree this is unacceptable, you'll always be a toxic participant in open source. I'm not even exaggerating here. Open source developers will never owe you anything, the entire point of it is it's all voluntary and any contributor can come and go at any time they please. Read this article if you want to know more about why this type of toxic entitlement is always harmful: https://mikemcquaid.com/entitlement-in-open-source/
>You may disagree on that criticism, but from where I'm sitting it was legitimate.
And I'm telling you it's not. You're sitting in a place with incorrect information.
>Things like "I would be happy if they stop opposing server side decorations in Wayland" is entirely appropriate
First of all, that's not what you said originally. You're walking it back again. I wish you would just be honest and apologize and say you were out of line before. Second of all, they're not doing that. Your statement is incorrect and misleading. GNOME isn't opposed to anyone else implementing server side decorations in Wayland. There's just no point to them implementing it in GNOME.
>That's about the most passive and polite way to criticize Gnome I can imagine
Well you need to imagine harder because that wasn't passive. You're framing it like GNOME is actively standing in the way blocking someone from implementing server side decorations, when they've never done that. You can put server side decorations in your own Wayland implementation, or use another one like KDE that already has it. GNOME can't "oppose" anyone from doing that.
>I do that mostly because I don't want to call out individual contributors by name
You already did call them out by name. Again, if you have a disagreement with an individual contributor, you should talk it out with them instead of trash talking them behind their back on social media. Trash talking makes your behavior frustrating to deal with because nobody can trust you not to start fights.
>Gnome doesn't want to implement XDG-decoration, which is fine, but don't pretend the opposition is going against the facts here.
There's no "opposition," this isn't a fight or a debate and it never was. Open source is a team sport and the other team you play against is the computer. It's not about people vs other people. Either you're helping out the team working on the code or you're not. You're still framing this in needlessly confrontational and combative terms, this needs to stop.
>When we debate "should gnome implement the XDG-decoration spec" we're actually debating a lot of more ephemeral subjective stuff
No, there's no debate to be had here. If you were serious about discussing these issues you'd take it up with the GNOME design team. In a sense their decisions are subjective but they don't just make them at random. They're trying to make a consistent system within a particular framework targeted at a particular set of users. And the same things about development apply to them too. Nobody on the design team gets to "win" every debate. Some ideas are just bad and they lose and get thrown out. All the things you're saying have been discussed to death already. Do you think the design team hasn't heard this already in the years previously when these were brought up before? They have, you're not making any new arguments that would ever be convincing. You're just saying "I wish they would implement this" and that's like, ok? All the GNOME designers have about 1000 features they want to implement too, but time is limited so realistically they can only pick a few and they have to throw out the rest.
Do you understand the difference between that and general criticism of a project?
If you had to write guidelines on criticizing a project like Gnome in an acceptable way, what would they be?
My suspicion is that you think any criticism is unacceptable, but if you have some actual guidelines other than "people are mean to Gnome" I would be interested in hearing them.
Personally I think you've been very disrespectful during this thread, but as I generally enjoy debate I've been willing to put up with it until now.
This is fairly generic advice and it all isn't even related to GNOME. This is a general guideline for any healthy community. You can read about all this in random books about community building. If you want to be part of open source you just have to be a good community member, there's literally nothing else to open source. That's why I say it's unacceptable to do those negative things. There just isn't any other way this works. These are communities of equals, you aren't the boss and no one else is your boss either, so it's on you to manage your own conduct.
I'm trying to be kind to you but you're making it difficult when you lead by saying nasty things about people I know, like they're acting shitty just because they declined to implement a feature that you were personally invested in and they weren't. And you keep insisting that they have to do this or they deserve it or something like that. Please just don't do that, it makes it extremely hard to engage with you when I have to keep going through this wall of "but don't you see this other person sucks" or that type of thing. You're automatically putting everyone else on defense when you do that and it messes up the whole conversation.
There are a bunch of barriers, you don't have to go far to see people asking if pull requests would be welcomed for a particular feature.
The gnome foundation may be largely volunteer run, but it is a business and people do get paid to work on it.
I don't think it gets a pass just for being open source, any more than the linux kernel or Wikipedia does.
That isn't a barrier and you don't need to do that. You just implement the feature in your own fork. I can tell from this you're not a developer because this is a common confusion. When you ask for a pull request you're not trying to get through a social barrier. You're actually asking someone else to do you a huge favor by taking time out of their day to review your code for free. And then if they merge it you're also asking them to maintain it for free and fix future bugs in it for free. Normally you would have to pay to get other developers to do that.
>but it is a business
No, this is false and you're getting confused again. Some businesses can contribute by volunteering their employees' time, but that's different from the project itself being a business. The project itself (as in the collection of all the contributors) isn't deciding what those people are paid or what they work on. The project itself doesn't have the customers or answer to them, the business does and that's a separate entity both legally and functionally. Do you see how this is fundamentally different from a business?
>I don't think it gets a pass just for being open source, any more than the linux kernel or Wikipedia does.
A pass on what, exactly? You're coming back to this combative language again, please stop.
You said "changing the project from the inside", which a fork isn't.
>No, this is false and you're getting confused again
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/435...
Gnome is a business, same as Wikipedia. They have a charter and a board of directors and almost one million dollars in revenue in 2020. Lot less in 2021 though, and I don't see any newer reports (I'm not looking in depth right now).
>A pass on what, exactly?
Criticism, in the same style as you'd criticize any business, or at least Wikipedia.
So I ask again, what guidelines would you give for criticizing companies like Adobe, wizards of the coast, Wikipedia, the linux foundation, etc?
Yeah, it is. The inside of the project being the code. You just fork it and change whatever you want. What else do you think that means in the context of software?
>Gnome is a business, same as Wikipedia
No, GNOME and Wikipedia are both non-profits. They're not businesses. "Business" usually means a for-profit company. In both GNOME and Wikipedia, the money is mostly all going to administration costs and costs to run the servers. Currently no GNOME developers are paid by the non-profit, and Wikipedia editors aren't paid either. Ask any of them and they'll verify this. I think you're confused as to how most non-profits actually operate.
I haven't said anyone gets a pass on criticism, I'm not sure why you're pushing that point. I don't think you should throw bad, low-effort angry criticism at businesses either. But open source projects aren't businesses, so I can't answer your question because it doesn't make any sense. Please ask a different question or rephrase it.
In the "why hasn't the linux desktop won" post, they (presumably not you) say
>Without a doubt, systemd was (and still is) one of the most controversial projects in the Linux desktop. This is because its creator, Lennart Poettering, is known to have many controversial positions on the Linux ecosystem and UNIX philosophy.
Which is... pretty much completely missing the point, and rather showing their bias. The reason why systemd is controversial is because it was made by someone who makes controversial decisions? That's the worst kind of tautology.
Like it's a really bad piece of logic, and is makes for some very bad persuasive writing. I'm saying this not to attack theEvilSkeleton, just it stood out as a really big example of clear bias to the point where I felt the need to bring it up.
That's not true. Gnome is actively supported by some of the distros, Red Hat in particular.
Please, enlighten me how notifications position on the top center of the screen is supposed to help with concentration on some task? It'll rather distract and annoy me (as sometimes I accidentally misclick while switching browser tabs etc).
Being the biggest isn't cause enough for this perception.
GNOME, in the past decade, put itself in a remarkable position of prioritizing a perpetual-neophyte persona, who did not & didn't want to understand computers, and rebuilt the product around that persona. For a corporate desktop, where random people are handed GNOME & told they have to use 1 app or maybe 2 or 3 on a computer, this is perhaps reasonably well calibrated. Look at many who fund GNOME Project, and this vision makes sense. But GNOME is a Linux desktop environment, and they have Linux users, and it turns out this chosen persona GNOME Project fixated on doesn't only not line up very well, it actively rejects the premise of supporting the explorer, the tinkerer, the hobbyist, the learner. GNOME Project is quite literally the most visible open-source project on the planet, yet it has the most actively anti-open behavioralism & targeting of probably any open-source project. It's chosen a bounded mission, a narrow one, with incredibly bounded behaviors, and that runs counter to the open-source spirit of possibility & exploration.
> If you dislike the GNOME Project’s philosophy, then the solution is to simply not use GNOME.
In case you missed it the first time the author said it, the author comes back to re-confirm: GNOME is "my way or the highyway."
GNOME is uniquely unflexible in almost all open source software in being so narrowly focused. Unlike most open source software, where adding features & options is usually acceptable in some form or another, given compromise, GNOME believes in their one and only one persona, in the overarching vision of an extremely limited capabilities user. I can think of no other project that makes anti-flexibility such a priority, except maybe suckless, and frankly their extreme conservatism & excess of attitude & loudless is quite a turn off as well.
I've painted a pretty grim picture of what I think of GNOME Project, and I'm sorry to shove them under the bus like this because I think there are noble ideas mixed in with the totalitarianism. But I think their objectives are delusional & off-base, and need re-assessing dearly, not just because many users don't fit their model, but because their model of what a user is is actively bad & harmful & condescending & makes things worse.
To give a nod to GNOME though, the author's other article on the GNOME libadwaita controversy[1] is fairly good in many ways, & talks through some of the pain & complexity & how difficult it is being such a highly visible project that other folks push-the-boundaries on. Freedom leads to "mis-use," what GNOME Project seemingly lives in mortal fear of. The article isn't perfect; I think their KDE examples are 98% horseshit justification (the first qt5ct example feels like strong support that themes work to me, not that they are bad, and most of the rest of the examples are of bad hardcoding that apps should fix, not systematic issues. And the net positive of not needing fractional scaling & being able to adjust your theme seems enormous.). But the support burden experienced by GNOME seems legitemate & real: flexibility has problems. Being an absolutist project that believes in yourself & picks a way & tells everyone else to hit the highway, we don't want to do it is indeed a powerful technique to maintain quality & reduce support burden.
This all circles back to a topic I mention time and time again: the Cathedral and the Bazaar. The "Bazaar" model of software development is complex & hard & there's always unpolished things happening at the edge & sometimes pieces of it stop making sense. There's a alluring temptation to centralize, to pull in, to stop exploring, to obstruct users from going off the careful paths you've built for them, to marshal control. Many people in the world cry out that we must give up the Bazaar and instead build "Cathedrals." GNOME Project decided at some point to become Cathedral builders. And that means telling a lot of people to hit the highway. And alas, it often seems like a Cathedral built primarily corporate users, not actual living flesh & blood humans.
Postscript: as with most do-we-or-don't-we software discussions, I highly recommend "Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus"[2] for more framing, that talks about stances of acceptance vs control. It's helpful to think of GNOME in this framing & it's helpful to think of your own & others around you's approach to code. Recommend.
[1] https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2022/07/28/libadwaita-fixi...
I got tired of it, and the relentless dumbing-down of everything, and switched to KDE (in the form of Kubuntu). It's nice! And the developers seem to understand that it mostly works OK, and they don't need to force a UI paradigm shift on you (and their third-party app developers) every few years.
(Anything using C++ would have a libstdc++.so.6 related ABI break at a later date.)
Who's way are they trying to stay out of? Like why do I need a keyboard shortcut in order to type out a file path when I try to upload a file in Firefox?
There's some imagined user Who's way they're trying to stay out of, and it's not my way, and it's not any of my family Who's computers I set up...
You don't? Just start typing a path (starting with / or ~ or .) and the path picker will switch to a path editor for you. Typing other characters will start a (recursive) search which is what I want to use most of the time myself.
I'd also like them to let you double click the breadcrumbs to switch, but adding an extra action is not necessary in most cases.