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It still seems pretty strange to me that you’re so fervently denying anyone the right to criticize the design and UX choices made in GNOME just because it’s available for free (unless you’re a RedHat customer I guess..).

I assume most people who do that genuinely want GNOME to be improved than due to malice or anything else. What’s wrong about that? If I was working on GNOME I’d definitely prefer users who share their views and opinions to those who just silently quit without saying anything.

I never denied anyone that. Go criticize all you want. Just please stop with the conspiracy theories, it's bad discussion. You don't have to be a Red Hat customer, you could pay any other Linux consultancy.

The Red Hat but was supposed to be sarcasm…

No, 50k commits is from the higher up graph that includes unaffiliated commits.

> I say you're trolling because even if it were entirely a corporate Red Hat project, Red Hat still wouldn't owe anyone any features.

And I say that's not what that word means, unless you truly believe that no reasonable person could actually disagree with you (in which case you'd be factually wrong, but using the word correctly). You're allowed to claim that GNOME/RH giving software away for free makes it illegitimate to critize them, and I'm allowed to say that's nonsense and the software still sucks. Trolling, if you'll forgive my quoting urban dictionary, is

> making random unsolicited and/or controversial comments on various internet forums with the intent to provoke an emotional knee jerk reaction from unsuspecting readers to engage in a fight or argument

This isn't random (as an ex-user, I have very real, very strong opinions about GNOME), I don't care about your emotions, and I didn't intend this to be a fight. So no, not trolling.

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trolling

The comment on the higher up graph still says "I've excluded personal accounts" so a lot of data is just missing there.

I'm not saying it's illegitimate to criticize anything. Please don't put words in my mouth. This is the entire original comment I was responding to:

>What volunteers? GNOME is a Red Hat project.

There's no legitimate criticism in this comment. If you do have real opinions, you never communicated them. The only thing here is the usual substanceless FUD and complaining about Red Hat that pops in every Linux thread. It's bad discussion. You did add some more information afterwards, but your original comment didn't have that. This is why it's trolling. Do you see it now? Next time, lead with the information. Please don't just make snarky comments. I really don't get this vehement denial when it's right there. It was a snarky comment, judging by the language you're still using I think you know that it was snarky. You can just own it and we can move on.

EDIT: And about being an ex-user. People and projects change over time. It just happens. That's life. It's fine to have strong opinions and be passionate but you're letting that passion take you in a bad, angry direction. For yourself, please don't do that. It's like getting upset about a divorce, you have to find some way to deal with it that doesn't involve stewing over the person who left. And that analogy is stretching it because unless you make an effort to get involved and get to know people personally, then open source developers are not your friends. They're just random people giving away free stuff on the internet in a parasocial relationship not unlike anyone else you might encounter on social media. It's not worth it to bother having strong opinions if that's the case. I can tell you, the endless Linux flame wars complaining that software XYZ sucks aren't a place where good productive discussion happens.

> Trolling would be more like creating an account just to make personal attacks and defend RH.

user: QUrprUd1nCeicw created: 11 days ago karma: 76

Seems like he has a point. Are you afraid of losing internet karma points on your normal account?

No, there wasn't a point. Making these accusations is the personal attack and it's a non-falsifiable claim anyway. Once you go that route you're on a complete descent into nonsense conspiracy theories.

> I say you're trolling because even if it were entirely a corporate Red Hat project, Red Hat still wouldn't owe anyone any features. They would still be the "volunteers" in that case. Insisting anyone meet some threshold of features for a random free product they give away is leaning heavily into toxic entitlement.

Negative feedback when removing existing features is not "trolling", nor "toxic entitlement".

In fact, it's expected, when you remove a much used, much loved feature, that you're going to get criticism for doing so, even more so when there is strong indication that there will be no replacement for that feature now or in the future.

Gnome has been steadily dropping features and then attacking anyone who complains (much like you are doing so).

Mostly the gnome supporters imply that the complainers are just plain stupid (don't know any better, are ignorant, have poor habits, etc): from https://www.osnews.com/story/7344/opinion-why-users-blame-th...

> Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought and organisation in the filesystem structure; spatial ones do not.

> And now, when the time to ressurect the spatial ideas has finally come, people accustomed to the bad interface design try to defend it only because for the past years they have been using it!

TBH, if I had time, I could compile a substantial list of similar insults from the Gnome devs themselves, when closing issues as "wontfix".

You can criticize all you want, but I notice you neglected to share any of that actual criticism in your comment. Closing a bug as wontfix isn't an insult, please stop taking that personally. All open source projects reject bugs sometimes. Every project gets to determine their own threshold for what features they remove and what bugs they close as wontfix. All projects reject bugs. There's a comment from down thread about KDE developers doing exactly the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34395682

But you also have to make sure your criticism is good. Just complaining that a feature was removed "because I was using it" is not a useful criticism. I learn nothing from reading that. You have to actually explain why you needed the feature, how you were using it, and why the newer options don't work for you.

>Mostly the gnome supporters imply that the complainers are just plain stupid

I don't see the author claiming anyone's stupid in that article. This is what the author says:

>it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits

And maybe on that note, you could consider that designers know a lot more about the habits of users than a random drive-by commenter, considering they study it for a living?

> Closing a bug as wontfix isn't an insult,

That's a strawman. I said "they attack people who provide feedback".

And whether you like it or not, feedback of the form "Hey, don't take that away, I'm still using it" is legitimate feedback. You wanna see their typical response?

From https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1:

> I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately.

And that's one of their *good* responses. From my other link, you saw that their responses basically said that, even if users were using something, that way of doing things is only done by the ignorant.

> You have to actually explain why you needed the feature, how you were using it, and why the newer options don't work for you.

The posters in the link above explained all of that, and the response was still "No".

> I don't see the author claiming anyone's stupid in that article. This is what the author says:

>>it is just bad file organisation coupled with a bunch of old bad habits

The gnome dev literally said that any way other than their way had was because the users weren't thinking!

> Browser-mode file browsers hide the lack of thought and organisation in the filesystem structure; spatial ones do not.

I mean, they literally said that the users are not thinking if they prefer the old way.

There's a reason why gnome has fewer users than you'd expect given that is the default everywhere - even though it is the default, many user's still find it easier to simply switch.

> And maybe on that note, you could consider that designers know a lot more about the habits of users than a random drive-by commenter, considering they study it for a living?

If these designers knew that, they'd have more marketshare on Linux at least.

Ok, sorry. I misquoted you. I should have said "isn't an attack" instead of "isn't an insult."

Still, the rest of my comment is still relevant even with that change. There's no "attacks" anywhere in anything you've quoted. That response about Ubuntu and XFCE is a factual statement. GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE are all different platforms and they have different APIs. You can't expect GNOME to implement every XFCE feature just like you can't expect XFCE to implement every GNOME feature. And if you decide to do port to another OS like Windows or Mac, then you have to decide if you're going to use Linux APIs or Windows APIs, and so on. This is all very basic concepts. As an app developer you have to decide which of these APIs you're going to use. It's not "attacking" anyone to point out that truth. It's also not an "attack" for them to respond with a firm "no" response. If you want to get along with others you need to learn to accept that sometimes you'll receive "no" for an answer.

And no, "Hey, don't take that away, I'm still using it" isn't legitimate feedback. You need to actually explain why you need to use it that way and why another way isn't going to work for you. And even after that, you still need to be able to accept that your explanations could be bad or wrong and could get thrown out by the developers. You're not the one paying the cost to maintain that code so you don't get the final say on what gets thrown out and what doesn't. That's the entire point of open source. If you don't like this, then you start sharing some of the costs by maintaining the code, and then you can be the one who makes that decision. But it simply isn't an "attack" on you when someone else decides your feature is too expensive for them to work on anymore. You need to not take that so personally.

>The gnome dev literally said that any way other than their way had was because the users weren't thinking!

>I mean, they literally said that the users are not thinking if they prefer the old way.

No, it doesn't say anything like that anywhere in the article. That article isn't written by a GNOME developer either. If you're referring to something else, please show the direct quote where they said that.

>If these designers knew that, they'd have more marketshare on Linux at least.

There's no "marketshare" and no "market." This is an open source project being given away for free. I think what you meant is "mindshare." None of these projects are concerned with trying to dominate the mindshare, they all work together.