[jraph]

I don't like Gnome so much, but enshittification is quite a strong word to qualify it.

I'd prefer we reserved this word for when stuff gets worse because of money / investors, with incentives at odds with the user needs.

I don't believe Gnome suffers from decisions that are bad because of financial incentives.

[throwaway167]

I quite like Gnome.

I also think enshittification is a strong word, and a wrong one.

Because praise the shit. Praise the choice of shit. You like your shit. I like my shit. I enjoy my Gnome shit, I enjoyed Gnome 2 shit but I love Gnome 3 shit. I don't like KDE shit. I can't remember how to spell XKFG shit because it's not big enough to fit in my memory.

It's all choice. And praise choice. I do like Gnome. If you want to keep running Gnome 1 like it's 1999, I'm sure there's a way to do that too.

[Pannoniae]

Well, I am open to changing my mind. What do you think, what's the reason then? From an outsider perspective, 10 years ago I've seen all those beautiful, perfectly usable UIs, and they have almost all disappeared by today. What happened? Why do you think GNOME does that?

[jraph]

I believe its maintainers truly believe they are taking the right decisions that are good for the project.

They limit the feature set so they can stabilize on a smaller basis.

They take UI/UX decisions they think are right.

That's what I think.

I also think they managed to build a beautiful UI that works quite well and that pleases many people.

I also think they removed useful features, lagged on important features (thumbnails in the file picker, which I always found bad anyway, including in the Gnome 2 days). I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't, that they should be more understanding of users trying to work around the flaws instead of despising them, and that they shouldn't both reduce the feature set to a minimum and break extensions in each release. And I do indeed think they made UI like it would be used on tablets, degrading the experience desktop, way too early when they didn't work well on tablet anyway for many reasons and KDE was the only bearable option on tablets at the time.

So I really believe they truly do what they think is best, but I also like the KDE approach way better: listening to the users, trying to polish things while not removing too many features, being humble in their decision, and acknowledging their users might have different needs / taste. (for instance, in Plasma 6, they are reverting to double click by default - many KDE devs prefer simple click and think it's objectively better, but they recognize many users are disturbed by this default.)

[dizhn]

KDE is reall pretty good in listening to the users. They announced the removal of workspaces a while ago but then realized some people are actually using it. They reverted their decision on this. Of course people also stepped up to keep maintaining it. That's key in open source projects.

[dizhn]

Not workspaces of course. Activities.

[leidenfrost]

> I also think they believe they know better than their users on what they need when they really don't

This. They have this kind of Apple syndrome of belittling use feedback, minus the part of being a billion dollar megacorporation

Also, things would have gone differently if they forked gnome 2 into a new project and left the original sources intact, instead of dragging all the userbase and distros with them.

To me, this was the shittiest move. Instead of saying "hey, we want to remake gnome into a very opinionated DE so we will make a new project for it", they said "we will use the same gnome2 sources so we will not listen to you but you are forced to listen to us!"

[jraph]

I can't blame them taking their own project to the direction they want. I would certainly do this with my own projects if most maintainers wanted it.

Distros were also free to follow, or to migrate users to MATE.

(of course, I would strongly care about not breaking users habits if I can help it, but that's the direction I would take)

[sophacles]

It's possible that your subjective opinion of what makes a good UI differs from the subjective opinion of the people doing the work on Gnome.

I'd need some strong evidence that they are selling you to some other party in order to enrich their investors. Who are these investors? How do they even get profits from Gnome? What choices have been made that let 3rd party companies get better access to you/your data from Gnome itself?

Differences of opinion aren't evidence of intentionally screwing over users in order to get more money for investors.

[boomboomsubban]

Your opinion of what a good UI looks like is 10+ years old, GNOME is constantly trying to look like a modern relevant UI. I also hate it, that's why I don't use GNOME and instead use a desktop environment committed to looking like what was popular 20 years ago. I seem to be in the minority, I encounter many people that love GNOME