You know what's a nice feature? Capitalization. Removing it did not make this essay better.
In Keyboard 2.1, the caps lock key was removed as you can use the shift key. The Windows key was surplus to requirements, there's a perfectly good alt key.
Fast forward to Keyboard 3.0. There is no longer a control key (hold down alt for 2 seconds!), numlock is gone (the top row has numbers), cursor keys gone (you can use a mouse to move around).
In Keyboard 3.1 they removed the shift key as stylistically capitals aren't necessary.
in keyboard 3.2 they removed the comma and semicolon. these really aren't necessary as you don't need to pause when reading.
in keyboard 33 there is no need for single quotes because you should not use contractions. that just causes confusion and besides the amount of debates and derision around it were getting ridiculous. justification: world peace and an end to grammar nazis.
in keyboard 35 they are seriously considering removing the enter key the exclamation mark and any characters that require umlauts. this will help with a cleaner text rendering codebase.
I wouldn't be so quick to attribute this to arrogance or nonconformity. I noted that the brevity of individual paragraphs is similar to the way I had been writing. Mixed with the font, which does make it easier to catch the beginnings of sentences, it's entirely possible that he's making exactly the same mistake I made in exactly the way I made it—such that he hasn't yet noticed it does have an impact on reading speed.
Edit: Some of the other comments take a similar view, so I do want to point out that I may lack context. I don't use GNOME and I'm not particularly well-informed on the subject. My comment refers only to the lack of capitals and an anecdote about my own experience with avoiding capitals.
Can we please talk about what he says?
Is the topic in any way related to good blog design?
There are quite a few blogs without capitalization and if it is really so important to you feel free to write about it.
IMHO All those comments on design/grammar/font/... in every discussion on HN are mere distractions and add no value.
But speaking of substance, there wasn't really much there. He talked about users like they were an inconvenience and were unreasonable, and that they had some odd psychological issue that needed correcting. Yet he never addressed the genuinely useful features that were removed, or the feeling by users that if they used features in Gnome they might one day lose them, even if the need them.
The author's lack of capitalization is not important enough to me to write an article about it and post it to HN, but it was important enough to me to point it out in a comment on the forum page discussing the article.
It seems to me to exemplify exactly what is wrong with the author's approach to features... and by extension, with the GNOME development team's approach to the same.
This is terrible, terrible design philosophy and no one should ever listen to it. The end.
On the same note, I don't understand why in some countries signs on highways use all-capital letters. Words written that way are actually harder and slower to read [1] than ones written with proper capitalization.
Because of that all of the old signs were in all-caps. New signs with proper capitalization look odd.
Now if people would start tech blogging in rhyme or iambic pentameter, that might be awesome.
Then I read the whole thing and I now wish I had stopped after two sentences like so many others.