[stretchcat]

I believe the 'graying of GNOME' discussed here a few weeks ago is evidence that fewer and fewer people like GNOME each year. New developers would naturally be drawn from the ranks of enthusiastic users. (Why would a developer volunteer their labor for software they don't use and care about?) The graying of GNOME shows that the pool of enthusiastic users has been shrinking since GNOME 3. That's about when GNOME tipped over the edge and started losing developers faster than it gained new ones. The missing new developers would be new developers, not old timers. If it were only old timers who feel alienated, I wouldn't expect GNOME to have trouble recruiting new developers.

[Chyzwar]

Gnome 3 is default for most popular distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Debian etc) If anything gnome is getting more popular thanks to Ubuntu switching.

There fewer people contributing because programming in C is no longer fun or hip. It is not Gnome problem but the whole Linux ecosystem. Gnome is slowly adopting rust but the core framework is still C. There is plenty of active forks of Gnome2 people can contribute there.