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Comment by 24t | Hacker News Reader

>...working together on one definitive GNU/Linux DE

No thanks. GNOME dev hubris is the reason I use KDE

Agreed, GNOME is so user-hostile that I'm actually a little impressed.

Personal example from trying GNOME out recently: I have an external webcam, which means I need to move the GNOME panel clock since it's in the top middle of the screen (and thus blocked by the base of the webcam). You would _think_ that would be easy, but you have to get an extension just to move the clock! Apparently each panel "widget" (this may or may not be the official term) defines its own position on the panel. So, to move something, you need to either find an extension that does it (Frippery Move Clock[0] in this case) or edit the widget code yourself.

Maybe someone can chime in with a technical explanation, but my cynical take is that the GNOME devs don't even trust users to be smart enough to customize their own panel without breaking things.

</vent>

0. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2/move-clock/

They're not really user-hostile, they just have limited development resources and making a polished interface for editing the positioning of top bar widgets would be way too much work. If you want to try things on your own, that's what unofficial extensions and tweaking tools are for.

There are several full time paid developers working on it which is plenty of resources (AFAIK more than KDE). They are not only actively user-hostile but also community-hostile. Every library or project they have under their umbrella receives updates all the time that only serve GNOME and potentially break all software dependent on it that are not part of GNOME (e.g [1]).

1.: https://github.com/thestinger/termite

What you're saying is simply that GNOME developers don't want to pick up development and maintenance burden that isn't going to directly benefit their project. If you think there's opportunities to share projects or libraries across DE's, the proper venue for that would be freedesktop.org not really GNOME itself. Then the maintenance load can be shared as well.

This has been tried. All you will get is rejected pull requests. What makes it even worse is that GNOME has usurped many projects that were original not part of GNOME but that the community relies on (one example is the "GIMP Tool Kit"). This led to the death of many long tail niche projects which are the actual strength of Linux/FOSS.

The example doesnt seem to support your argument. The rationale the developer gives here is reasonable and looks like good stewardship of a shared library - the patch added a new API that was tightly based on termites' needs and provided little benefit for other terminal programs. What the maintainer wanted was a more complete API for the feature. The termite dev said he did not want to implement this feature in the library. This is also reasonable. Its his code and his time. So we have two people who can't find/commit to a solution everyone is happy with. It doesn't really seem user hostile at all, just that something couldnt be worked out. Sure, its frustrating when its an app you really like, but sometimes interests wont align even when it seems from the outside like they should.

That reading doesn't really agree with the maintainers' responses at all.

They say this is desirable functionality, but that they would want to subsume termites features in VTE and Gnome Terminal, and that was their rationale for rejecting the patch. Then they didn't deliver those features in a timely fashion.

That's just abhorrent behavior.

Can’t really blame them for not producing the slick configuration GUI for every option. But it is annoying that they always go for the slick configuration GUI, as if they were a for profit company with a bunch of full time devs. Meanwhile every other open source program, recognizing that it has limited developer time (and interest in boring grunt work), just sets up easier text-centric config first…

The text-centric config for GNOME is dconf/gsettings. But what people like to complain about is graphical configuration, which adds enough maintenance burden that it's only worth doing if it's going to be friendly enough for most novice users.

Gnome used to have a polished interface for editing the positioning of top bar widgets circa 2001.

Nah a bunch of clowns funded by private companies used their salaries to boost their egos to develop stupid anti-user centric desktop software starting after gnome 3 launched. Remove all options, treat everyone like an iPad baby and try to leverage the existing desktop to do a radical paradigm shift, when all people wanted was GNOME2+. This is actually different than KDE3->KDE4 transition, which while it was a total disaster in terms of usability and reliablity, continued to keep the roots of a power desktop in terms of flexibility configuration and software customization.

GNOME2+ is still around, that's what Mate is. GNOME 3 and later releases has great support for convergence, which is incredibly popular among users - while also being very easy to use via the keyboard, for a more traditional workflow. Ubuntu's Unity interface was built with similar goals, so this is quite far from a pure GNOME thing.

>convergence, which is incredibly popular among users

I'm gonna say citation needed on that one. In fact, I have seen many rants about desktop software trying to look like touchscreen software.

Many high-end laptops have touchscreens these days. So the resemblance is quite appropriate. I would like to see a "compact", non-touchscreen mode in case no touch hardware is being used but it should be optional, for users who are okay with that level of fine-grained control.

I used GNOME for a long time, but I didn't like the bloat, among other things, such as the "I know better than you" attitude from the devs. At the same time KDE has a tendency to get me into rabbit holes, and then inevitably something breaks at some point that I don't know how to repair because it is rather too complicated of a system. (This is ~2017, not sure if things have changed). For now, I just use bspwm, polybar and a set of GUI applications. While they are less friendly to set up, they are much easier to understand for me.

Things have changed a lot since 2017. In 2017, I wouldn't touch KDE with a barge pole because I had work to do and it would disassemble itself if I looked at it funny.

Now I'm writing this reply from KDE, quite comfortably, and it's quite stable. Comfortable, even. And it doesn't get stupid and die when I plug/unplug monitors and stuff.

Similarly, nowadays I use XFCE but could have been KDE as well, JavaScript everywhere and having killed design tooling for Gtk4, doesn't really make it appealing, and once upon a time I wrote an article for "The C/C++ Users Journal" advocating for Gtkmm.

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