[freedomben]

Your question is valid (and I have the same one) but this is about as uncharitable a thing to say as you can, especially without providing evidence/examples:

> I guess they want to obfuscate as much as possible and dumb things down for users like they have been doing for close to a decade.

The Gnome project has done an enormous amount to push the open source and free desktop forward. The least we can do is not impute sinister motives to them. What do they stand to gain from "obfuscat[ing]" their version number when their code is all open source?

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I strongly disagree: the gnome project and the systemd mess are both severely damaging Linux. The good thing, though, is that KDE Plasma seems to have recovered nicely from the KDE 3->4 mess.

[kaba0]

Yeah I also want to use a system for servers where critical functionality depends on goddamn bash scripts that will regularly break. I also enjoy hunting down bugs in each distro that does things just a tiny bit differently...

Central design is somewhat restrictive but a bazaar style of development for everything will only result in chaos. The kernel itself has become pretty much cathedral at this point, and not having a central init system (which is quite good, I don’t see the blind hate towards it which is usually never justified on technical merit) would have set back whole of linux by many years.

As much as I dislike that Red Hat has a specific role in the linux desktop case, they do sponsor important work.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I don’t necessarily like sysvinit: systemd is just a monster slowly gobbling up all sorts of functionality that’s not directly related to “initializing the system”.

[kaba0]

Initializing a system is a very complex problem. And that systemd gobbles up unrelated things is simply FUD. Systemd is both an init system and a group of many related projects. So it’s a bit like saying plasma is all-encompassing because they have a desktop env and also a pdf viewer file manager etc. They are just under the same name, not mandatory, similarly to many systemd programs.

[freedomben]

I'm not trying to argue, I'm surprised and legitimately interested at your comment and would really like to understand where you're coming from.

Are you a current Linux desktop user? How long have you been? What distros do you use?

If Gnome had just paused or become what MATE is today, would we be better off? If you were suddenly emperor of the Gnome Foundation, what would you direct them to do?

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’ve been using Linux on the desktop since Mandrake 7. I mostly use Debian these days (ever since Ubuntu switched from Gnome 2 to Unity). For a while I just used tiling window managers (xmonad, stumpwm) because I couldn’t make Gnome 3+ work for me. Recently I tried Plasma again and I’ve mostly settled on that being good enough. At this point, I have no confidence in most of the people involved in the Linux desktop initiatives: I’d probably fund MATE and maybe even the Trinity Desktop environment: the best Linux desktop setup I ever had was KDE 3 apps on Gnome 2

[calvinmorrison]

Glad to see another person here aware of Trinity. I'm an active user. KDE3 just nailed the balance of power user + FOSS. Kmail3, Kdiff3, Kpdf, all these tools work wonderfully, intergrate well with Konqueror, the desktop usage is really quite enjoyable

[fiddlerwoaroof]

This page is a good example of everything I dislike about modern Linux desktop developers: https://stopthemingmy.app/

[locke78]

That's not a modern problem and it's not something the developers did. If you have N apps and M themes, you have to test N × M combinations. This is an impossibly large number on any platform that allows users to make their own apps and themes.

It's a lot easier for everyone if the app developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved themes, or if the theme developers decide they're only going to support a small number of approved apps.