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Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitla

Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Karunamon 5y ago
Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.
- zxzax 5y ago
  >Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about it, but they never talk about the other thousands of patches that do get accepted. Go look through all the other MRs on the gitlab if you don't believe me. Yes sometimes patches get rejected, it happens in any open source project.
  - traverseda 5y ago
    As a programmer Gnome has really damaged their relationship with a lot of developers. For example take a look here: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 >I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. Gnome kind of goes off and does it's own thing without thinking about or cooperating with other open source developers. [Here's](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217) an example where they make a technical decisions that massively inconveniences a bunch of well known open source projects like GLFW and SDL (low-level cross-platform GUI toolkits). Gnome are not good citizens of the open source commons, they do things that make it much harder to create cross-platform/cross-DE apps. GTK used to be fairly vendor neutral, it was the "GIMP ToolKit", not the Gnome toolkit. It worked with any desktop environment you chose to use. Since then they've been making the toolkit much more dependent on Gnome specific features and actively been making the lives of everyone else more difficult. Also there are a lot of controversial decisions that make developers lives annoying, like [refusing to implement classic typeahead](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244) instead relying on their search daemon which is really annoying for a lot of developers, and of course makes running a GTK app in a non-gnome desktop much worse. There are a few outstanding issues that make it annoying for developers to work with file paths under Gnome. So yeah, they've burnt a lot of developer good will and seem intent on continuing that trend. LXDE even switched to QT instead. Really made it so that the linux desktop is less of a stable/reliable thing to develop for. --- https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linu... By refusing to cooperate with other open source projects they're really making it harder for open source developers to get things done and make new apps. Instead of having a common platform we now have gnome and everyone else, and there really are a lot of very obvious examples of that happening over the years.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would stop trying to revive these ancient flamewars without acknowledging the current state of things (not saying this is your fault, but a little diligence always helps). The second two links you're posting are again, the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of patches are accepted, you just happened to stumble across two of the contentious ones that got a big outrage response on reddit. Please go look at the other thousands of issues and MRs against GTK if you don't believe me, it's not just GNOME people filing those. I would say I thoroughly agree with the last article you posted. There has never been a "Linux platform." It was always Motif versus KDE versus GNOME versus Enlightenment versus all the rest. Historically they only cooperated with each other on certain things. If none of them refused to cooperate, we would still probably be using Motif. We can come up with various reasons for why this fragmentation happened but placing all the blame for that on GNOME for going its on way doesn't make many sense when this fragmentation always existed.
      - traverseda 5y ago
        > It's not an illustrative example. What I'm describing is a cultural problem. If you don't think that link is illustrative than you don't understand what it is I'm trying to illustrate.
        zxzax 5y ago
        Again this particular cultural problem was resolved a long time. Ubuntu and XFCE and GNOME have since all aligned on this matter. I see what you are trying to illustrate, maybe it was true 10 years ago, but it's not now. Cultures can change you know.
        jstimpfle 5y ago
        As someone who has to occasionally work on a Gnome desktop, I can confirm that they still haven't fixed type ahead in Nautilus. Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. (I have multiple terminal windows open and switching between them is a pain, it has to be seen to be believed). Two big annoyances, and reading that type-ahead thread quoted above is quite an experience. Being in my 30s, it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. And I strongly disagree with that sentiment "it's ours, go make your own if you don't like it". Point is, I do not want to use their crappy product but I have to, due to political forces that extend from Red Hat to what my employer has installed on that computer in the lab that I have to deploy and test my software on. If I had a choice, I would prefer to install there my simple arcane plain window manager, xterm (fast and crisp), and just enough junk so I can do my work. My Thinkpad X220 with this setup is actually pleasant to use and has required basically 0 maintenance in the last 6 years.
- specialist 5y ago
  > "free in license only" Very interesting. Thanks. Are you familiar with Bryan Cantrill's "right to fork, but not the power" observation? It deeply influenced me. Alas, I didn't find his post-mortem until after I already joined an FOSS effort (kauli.org). Which failed. For so many reasons. Neutering us contributors probably being foremost. Copypasta: OpenSolaris challenges • That certain critical bits had to remain proprietary made forking the operating system technically difﬁcult... • And that virtually all Solaris implementation knowledge lived within Sunʼs walls made it a practical impossibility • The community had the right to fork, but not the power • This led down the primrose path to open source governance: governing boards, elections, constitutions • And because all development on the system realistically required copyright assignment to Sun, OpenSolaris (sadly) remained a Sun puppet • Worse, some among Sunʼs middle management fancied themselves puppeteers... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...
zxzax 5y ago
I don't see why you are saying that has something to do with some attitude from GNOME. There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature.
- Cloudef 5y ago
  >There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature. Can you list some that aren't weston or dead projects?
  - zxzax 5y ago
    I don't follow all the Wayland compositors but Enlightenment doesn't, and Weston matters here. If somebody really wants this to become standard, implementing it in Weston should be priority. Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional, e.g. mir, qtwayland, wlroots.
    - Cloudef 5y ago
      Considering it got xdg prefix and was included in wayland-protocols that should be as standard as it gets. Weston is barebones "reference" compositor. It's not for normal use. Mir is dead. The xdg-decoration is based on KDE's own protocol, it was later refined and pushed to wayland-protocols by wlroots devs. Now kde uses the xdg-decoration too. >Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional Because that's the point of it. If compositor doesn't implement it, application would have to fallback to CSD (however very inconvenient for many apps, or users who suddenly will not see a decoration due to purely _technical reasons_), and even when it's implemented, application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/MEMBERS.md https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b... >application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window. My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD.
akvadrako 5y ago
If that's your best argument against Gnome it seems like they are doing pretty well. Decorations can be done client-side with a library if needed - there is no reason to push that work to the compositor.
- Cloudef 5y ago
  Sure you can do everything with a library, and that's how you end up with library hell, or dependencies that will be hard to get rid of or replaced later, because how big they become or how broken the API was (e.g. fontconfig). But being the only ecosystem where that's needed is pushing some heavy boilerplate on developers. Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? There's plenty of good examples of applications where the decoration being forced on them doesn't make sense. The protocol is also standardized and gnome is the only wayland compositor that refuses to implement it, this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Things like these are why I think I'll never will be using wayland as it just breaks everyone's existing applications and workflows. wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". And I speak as someone who wrote one of the first wayland compositors, and one of the first wayland compositor libraries, which code partially still exists in wlroots.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    >Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? I don't think they would which is why the low level toolkits like SDL are the ones that have to handle it. Unfortunately that's the way it is, libwayland is very barebones and doesn't have a way to draw decorations. >this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Please do not assume bad faith and suggest that someone is being a jerk to you personally because they didn't implement a feature that you were interested in. This is a sure fire way to cause burnout and stress to open source developers. >wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". I have seen wlroots and sway developers reject patches and features that don't go along with their vision too, so I am not sure what distinction you're trying to draw.
dleslie 5y ago
I love how that thread is full of well-intentioned, respectful responses with deep technical knowledge and details; and the Gnome developers just won't budge. When, finally, it becomes clear that the user demands cannot be met and Gnome is woefully inadequate as a modern desktop due to their design decisions, the final post is: > Enough spam for today. Locking the issue. Gnome is dead. It has been taken over by toxic developers.

Gnome developers actively hate their users and non-gnome developers. This issue takes the cake: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

Karunamon 5y ago

Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. To borrow a term or two, it's developed in the bazaar, but run like the cathedral. Maybe an open-air cathedral. Firefox is another project that I'd put under this label. All the important discussions happen in the back rooms, and by the time something universally unpopular hits the bug tracker, it's too late for users or the wider dev community to have any say.

zxzax 5y ago
>Gnome is one of those projects that should be considered "free in license only". While the project is free to hack on as you wish for your own purposes, your chances of being able to influence the development of the main project are minuscule. That's not been my experience at all. The outrage machine on social media tends to spread around the small handful of patches that do get rejected so they can get angry about it, but they never talk about the other thousands of patches that do get accepted. Go look through all the other MRs on the gitlab if you don't believe me. Yes sometimes patches get rejected, it happens in any open source project.
- traverseda 5y ago
  As a programmer Gnome has really damaged their relationship with a lot of developers. For example take a look here: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685#no1 >I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry. Gnome kind of goes off and does it's own thing without thinking about or cooperating with other open source developers. [Here's](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217) an example where they make a technical decisions that massively inconveniences a bunch of well known open source projects like GLFW and SDL (low-level cross-platform GUI toolkits). Gnome are not good citizens of the open source commons, they do things that make it much harder to create cross-platform/cross-DE apps. GTK used to be fairly vendor neutral, it was the "GIMP ToolKit", not the Gnome toolkit. It worked with any desktop environment you chose to use. Since then they've been making the toolkit much more dependent on Gnome specific features and actively been making the lives of everyone else more difficult. Also there are a lot of controversial decisions that make developers lives annoying, like [refusing to implement classic typeahead](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/244) instead relying on their search daemon which is really annoying for a lot of developers, and of course makes running a GTK app in a non-gnome desktop much worse. There are a few outstanding issues that make it annoying for developers to work with file paths under Gnome. So yeah, they've burnt a lot of developer good will and seem intent on continuing that trend. LXDE even switched to QT instead. Really made it so that the linux desktop is less of a stable/reliable thing to develop for. --- https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linux-platform-1/ https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2019/12/04/there-is-no-linu... By refusing to cooperate with other open source projects they're really making it harder for open source developers to get things done and make new apps. Instead of having a common platform we now have gnome and everyone else, and there really are a lot of very obvious examples of that happening over the years.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    Your first link is an issue that was posted over 10 years ago and was long resolved in other areas. It's not an illustrative example. I really wish people would stop trying to revive these ancient flamewars without acknowledging the current state of things (not saying this is your fault, but a little diligence always helps). The second two links you're posting are again, the exception, not the rule. The vast majority of patches are accepted, you just happened to stumble across two of the contentious ones that got a big outrage response on reddit. Please go look at the other thousands of issues and MRs against GTK if you don't believe me, it's not just GNOME people filing those. I would say I thoroughly agree with the last article you posted. There has never been a "Linux platform." It was always Motif versus KDE versus GNOME versus Enlightenment versus all the rest. Historically they only cooperated with each other on certain things. If none of them refused to cooperate, we would still probably be using Motif. We can come up with various reasons for why this fragmentation happened but placing all the blame for that on GNOME for going its on way doesn't make many sense when this fragmentation always existed.
    - traverseda 5y ago
      > It's not an illustrative example. What I'm describing is a cultural problem. If you don't think that link is illustrative than you don't understand what it is I'm trying to illustrate.
      - zxzax 5y ago
        Again this particular cultural problem was resolved a long time. Ubuntu and XFCE and GNOME have since all aligned on this matter. I see what you are trying to illustrate, maybe it was true 10 years ago, but it's not now. Cultures can change you know.
        jstimpfle 5y ago
        As someone who has to occasionally work on a Gnome desktop, I can confirm that they still haven't fixed type ahead in Nautilus. Another point is that their Alt-Tab has a strange auto-grouping behaviour that totally breaks my workflow. (I have multiple terminal windows open and switching between them is a pain, it has to be seen to be believed). Two big annoyances, and reading that type-ahead thread quoted above is quite an experience. Being in my 30s, it's been a long time I've felt such an enormous disgust at the amount of neglect and arrogance that is being displayed there. And I strongly disagree with that sentiment "it's ours, go make your own if you don't like it". Point is, I do not want to use their crappy product but I have to, due to political forces that extend from Red Hat to what my employer has installed on that computer in the lab that I have to deploy and test my software on. If I had a choice, I would prefer to install there my simple arcane plain window manager, xterm (fast and crisp), and just enough junk so I can do my work. My Thinkpad X220 with this setup is actually pleasant to use and has required basically 0 maintenance in the last 6 years.
specialist 5y ago
> "free in license only" Very interesting. Thanks. Are you familiar with Bryan Cantrill's "right to fork, but not the power" observation? It deeply influenced me. Alas, I didn't find his post-mortem until after I already joined an FOSS effort (kauli.org). Which failed. For so many reasons. Neutering us contributors probably being foremost. Copypasta: OpenSolaris challenges • That certain critical bits had to remain proprietary made forking the operating system technically difﬁcult... • And that virtually all Solaris implementation knowledge lived within Sunʼs walls made it a practical impossibility • The community had the right to fork, but not the power • This led down the primrose path to open source governance: governing boards, elections, constitutions • And because all development on the system realistically required copyright assignment to Sun, OpenSolaris (sadly) remained a Sun puppet • Worse, some among Sunʼs middle management fancied themselves puppeteers... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cantrill.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/lisa11/tech/slides/cant...

zxzax 5y ago

I don't see why you are saying that has something to do with some attitude from GNOME. There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature.

Cloudef 5y ago
>There are several Wayland compositors that don't implement that feature. Can you list some that aren't weston or dead projects?
- zxzax 5y ago
  I don't follow all the Wayland compositors but Enlightenment doesn't, and Weston matters here. If somebody really wants this to become standard, implementing it in Weston should be priority. Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional, e.g. mir, qtwayland, wlroots.
  - Cloudef 5y ago
    Considering it got xdg prefix and was included in wayland-protocols that should be as standard as it gets. Weston is barebones "reference" compositor. It's not for normal use. Mir is dead. The xdg-decoration is based on KDE's own protocol, it was later refined and pushed to wayland-protocols by wlroots devs. Now kde uses the xdg-decoration too. >Every compositor library I've looked at also considers this optional Because that's the point of it. If compositor doesn't implement it, application would have to fallback to CSD (however very inconvenient for many apps, or users who suddenly will not see a decoration due to purely _technical reasons_), and even when it's implemented, application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window.
    - zxzax 5y ago
      Inclusion in wayland-protocols means that it had enough support without opposition. It doesn't mean that all the members are interested in implementing the feature. According to the members list, Weston and Mir are still important enough to have a vote: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/blob/main/MEMBERS.md https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/b... >application have to explicitly ask for compositor to decorate the window. My reading of the protocol is that even when the application asks for that, the compositor can still reject it, and the application must always provide a fallback to CSD.

akvadrako 5y ago

If that's your best argument against Gnome it seems like they are doing pretty well. Decorations can be done client-side with a library if needed - there is no reason to push that work to the compositor.

Cloudef 5y ago
Sure you can do everything with a library, and that's how you end up with library hell, or dependencies that will be hard to get rid of or replaced later, because how big they become or how broken the API was (e.g. fontconfig). But being the only ecosystem where that's needed is pushing some heavy boilerplate on developers. Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? There's plenty of good examples of applications where the decoration being forced on them doesn't make sense. The protocol is also standardized and gnome is the only wayland compositor that refuses to implement it, this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Things like these are why I think I'll never will be using wayland as it just breaks everyone's existing applications and workflows. wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". And I speak as someone who wrote one of the first wayland compositors, and one of the first wayland compositor libraries, which code partially still exists in wlroots.
- zxzax 5y ago
  >Why would games, or non-gnome apps care about decoration? I don't think they would which is why the low level toolkits like SDL are the ones that have to handle it. Unfortunately that's the way it is, libwayland is very barebones and doesn't have a way to draw decorations. >this is not the only case where gnome devs just decide to be jerks. Please do not assume bad faith and suggest that someone is being a jerk to you personally because they didn't implement a feature that you were interested in. This is a sure fire way to cause burnout and stress to open source developers. >wlroots and sway developers are doing good work to try to bring wayland and its tools to same level as X11, but then we have these other groups that just actively reject anything that doesn't go along with their "vision". I have seen wlroots and sway developers reject patches and features that don't go along with their vision too, so I am not sure what distinction you're trying to draw.

dleslie 5y ago

I love how that thread is full of well-intentioned, respectful responses with deep technical knowledge and details; and the Gnome developers just won't budge. When, finally, it becomes clear that the user demands cannot be met and Gnome is woefully inadequate as a modern desktop due to their design decisions, the final post is: > Enough spam for today. Locking the issue. Gnome is dead. It has been taken over by toxic developers.