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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

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.

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.