[crashdancer]

> I was expressing my personal frustration and disappointment

I understood that but that's different from saying everyone is being done a disservice. When you say that, what you're actually doing is accusing them of doing mass harm to the community -- I hope you can see how that's a serious accusation that's separate from your personal frustrations.

>Open-source projects thrive on feedback, both positive and negative. It's through these discussions that developers can gauge user sentiment and make informed decisions.

The feedback has to be structured in the correct way so developers can prioritize issues and turn it into a development plan. If it's just complaining about attitudes and making generalized statements, or constantly trying to renegotiate the direction of the whole project, that stuff doesn't help.

>It seems that your feelings about "my desktop" and your emotional investment in gnome are clouding your judgment, preventing a balanced perspective.

I don't have an investment any more than anyone else who just uses Linux for work/hobbies and is more or less fine with it, actually I probably have much less investment (both financial and personal) than the stereotypical techie who buys a new iPhone or Tesla or something and gets really into it.

>If this is the sort of interaction people have with gnome enthusiasts or developers (whatever you are with your throwaway account) you can see why most people don't like to work with the community you are representing here.

Please notice that you're demonstrating extreme prejudice and creating a vicious cycle here: someone makes some negative comments, I lightly push back on them, then somehow not only am I the bad guy but suddenly I've been elected as representative for the entire community and the entire community becomes responsible for my actions too! The subtext here is that I just shouldn't say anything or express my opinions at all because by the simple act of doing that, all the past disagreements and flamewars going back decades are now my fault too!

[BoredPositron]

> The feedback has to be structured in the correct way so developers can prioritize issues and turn it into a development plan. If it's just complaining about attitudes and making generalized statements, or constantly trying to renegotiate the direction of the whole project, that stuff doesn't help.

Selective absorption of criticism has probably steered gnome to where they are now. Especially if you are talking about the form... akin to the meticulousness of a grammar enthusiast. Since we are on a forum and not a bug tracker or feature request list, the feedback here tends to be more generalized. Also your focus on the form and the distinction between the GNOME Desktop and the GNOME Foundation is deflective when we are primarily talking about user satisfaction for which you made no argument at all besides your personal anecdotes. Why is GNOME considered so great? Why are 8 of the most downloaded/popular extensions designed to rectify the bad decisions made by the GNOME development team? Why are there countless forks? These are all points you conveniently ignored or decided not to engage with. You went for the low hanging fruit.

> Please notice that you're demonstrating extreme prejudice and creating a vicious cycle here: someone makes some negative comments, I lightly push back on them, then somehow not only am I the bad guy but suddenly I've been elected as representative for the entire community and the entire community becomes responsible for my actions too! The subtext here is that I just shouldn't say anything or express my opinions at all because now all the past disagreements and flamewars are now my fault too!

It's not prejudice; it's a consistent reaction from multiple people in this thread to your comments. You might want to reflect on why that is and consider how your responses might be perceived. I am also only engaging with you in this specific subthread, and not elsewhere. Please refrain from distorting the facts to strengthen your argument. No one is suggesting that you represent the entire GNOME community—just that your behavior reflects poorly on its less favorable aspects. You are entitled to your opinions, but no one is obligated to agree with them, just as you don't have to agree with mine.

If you truly believe I’m not entitled to my opinion that GNOME has, overall, done a disservice to the Linux Desktop and its community over the past 15 years, then please, enlighten me:

What would be an acceptable way to express this sentiment while maintaining the same level of concern?

[crashdancer]

>Also your focus on the form and the distinction between the GNOME Desktop and the GNOME Foundation is deflective when we are primarily talking about user satisfaction for which you made no argument at all besides your personal anecdotes.

There's no argument to make, user satisfaction is entirely subjective and it depends very much on which users the maintainers decide they want to pursue. It's well within their means to decide they want to change or shrink their userbase for any reason. And plus it's open source so even if that happened it may not be a problem because any person can decide to start contributing or fork it, thus bringing in new users if that's what they want.

>Why is GNOME considered so great?

These type of questions are a lot more interesting questions for me to answer, I wish you had asked these earlier. I don't think I would argue it's great, but I think GNOME is popular because they have a mostly complete platform. The quality of individual parts may vary but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Otherwise known as network effects. And I would say the same thing is true of Windows or Android any other major desktop OS that are their own platforms.

>Why are 8 of the most downloaded/popular extensions designed to rectify the bad decisions made by the GNOME development team?

Not sure I understand, are you criticizing GNOME for having extensions? Again "bad decision" is completely subjective, that's why you can choose which extensions you want to install or not install. That's why KDE also has extensions.

>Why are there countless forks?

Well no, currently there are only two notable forks, MATE and Cinnamon. And I wouldn't say either of them compete directly with GNOME, they have different goals. But also, any popular open source project has forks. If you want something that actually has countless forks, see the Linux kernel.

>It's not prejudice; it's a consistent reaction from multiple people in this thread to your comments. You might want to reflect on why that is and consider how your responses might be perceived

In this thread I've been on the receiving end of a bunch of conspiracy theories and gaslighting so I don't consider that type of reaction to be reasonable or worth reflecting on, it's not even appropriate to post that stuff on this website.

>No one is suggesting that you represent the entire GNOME community—just that your behavior reflects poorly on its less favorable aspects.

No sorry, I have to push back again here. I could sum up my view as "GNOME is not that bad" and I really don't think that's any kind of notable behavior, or something that reflects on anything, or even fulfills this abstract idea of favorability. I couldn't care less what transgressions other community members did either. Come on, what am I supposed to do here? Go looking through years of IRC logs and Twitter comments reading flame wars, to make sure I don't accidentally say something similar to what somebody on "the wrong side" said in the flame war? To be honest I had a period in my life where I really didn't like GNOME at all and I probably said a lot of the same things being said here about how bad it is!

>What would be an acceptable way to express this sentiment while maintaining the same level of concern?

How would such a concern ever be quantified empirically? And who decides just what the community is? Is that anyone who's ever tried Linux once in their life? Or do they have to have used it within the last month? Year? Decade? I could go on here, whatever we come up with is a likely minimum of millions of people, can any of us conclusively speak for all of them?

See what I'm getting at here? The statement is so vague, IMO it doesn't actually communicate any information and it's just going to inflame. The users who think GNOME is terrible already agree with you and will only be riled up by hearing that. The users who are happy won't learn anything new from being told that and they'll think you're being a bit of a jerk by suggesting their feelings are wrong.