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As far as I can tell, Gnome is way LESS customizable than macOS. macOS actually has a ton of customizability, even before you dig into hidden options, and then
by saurik 4y ago
As far as I can tell, Gnome is way LESS customizable than macOS. macOS actually has a ton of customizability, even before you dig into hidden options, and then it also has a ton of hidden options you can modify in configuration files to alter its behavior.
The Gnome people seem to seriously just go around removing options because deleting working code used by actual humans makes them feel more powerful: they think they know better than sometimes decades of prior design or tons of existing projects (including Linux itself at times).
They think of themselves as Apple, sure: but they have neither the true vertical control of everything Apple does to pull off Apple's most "courageous" battles nor the distribution bottlenecks Apple can wield when they are being their most evil.
- QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y ago>The Gnome people seem to seriously just go around removing options because deleting working code used by actual humans makes them feel more powerful They do it because open source projects don't have infinite resources to maintain infinite options forever. You can complain about it all you want, but 25 years of history shows that just because something was being used by humans doesn't mean that volunteers are going to magically show up to maintain that option for eternity. I'm sure if you've been working in this field for a while then you've deleted some unfortunate code in your day job and had to convince users to do things a better way. So why single out GNOME for this?
- quanticle 4y agoAnd yet, KDE, XFCE, even Gnome forks like MATE and Cinnamon manage to handle having loads more customization options than Gnome, despite having equivalent or inferior time and financial resources. I have very little patience for the, "It's open source and maintained by volunteers," argument when other projects which are equally open source and maintained by fewer volunteers somehow manage to deliver more functionality.
- QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y agoAll of those alternatives are notorious for having a release schedule slower than molasses, or for having outdated tech, or for having a lot of bugs. That's the price you pay, nothing is for free in this world. You mentioned they had more functionality in some ways but you neglected to mention why that is. Also it's funny that you think GNOME has any spare time or financial resources. Every GNOME developer I've ever talked to has been overloaded with low-paying or non-paying work, same as any open source developer. The rest of your comment is dangerously close to toxic entitlement. You don't get to say you have no patience. Or rather, you can say it, but it's completely meaningless for you to do so unless you were trying to antagonize some volunteers. Avoid that line of thinking. These are all volunteers who can spend their time as they want.
- quanticle 4y agoI don't know about bugs. I haven't really noticed very many bugs in KDE, XFCE or MATE. Those pieces of software seem to be no buggier than Gnome. And I'm not sure why "modern tech" or a rapid release schedule is a good thing in and of itself. Modern tech and rapid releases are good only when they result in good things. Otherwise they're just churn. Change for the sake of change. Maybe if Gnome didn't have so much "modern tech", (like DBus, for example) the Gnome devs wouldn't be so overworked.
- QUrprUd1nCeicw 4y agoThe change may be in areas you don't see. Refactoring is something visible only to developers but it has to be done continuously to be able to pay down tech debt. FYI dbus is also used by KDE, XFCE and MATE. Please avoid making more criticisms like this. Volunteers really aren't going to listen to you if you can't even get the basic facts right.
- quanticle 4y agoWell, it's not as if the Gnome devs are listening to me as it is, so I don't really see the difference.