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Comment by eptcyka | Hacker News Reader

Feature parity matters, especially if adoption is a goal. I'm not sure Gnome cares about adoption, but since they're on the back foot, and if they're wanting to increase adoption, it'd be in their best interests to have feature parity so that supporting Gnome does not require extra code to support entirely different UX paradigms.

I personally love Linux, love Gnome, and, when I'm not paid, I only use these platforms. However, it is incredibly difficult to justify spending time on workarounds, and it is emotionally painful to see the Gnome team dig in their heels. I can't blame them for wanting to do things the way they see fit, they are a volunteer organization after all, but seeing them be actively averse to adoption is difficult.

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Simplicity is feature on its own, you can't please everyone and you have other choices. Considering feature parity - I used small window managers in the past: Fvwm, Fluxbox, Pekwm... what made me eventually stick with Gnome was that It made things like Wifi, printing, mounting disk... seamless - on par with Windows. That is a lot more important for most users than customization, which can be overwhelming in environment like KDE (I haven't used it in years).

I agree, simplicity is cool. That is why I love to support platforms that are simple to support. Say, if you have a piece of software that has it’s main entrypoint be a status icon, it suddenly becomes incredibly difficult to support gnome, since different distros will ship with different versions of gnome, which support different versions of status icon plugins, which work differently and sometimes they dont even have the plugins in the repo. Suddenly a feature that just works turns into a 3 page ordeal in the user manual do deduce what plugin must they install where to make our app work.

If it is an ordeal, maybe you are doing something wrong?

Maybe your app sole entry point should not be a systray icon, especially, since users might not have systray at all (intentionally).

You will have similar issue with Android, and how it handles (persistent) notifications, background tasks and activities in foreground.

If it works everywhere except Gnome, requiring a custom solution on Gnome alone, it's definitely Gnome's fault. Gnome people have this weird ego thing where they expect the world to conform to them, even developers who are only including Linux support as a courteous afterthought to users. Anything Gnome does in a unique way adds friction for these developers, to the detriment of all Linux users.

> actively averse to adoption

The Linux community has the weirdest gatekeeping. "We're not going to let you do that because it reminds us of proprietary software."

When the Start menu is nothing but advertisements and user data is forcibly uploaded to the cloud, Windows users will look up and shout "save us!" and the Linux community will look down and whisper "no".

Well, when windows users demand "windows, but gratis and without the annoyances", linux isn't it. You have to do some minor adjustment; just like you had to do with iPhone. It doesn't have task panel by default either.

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