pojntfx also already pointed to some great resources to understand their reasoning.
Also, it's a FOSS project. Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved. Just try and be kind when you make suggestions. Or, even better, contribute yourself:
https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/
> Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved.
Unfortunately that's not how the Gnome project has been run. Even back in Gnome 2.x times. There's a famous very funny jwz blog post about this (that I won't link because of some well known reasons).
I'm afraid I'm the kind of naive person that believes in the best intention of people and have not read that blog post. So I will have to be provided with a link to better understand and judge for myself.
If you link to that particular blog from HackerNews, he checks the referer and serves you up a nasty message instead of the blog post. So, instead of providing a direct link, search for JWZ, GNOME and CADT.
Patches are available for type-ahead, in particular the gtk-mushrooms fork. If open source is about "scratching your own itch" gnome is making it really hard for developers to do that. There was discussion of burying that features somewhere deep in the gnome registry, all kinds of options, but it's clear that pull requests are not welcome, even if the option is buried deep in some config file somewhere and is only accessible to power users.
That seems to be the case a lot of the time when outsiders try to solve their own problems with a pull request. There's just no room for compromise or for solving your own problems.
I read through most of the thread and I am very confused by the negative reactions. What was tone deaf in the response!? (I do understand my question is tone deaf by associativity, but I sincerely do not get it)
That's fine, and I get that gnome is a platform. The problem is that they're forcing their platform's choices on every GTK-3 app, which makes it really annoying for people who use GTK (not gnome) apps but which don't like the Gnome platform.
The problem is that GTK was used as a generic toolkit, and they've added a bunch of weird customization's to make it work better with their platform. That fucked over a lot of people who used that toolkit on non-Gnome platforms, and for non-Gnome uses.
Most people using GTK didn't sign up to be part of the gnome platform. Firefox isn't a gnome app. They (and everyone else) assumed it was being developed as a generic and cross-platform gui toolkit. Bit of a bait and switch there.
The tight integration between gnome (the platform) and GTK (the cross-platform GUI toolkit) seems an awful lot like a betrayal, like taking something that was for everyone and well.. taking it. Making it all about themselves, and burning the commons so other people can't use it. Or at least like a heavy-handed attempt to force people to write Gnome apps instead of GTK apps.
It seems that "professional designer" means a person who makes changes that are generally bad. Once the UI is perfected, it must continue to change (and thereby become non-perfect) because how else would customers know that they got a new product?
If the professional designer in question really is expected to do something different, such as make usable software, then a review of job performance is sorely needed.
I was only referring to the fact that Gnome developers get such a bad rap for being unfriendly, as the GGP stated.
The link was an interesting read eitherway and I can absolutely understand where the frustration comes from. The users' comments just flew over the developers' heads. Nonetheless it looks more like a breakdown in communication than willfully ignoring with deceitful intentions on the part of the developers in my opinion.
There are a lot of issues like that. After a certain point a pattern emerges. I don't have time to find a big list of historical issues. Here are some quick links though.
I'm sorry I can't find the link but I remember reading a discussion on a freedesktop gitlab issue tracker in which some developers of other wayland desktops wanted to standarize a wayland protocol extension that everyone but Gnome already used. A Gnome dev showed up and told everyone this is not needed because the problem at hand is solved with dbus in Gnome. Everyone told him that the extension is already widely adopted (not to mention dbus was Linux only at the time and solving this with dbus would cut off any BSD users from that feature). The response was basically 'the only adoption that matters is Gnome adoption and Gnome did not adopt this, so it's irrelevant'.
The problem with creating additional wayland-only solutions is that they tend to need good, strong implementations in the toolkits first for it to really make sense over a dbus implementation that already exists. (The wayland api is not particularly friendly for application programmers) The person advocating for the protocol is usually the one who has to implement that.
Also, it's a FOSS project. Which means you can make your voice heard and get involved. Just try and be kind when you make suggestions. Or, even better, contribute yourself: https://www.gnome.org/get-involved/