[ravenstine]

How long have you been using Gnome for? I'd been a while for me, but back when I was using Linux it seemed like Nautilus was frequently dropping features for things I didn't care about.

https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/gnom...

Gnome may be different now, but they were part of a pattern in the GNU/Linux community that ultimately caused me to leave it. I knew I couldn't rely on either Gnome or distros themselves because they seemed to have no problem changing things out from underneath you, and more often than not it seemed like those things were done as a form of self promotion.

This wasn't a one off thing. This was the Linux world for a good number of years, in my experience. Anyone who used Ubuntu or Debian from 2008 to around 2013 might remember the forks that happened because DEs up and decided that they knew better than their own users.

Not specifically about Gnome, but I brought up FFmpeg (or rather libav) as another example of the bullshit of Linux. Some devs decided that they didn't like the architecture of FFmpeg and wanted it to be organized to their liking, so they forked it into Libav/avconv, which was inferior to FFmpeg but the people who run the Debian repositories were convinced that Libav was the future so they replaced FFmpeg with an alias to avconv that had a totally misleading deprecation message that was basically a lie.

So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Gnome one day decided to get rid of thumbnails and not provide an option to turn them back on. Yes, I am bitter from the latter years of my Linux usage. Somehow macOS can update and upgrade its versions without causing me to question whether aspects of the UI I rely upon will spontaneously disappear or gaslight me into thinking I shouldn't be using those things anymore.

[grumpyprole]

I've been using i3 up until recently. I'm trying out Gnome because it works out-of-the-box and e.g. Sway does not. Yes the software churn is rather worrying. I hope they learn from the mistakes.

[ravenstine]

The thing that irks me more than churn is not providing pathways forward. It's like, if you're going to get rid of bookmarks, then either give me an add-on that brings them back or give me time to adjust to not having bookmarks. Gnome used to be one of the worst at communicating their intentions. You never knew what you were going to get if you were going to upgrade Gnome. But I come from the philosophy of frontend JavaScript development where everything is announced, has a deprecation warnings, features extracted into libraries, and so forth. The people who work on GNU/Linux related development come off as very arrogant in their decision making, even if they aren't intending to be arrogant.

Just so people are aware, I understand that things could have changed in the last 9 years. However, those kind of user experiences can permanently ruin the reputation of OSS projects.

[zxzax]

You are perceiving arrogance where there is none. These are volunteer-driven projects, for better or worse the deal has always been "take it or leave it," or fork it if that's what you prefer. If there is something you want extracted into a library, just go and extract it and make the library. Of course if you choose to abandon it entirely then it's going to be a total crapshoot if it improves the way you want it to.

[AstralStorm]

This attitude results in the only possible answer being "leave it". Nobody has time to fix it in any nontrivial way who isn't being paid to do it, and if you're being paid, it's not volunteer work and you're supposed to pull your weight.

RedHat is not a volunteer project and it ate half of Linux. Volunteer projects in fact tend to be the more stable and polished parts of it.

[zxzax]

I'm not sure what you mean, the paid people are still volunteering. They don't really have to spend company time upstreaming anything, they could technically keep all their patches in a private fork, but the company allows them to upstream things because it makes the most sense. You also don't have to leave it, you can also make a private fork too, and work on it slowly, if it makes the most sense to you.

These complaints about Red Hat are what make no sense to me, if you believe they are "eating Linux" for the worse then I would advise you to produce a version of Linux with all of the Red Hat commits removed, and see for yourself if it's more stable and polished. It may not be, because you would likely also be removing a lot of the bug fixes they upstream.