[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)