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Comment by asdlfkjasdlfjkh | Hacker News Reader

gnome is not closer to macOS. sadly gnome is coopted into making bad decisions under the guise of copying macOS.

As soon as the "designers" got more funding than the coding contributors, the whole gnome org went down the drain. They often trhow away complete systems and replace them with something that are unusable "to drive coding contributors". They are completely disconnected from the community. Ubuntu tries to work around all that (by making their own shell, settings apps, etc) so it is not too obvious, but if you use debian, you probably spend several months without basic desktop funcionality every time they pushed something. Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics.

So, no gnome is not closer to macOS. but gnome is broken by using copying macOS as an excuse by the designer teams.

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Oooh, coopted? That makes sense. I've always felt like Gnome's direction is exactly the pathetic outcome that would occur when 20 devs in a trenchcoat try to act like Steve Jobs, but I never dug into the specifics.

yeah. gnome become this mess exactly by the time most laptops OEM were jumping in on the netbook fad... and some of them started to ship laptops boasting linux in the marketing campaign, because, well, they needed something that ran well on low powered 2003 devices with little batteries. most used ubuntu, which was ubuntu the company's goal at the time btw.

then gnome was coopted and took a nosedive and OEM went back to using microsoft for everything. and ubuntu had to write their own shell to survive because gnome tought it would be smart to ship a broken 2.x version with no settings app

GNOME started down their current path through a combination of Easel (started by the people who designed the Macintosh) designing nautilus and icon sets and trying to get the desktop to be more cohesive and Sun pushing hard on accessibility which also meant making things clear and consistent. Those influences were boiled down into the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines which all apps are supposed to follow.

The easiest way to make things clear and consistent is to have less things, the idea is you have a clean base then figure out how to add the things people are still wanting the most. If you had whole development teams working on these things then that would work (see macOS) but without that people implement the simplest parts and avoid the rest due to it not being fun, not having an agreed design for them, the design being too contentious, or just a lack of time.

> Gnome is the inspiration for the systemD politics.

Could you clarify what you mean by this?

Not parent , GNOME is not a community project, there seems to be one or a few big ego persons that do not even use GNOME and that push a "vision".

Like they wanted CSD and they decreed that everyone, even non-GNOME apps like old games that nobody works on should implement CSD because they are not going to be backwards compatible.

Same with notifications, old apps, third party apps should implement the GNOME way, they do not care for supporting non-GNOME stuff.

But more power for them, they self select a niche user, a "GNOME user" that either is compatible with the GNOME way or they will contort themselves into it.

Their relentless push of design choices that I find intolerable is what eventually drove me to ditch Gtk in favor of Qt for my personal projects, and leave Xfce in favor of Plasma on my desktop. What a relief it has been. It's important to me that my UI be something I actually want to use.

Same here. GNOME is a powerful force driving people away from Gtk and towards Qt.

I always preferred Qt over GTK just from quality POV, if you are not a C++ hater then Qt is perfect for cross platform professional looking apps.

And about this designers forcing their shit on users, I hit lately a issue with GTK apps where the windows of the app and popups are hard coded and you can't resize them. Because of my bad eyes I use a giant font size and this apps are unusable (I need to research if is possible to trick this windows at runtiem that they are allowed to resize)

Gnome introduced a hard-dependency on systemd (and later denied it / claimed it had been an accident) in what looked very much like a deliberate move to force distros to ship systemd.

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