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Comment by 127361 | Hacker News Reader

I've managed to excise D-Bus and other toxic freedesktop.org (Red Hat / GNOME) garbage from my Debian system. And it's still a fully usable desktop environment. Nearly everything works.

The removal process is quite spectacular, you can see apt delete hundreds of interrelated dependencies, one after another. So satisfying to see it all go.

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But why?

I hate the Freedesktop.org organization and their design philosophy. Also their pro-censorship political stance, they were among the first to adopt the polarizing "contributor covenant" code of conduct and other Woke ideas, such as renaming all the git master branches to main. [1][2][3] And I like having a minimal system that's practical and usable.

1. https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/26257

2. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/NetworkManager/NetworkManager...

3. https://www.inclusivenaming.org/word-lists/ (this one is comical, it is a real project sponsored by the Linux Foundation, it is not satire)

4. https://getwoke.tech/

Also what I deem "cargo-cult enshittification" of the Linux desktop, where open-source blindly copies large corporations in enshittifying their platforms. This is particularly notable with UI design, with GNOME being the worst offender.

Large corporations cater to the masses, so they follow these fashionable dumbing down trends in order to satisfy marketing/branding goals and maximize revenue. If it looks "trendy" then it will generate more sales, revenue, etc. And open source software ends up copying it unthinkingly.

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