[md8z]

I don't really know the details of this but for some things it is non-trivial to ship even small changes on other platforms, even those will have to go through full dev-test cycles which takes time and money. About removing things, I don't know, I had a car once that had some really nice cupholders. Really deep and exactly the right size, exactly at the right height for the arm. My current car doesn't have them and I can't find any cars that have that were quite as good as that. They just stopped making them. If that's not "vision" then what is it? I mean somebody has to make the decision of how to make the new cars. There is also the question of, do I value cupholders over everything else in the car? Would I buy a car with terrible steering if it meant the good cupholders? If I could get the good cupholders in any car would I pay an extra $3000 or however much the dealership charges? I think probably not but it really depends. So there's many factors at play here.

Edit: Or say maybe I am a startup founder and I design and build my own car exactly how I want and turn it into a company. It's perfect for me but then someday I get bored of driving my car and I retire. Then I hire someone else to design the cars and pass responsibility on to them and they change some stuff. Well, now the cars are different and everyone pretty much has to accept it because the original designer is gone, and as much as people liked the old one, nobody else can really copy them exactly because it was really their personal vision that made it what it was.

For Wayland, I think all of that is happening already? There is somebody making an implementation in Rust. They did try to make a shared implementation (Weston) but it turned out that people didn't actually want that, they preferred to write their own implementations.

[simion314]

The car examples don't make sense.

It is software, in Chrome case is just a simple popup, the code is there and it only is visible for OSX because the platform forced the vision guy's hand. The bullshit excuses that is hard to code and test and maintain do not work here.

Also excuses do not work even if valid if you destroy your users workflow, you don't remove system tray, server side decorations and just tell your users to find replacement applications because the ones they use do not conform to the GNOME vision.

Again, if is not a toy you target some users, is your duty to listen to this users and not to impose your vision on them, I am upset when there is no actual testing/research involving actual users and real world work, say when you test your app with "hello world" simple workflows that fail in real world with real users, or you make your app look cool on your expensive screen but looks like shit on real users hardware.

But you are right, GNOME has decided they don't want a part of the users and they are cultivating the perfect GNOME type user, a user that adapts to the software and not the reverse.

[md8z]

I don't know what you mean bullshit excuse. Everything has a cost to test and maintain. It doesn't help to say that it's bullshit if nobody has done a real cost analysis. Remember that this is something that has to be maintained for years. If some bugs occur in it later and it has to be removed again then the users will be upset again so it's not really useful for us to say just ship it and don't test, that's what we want to avoid. Yes, you and I could guess what it costs but that doesn't carry as much weight as somebody who actually works on it full time doing their cost analysis.

I get your frustration about your workflow but I'm still upset about my cupholders :) For the system tray and server side decorations, there are technical reasons for those to have gotten removed. Their existence may enable some workflows but it also breaks some other workflows so that's not an area where everyone can win. And if you want to bring them back then I can guarantee you that's not just a matter of flipping a switch, there is real work that needs to be done there and it won't happen if nobody is willing to pay the cost. It doesn't really make sense to blame volunteers for not being able to afford that either when this is something that's so expensive that the bigger contributors like Red Hat don't even want to pay for it.

[simion314]

Sure, but think about it like this:

Your DE has 10 features and 10 users, we decide we remove any feature that is only used by 1 or 0 users. We look around and find that 1 feature F1 is used only by user U1 , we remove F1 and we push user U1 to go away.

2 feature F2 was used by 2 users but now that U1 left , F2 is used only by 1 user, so we remove F2 and kck out the user U2 , we left with 8 users now from 10 and 8 feature

3 feature F3 was used by 3 users including U1 and U2 , but since we kicked this 2 users ut only U2 left using it , so now we remove F3 , kick out user U3 (U3 regrets now that he was a dick to U2 and U2 accusing them of beeing snowflackes and using it wrong)

4 ... repeat until you reamin with 2 users, the designer and the developer (the dev uses other DE on his personal machine anyway)

My second point, GNOME team should just pause and reflect at Apple, see that vision without a connection with users is wrong, Apple has sales numbers and other ways to detect when their big ego vision dude has messed up but GNOME needs to reflect (not change, not implement features just reflect), are we going to far? how do we know when our vison dude has gone too far since we don't have sales number and shareholders keeping the bullshit in check?

There is a chance that GNOME vision is wrong and it can take much more years then it took Apple to do the "courageous" thing and undo the stupidity and replace the vision individual.

[md8z]

For GNOME I guess you could say it's the same way but they are more after volunteer contributions, not money. So they will make changes that tend to increase the contributions, sometimes it's a trade-off i.e. do we make this change to lose 5 contributors but gain 10 contributors in other areas. They're tough decisions to make, and nobody likes to be the one to tell angry users that their workflow is breaking.

[simion314]

I don't think that the ego dudes do this calculation, just use it to pretend they have a motive.

Since I stopped using GNOME i switched to KDE and a few years back Plasma also had a big ego dude in charge, we had similar issues there with the Plasma vision , one example is

- removing the cachew ugly widget, the dude refused to give us the option to hide it even if we contribute the 3 lines patch ... but guess what the cachew is gone or hidden by default now ... my point is that I have an example that is not GNOME where big ego caused issue and when big ego person left things were solved.

My experience contributing to small KDE project was great though, there was no big vision people that needed to approve a feature or adding a new menu, the maintainers were developers that were happy to help the users, help debugging and were super happy to receive bug fixes and improvements. I would conclude(but without serious evidence) that big projects with big visibility will attract the individuals with big ego, like Plsama or GNOME , the big ego people will be attracted to this very visible projects so they canpush their vision into many peoples faces/lives.

But on the other hand if GNOME can double they contributors at the same time they lose half of the users is a metric they prefer then I hope they got their contributers, though by the number of GNOME forks that appeared it is possible their contributors got fragmented too.

[md8z]

To me it helps to think of it like debt, if they get a lot of money (or contributors or whatever) and lose users in the process then that can be re-invested to acquire more users at a later date. The GNOME forks I have seen don't really have a lot of developers, same thing with the KDE/Qt forks.

I don't really have any other comments on "ego guys", every maintainer has their own style. I have seen leadership with a strong vision work for some projects but not work for others.