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Please excuse this incredibly long post. Your post was insightful and polite, so I wanted to respond as thoughtfully as I think it deserves! :D

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The knee-jerk reaction to the new GNOME interface was, I agree, understandable at the time, given the Zeitgiest — if you're in a time when you're seeing a lot of interfaces move towards being less usable in your eyes, in favor of chasing largely wishful thinking, you might well react strongly to the smallest sign of it in other places. However, I think this reaction was ultimately misguided at the time, and is even moreso now, more maintained by resentment that has long since reached the point of being self-sustaining than anything else, which is what I felt I was responding to originally.

The concessions to touch oriented devices in the design in GNOME 3 are mostly superficial, skin deep changes that are perfectly usable on the desktop and also perfectly explicable by other means then focusing on mobile, and more than made up for by a focus on keyboard navigation (a uniquely desktop-oriented trait).

For instance, if you're scrolling through your applications looking for one, you're not going to have your attention on anything else in the screen, so why does the menu need to take up a small amount of the screen, instead of taking up the whole screen and being able to show you more results?

Or, similarly, if we look at title bars, all GNOME did was essentially merge the tab bar, action button bar, and title bar into one — a move that necessitated larger title bars to maintain button sizes in line with those in the application window itself, which makes sense, since they now ARE application buttons, but in return unified a number of often stacked UI bars with overlapping purposes into a single cohesive entity, probably overall decreasing the amount of space taken up by the header area of many applications overall. In light of this change, moving menus into a hamburger also makes perfect sense: if every application now has an action bar, all the common menu bar actions will be covered there, arguably more discoverable and convenient than before, so being forced to make room for those action buttons by putting the rest of the menus behind a universally understood, common icon (adding at most one click, and likely actually being a wash, since hamburger menus in GNOME tend to be flatter), is a small price to pay, especially since, again, it also helps merge two bars into one, actually saving space.

The network effects criticism seems like a much more reasonable one to me, but I still don't find it particularly convincing, and I suspect it often serves as rationalization for self perpetuating resentment and fear of change.

First of all, I don't see the problem with having various projects take advantage of each other's functionality where it makes sense, and in fact I think one of the major things that was holding the Linux desktop back is the heretofore all too common focus on making everything a completely generic and replaceable component that doesn't really integrate well with anything else or fully use the features of anything else. Instead, I think it's a very good thing to have a relatively unified, well integrated Linux platform all the way from the kernel up to the DE, as long as it does allow for things to be switched out within reason, has a unidirectional flow of dependencies downward (so no kernel depending on window manager), each platform component is managed as a separate entity with relatively defined interfaces, and allows for alternative platforms to exist. Indeed I think the fear of a unified platform stack being merely extant or popular, as if its mere existence will make dependency chains invert and our systems completely brittle and unyielding, or as if that will erase the existence of alternative Linux distributions that use different stacks (how could you put a stop to that anyway? I think the Gentoo and Void people are far too hardy a breed for that <3), is I think based on paranoia and conspiratorial thinking.

In fact, secondly, I also think the network effect is greatly overstated — it's pretty clear that the lower level systems in the FreeDesktop stack can work perfectly well without the higher level ones, meaning as you approach closer and closer to the parts of the system that actually affect users, modularity grows more and more; and even the higher level ones can often work perfectly well without the lower ones — for instance, Wayland and GNOME both work perfectly well without systemd as far as I know, considering that they both run fine on for instance Void Linux. So the FreeDesktop stack does indeed meet the criteria I mentioned in the first point.

Thirdly, I think the opposition to the specific programs that make up the FreeDesktop (let's call it) stack is mostly based on hidebound traditionalism and fear of change, an almost cargo cult like devotion to the "UNIX philosophy" (most strongly to be seen amongst the suckless crowd, who judge the quality of software by how few lines it contains, irrespective of its problem domain and features, and set themselves arbitrary line limits). Conversely, I tend to believe that "doing one thing well" is oft-misunderstood by that crowd, since IMO it often requires completely and holistically solving a problem from first principles, instead of writing a beautiful, minimal art piece in C that solves only about 80% of the problem (myopically defined) and does so by relying on a zoo of tools that only half work for that solution (like relying on shell scripts for an init system) and leaves the lost 20% of edge cases and nice to have features and the rest of the surrounding problem unsolved so that you have to cobble together a whole another zoo of tools to solve it, and the fear of doing this is mostly just a cargo cult devotion to a just one out of many great software traditions. In essence, I subscribe more to the "GNU philosophy", and agree with Rob Pike when he said that the Unix philosophy is dead and Perl killed it.

Fourth, even if there was a tight interconnection between those platform components, that doesn't really constitute a network effect, just a dependency chain: a network effect would be some means of keeping distro maintainers or users — depending on which perspective you take — on that stack as opposed to any other, but as far as I know there's not really much of that at all, it just so happens that that stack is the most polished and featureful for users, and the most powerful and easy to maintain for distro maintainers and system administrators. It seems perfectly possible to switch to an entirely different one if you so choose, as demonstrated by distributions like Void Linux (a real best of breed for its type if distro imo, it looks pretty damn nice if you wanna graybeard it IMO).

[Aside: this is especially the case since someone who objects to one part of the stock is likely to object to all of them, and so having to give up the others in order to give up the one they most strongly object to isn't likely going to be any big misery for them. Someone who doesn't like systemD or Wayland probably wouldn't want to use GNOME anyway, at most they probably be using MATE.]

So really it doesn't seem like this complaint is about network effects at all, but about the very idea of dependencies between things, which just goes back to my comment before about this obsession with modularity to the detriment of making a featureful, reliable system that is actually capable of taking advantage of its own strong points. For instance, why shouldn't an init system take advantage of the unique features and capabilities of its kernel? The idea that everything should be written in is generic manner is so strange to me. Complaints about that, and just about the fact that the free desktop platform dominates the Linux world, but that's more a function of its quality and the amount of work that goes into it, in my opinion.

--- Signed, a happy Fedora Silverblue + nushell + Emacs user.