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I have no idea why it has become so common on here to dog on GNOME for being "user-hostile" because they targeted a different kind of user than the average HN e

I have no idea why it has become so common on here to dog on GNOME for being "user-hostile" because they targeted a different kind of user than the average HN engineer/startup person. You can use one of the "GNOME 2 revival" type desktop environments if that's your fancy.

Macha 6y ago
Because the user they were hostile to were the users that had been until then the majority of Gnome's users. It may be a good business move to ditch your existing userbase in favour of a potential larger one but the userbase you've moved on from have no obligation to be happy about that
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I don't expect the community to be happy, I would say I more expect a community of engineers to be realistic. The ship has unfortunately sailed long ago and it's not coming back.
Miraste 6y ago
That's their justification, but put a non-technical user in front of a gnome system and you will find nothing but confusion. It doesn't operate like any other OS GUI, nor is it intuitive or discoverable, nor does it have feature parity. They must be designing gnome for someone, but I don't know who.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I don't know, last time I tried stock Ubuntu I found it to be pretty similar to current macOS with the launchpad and mission control. In any case, the answer to those problems you're describing would be more and more breaking changes, not less.
  - type0 6y ago
    Ubuntu ships with a patched version of GNOME, default experience is completely different.
type0 6y ago
> because they targeted a different kind of user than the average HN engineer/startup person. It is not, sometimes GNOME devs even say outright that the project is for their peers and those who share their vision. They do their testing on other GNOME aficionados. In the days of Unity, Canonical did some of their user testing on regular people, those days are long gone.
michaelmrose 6y ago
They produce bad software with a bad interface based on a bad theory of how people use things and when people critique their bad software they give bad reasons, argued badly, with a bad attitude and in bad faith to boot. It truly needs its own fractal of bad design essay save it would have to a farce in 7 parts. To say that they targeted a different kind of user is insufficiently descriptive. 3.0 was the beginning of ticking off the users they actually had in order to target users they wish they could get with a total package that such users could never encounter in a million years because joe average wasn't installing Linux in 2011 regardless of how simple you made the interface. 9 years later the Linux user base is virtually unchanged and gnome 3 is no longer horrifying as 9 years of labor have rendered it modestly acceptable after the worst ideas were put off or mitigated. If you spent 300k building a hovel where the roof fell in quarterly and you after much consternation and a decade of work figured out how to keep the roof mostly in place most of the time I would pretty much expect such a project to be the go to horror story among home builders in the neighborhood. This isn't meanness its just honesty.

Macha 6y ago

Because the user they were hostile to were the users that had been until then the majority of Gnome's users. It may be a good business move to ditch your existing userbase in favour of a potential larger one but the userbase you've moved on from have no obligation to be happy about that

cycloptic 6y ago
I don't expect the community to be happy, I would say I more expect a community of engineers to be realistic. The ship has unfortunately sailed long ago and it's not coming back.

Miraste 6y ago

That's their justification, but put a non-technical user in front of a gnome system and you will find nothing but confusion. It doesn't operate like any other OS GUI, nor is it intuitive or discoverable, nor does it have feature parity. They must be designing gnome for someone, but I don't know who.

cycloptic 6y ago
I don't know, last time I tried stock Ubuntu I found it to be pretty similar to current macOS with the launchpad and mission control. In any case, the answer to those problems you're describing would be more and more breaking changes, not less.
- type0 6y ago
  Ubuntu ships with a patched version of GNOME, default experience is completely different.

type0 6y ago

> because they targeted a different kind of user than the average HN engineer/startup person. It is not, sometimes GNOME devs even say outright that the project is for their peers and those who share their vision. They do their testing on other GNOME aficionados. In the days of Unity, Canonical did some of their user testing on regular people, those days are long gone.

michaelmrose 6y ago

They produce bad software with a bad interface based on a bad theory of how people use things and when people critique their bad software they give bad reasons, argued badly, with a bad attitude and in bad faith to boot. It truly needs its own fractal of bad design essay save it would have to a farce in 7 parts. To say that they targeted a different kind of user is insufficiently descriptive. 3.0 was the beginning of ticking off the users they actually had in order to target users they wish they could get with a total package that such users could never encounter in a million years because joe average wasn't installing Linux in 2011 regardless of how simple you made the interface. 9 years later the Linux user base is virtually unchanged and gnome 3 is no longer horrifying as 9 years of labor have rendered it modestly acceptable after the worst ideas were put off or mitigated. If you spent 300k building a hovel where the roof fell in quarterly and you after much consternation and a decade of work figured out how to keep the roof mostly in place most of the time I would pretty much expect such a project to be the go to horror story among home builders in the neighborhood. This isn't meanness its just honesty.