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It definitely seems like Gnome has developed a toxic anti-user culture lately. Calling wiki contributors "clowns" and Gnome users "the peanut gallery" is exactl

It definitely seems like Gnome has developed a toxic anti-user culture lately. Calling wiki contributors "clowns" and Gnome users "the peanut gallery" is exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to being surrounded by nothing but sycophants. And that inevitably leads to ridiculous bugs and design failures, like not being able to set a desktop background color, or planning to remove support for X11, or not having preview thumbnails in a file picker.

smoldesu 4y ago
It makes me embarrassed to use Linux. People ask about simple features like supporting Nvidia hardware or letting us move the dock to the left or right, and I have to explain to them that the reason those features don't exist is because of "developer politics". I can't even recommend desktop Linux anymore knowing that this is the way the desktop is headed. If GNOME's desktop metaphor is just going to be whittled down to iPadOS-tier functionality, they shouldn't even bother calling themselves a desktop environment. Hell, they should have just separated from the Linux kernel when they decided to implement Wayland and saved everyone else the trouble of cleaning up their mess. Maybe that's a harsh way of looking at things, but it's not like they see the scenario as benevolent either.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > It makes me embarrassed to use Linux. All of Linux? Why? There's a bunch of competing desktop environments you can use instead.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I do use other desktop environments, and making them feel like home feels futile when a significant portion of development effort is focused on building Titanic-like projects such as Wayland or Flatpak. That's mostly the same reason that I can't recommend it to other people, there's no way to tell everyday people all this stuff with a straight face. The year of the Linux Desktop feels like it's been postponed indefinitely while we shave a bunch of redundant yaks. GNOME wants everyone to live in a world where they have two package managers and download multiple gigabytes of redundant runtime dependencies that shouldn't need to exist in the first place. Our overall community focus should be towards delivering robust software that works with live USBs, natively-packaging and Flatpak. I fear that we're heading down a pretty horrible path where people will build fragile software that links against even more esoteric runtime requirements, creating software that's completely unusable unless it's running in digital life support (aka, Flatpak). I despise Windows, but even downloading 10x 100mb C++ redistributables is better than having 5x 1.5-2gb GNOME runtimes. Nobody deserves to live in a world where that's how their software is delivered, it's a travesty. Even Apple doesn't hate their users enough to do this, not on MacOS and not on iOS. They had the dignity to make actually stable APIs that software could target, so they don't have to live in this virtualized hellscape that we've built for ourselves. Everything GNOME tacks on to the desktop Linux experience makes it increasingly feel like that 4chan image macro of the GNU/car (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDEORUBWAAENKFC.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDEORUBWAAENKFC.jpg). At least, that's how it feels when you have to explain to someone that screenshare isn't working right now because you're "logged in to the wrong desktop session"...
    - hulitu 4y ago
      > I despise Windows, but even downloading 10x 100mb C++ redistributables is better than having 5x 1.5-2gb GNOME runtimes. There is fvwm, vtwm even lxde, you know.
      - doubled112 4y ago
        Xfce is a pretty complete desktop experience, assuming you think Windows 7 was about where it peaked. You don't need to use the defaults.
        torstenvl 4y ago
        Xfce relies on GTK, so it would seem subject to the whims of the Gnome team in a lot of ways. Do you know of any plans to wrest control of GTK away or fork it?
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I don't think XFCE intends to switch to GTK4, and if they do then it will probably be towards the end of the update cycle.
      - smoldesu 4y ago
        That's not the problem. The problem is that any Flatpak I download also comes with several gigabytes of GNOME runtime dependencies, which is absurd and shouldn't be treated as "the new normal" of software distribution. Running to alternative DEs doesn't solve the problem.
        Crysstalis 4y ago
        That was already the normal long before flatpak. Installing the same packages with your distro package manager will also install the same several gigabytes. The number you see in flatpak might be an illusion though, the real amount of space taken up on disk is less: https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usage-and-deduplication/ https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usag... So flatpak may actually be a solution to the problem that you don't realize. It can only cause a big issue if you have a lot of old software that never updates the runtime.

smoldesu 4y ago

It makes me embarrassed to use Linux. People ask about simple features like supporting Nvidia hardware or letting us move the dock to the left or right, and I have to explain to them that the reason those features don't exist is because of "developer politics". I can't even recommend desktop Linux anymore knowing that this is the way the desktop is headed. If GNOME's desktop metaphor is just going to be whittled down to iPadOS-tier functionality, they shouldn't even bother calling themselves a desktop environment. Hell, they should have just separated from the Linux kernel when they decided to implement Wayland and saved everyone else the trouble of cleaning up their mess. Maybe that's a harsh way of looking at things, but it's not like they see the scenario as benevolent either.

josephcsible 4y ago
> It makes me embarrassed to use Linux. All of Linux? Why? There's a bunch of competing desktop environments you can use instead.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I do use other desktop environments, and making them feel like home feels futile when a significant portion of development effort is focused on building Titanic-like projects such as Wayland or Flatpak. That's mostly the same reason that I can't recommend it to other people, there's no way to tell everyday people all this stuff with a straight face. The year of the Linux Desktop feels like it's been postponed indefinitely while we shave a bunch of redundant yaks. GNOME wants everyone to live in a world where they have two package managers and download multiple gigabytes of redundant runtime dependencies that shouldn't need to exist in the first place. Our overall community focus should be towards delivering robust software that works with live USBs, natively-packaging and Flatpak. I fear that we're heading down a pretty horrible path where people will build fragile software that links against even more esoteric runtime requirements, creating software that's completely unusable unless it's running in digital life support (aka, Flatpak). I despise Windows, but even downloading 10x 100mb C++ redistributables is better than having 5x 1.5-2gb GNOME runtimes. Nobody deserves to live in a world where that's how their software is delivered, it's a travesty. Even Apple doesn't hate their users enough to do this, not on MacOS and not on iOS. They had the dignity to make actually stable APIs that software could target, so they don't have to live in this virtualized hellscape that we've built for ourselves. Everything GNOME tacks on to the desktop Linux experience makes it increasingly feel like that 4chan image macro of the GNU/car (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDEORUBWAAENKFC.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CDEORUBWAAENKFC.jpg). At least, that's how it feels when you have to explain to someone that screenshare isn't working right now because you're "logged in to the wrong desktop session"...
  - hulitu 4y ago
    > I despise Windows, but even downloading 10x 100mb C++ redistributables is better than having 5x 1.5-2gb GNOME runtimes. There is fvwm, vtwm even lxde, you know.
    - doubled112 4y ago
      Xfce is a pretty complete desktop experience, assuming you think Windows 7 was about where it peaked. You don't need to use the defaults.
      - torstenvl 4y ago
        Xfce relies on GTK, so it would seem subject to the whims of the Gnome team in a lot of ways. Do you know of any plans to wrest control of GTK away or fork it?
        smoldesu 4y ago
        I don't think XFCE intends to switch to GTK4, and if they do then it will probably be towards the end of the update cycle.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      That's not the problem. The problem is that any Flatpak I download also comes with several gigabytes of GNOME runtime dependencies, which is absurd and shouldn't be treated as "the new normal" of software distribution. Running to alternative DEs doesn't solve the problem.
      - Crysstalis 4y ago
        That was already the normal long before flatpak. Installing the same packages with your distro package manager will also install the same several gigabytes. The number you see in flatpak might be an illusion though, the real amount of space taken up on disk is less: https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usage-and-deduplication/ https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2021/11/24/on-flatpak-disk-usag... So flatpak may actually be a solution to the problem that you don't realize. It can only cause a big issue if you have a lot of old software that never updates the runtime.