[addicted]

Gnome is a DE designed to be used by distributions.

Gnome doesn’t have an opinion on a desktop application launcher because it expects the distribution to add it.

The only distributions which don’t are GnomeOS which is intended for developing Gnome, and Fedora, which is intended to be a bleeding edge distribution to mass release stuff before it’s included in RHEL.

Turns out, however, that a lot of people actually like the default Gnome look and so are happy with using Fedora.

But in practice this isn’t an issue for anyone because their distribution will come with an application launcher.

And even better you can completely change and/or add an application launcher because they are implemented through extensions.

[ragnese]

> Gnome is a DE designed to be used by distributions. > > Gnome doesn’t have an opinion on a desktop application launcher because it expects the distribution to add it.

I don't think this is true at all. Where have you read this? If GNOME intended for distributions to customize it, I can't imagine why they'd keep harping on about how custom theming is awful. See: https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a..., and https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2018/10/15/restyling-apps-a...

I'm honestly surprised they still support adding extensions via extensions.gnome.org.

[Spivak]

I mean the official position has always been reasonable, if disappointing. GNOME never had any official support for themes, it was just a concept invented by users who patched the CSS. It's OSS so you can obviously do what you want but they aren't going to support it and reserve the right to make changes that break your themes.

[ragnese]

I'm not arguing against their position. Rather, I'm citing their position on theming to argue that it would feel inconsistent for them to hold that position on theming, but then also have a position of encouraging downstream distros to customize the whole UI/UX of the DE.

[softirq]

Every DE is designed to be used in a distribution. I think what you are trying to say is that GNOME is designed to be "finished" by the distribution, which is a completely made up idea. Show me where GNOME says you need to finish the DE yourself during integration. GNOME is designed as a complete DE, the reason Canonical/System76 change it is because it's poorly designed for new users/casuals, which is their user base.