A decade of a their trademark hard line "you're holding it wrong" ethos will likely already have driven away what people might object to this sort of change.
I've never believed on that dichotomy: either you are happy with everything a project does, or you are a hater. Why?
That was precisely what drove me away from the project after many years.
I don't use the software anymore and, for the most part, no changes they make affect me, but Gonome 3 should be treated as an example of an awful way of driving change by burning bridges and hurting the community.
I haven't thought about this for many years now, but I would have expected RH to do better.
Just to add: well-founded criticism is not being a “hater”, nor is forking or leaving a project over irreconcilable disagreements. Being a hater is repeatedly publishing absurd screeds, attempting to organize smear campaigns to pressure devs, and using sock puppets to flood social media with negative comments in order to influence users. Sadly there are a few very loud haters in the FOSS community.
If someone is calling you a hater over a difference of opinion, they are just wrong. That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!
> That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!
Speaking mostly from personal experience, I don't know how the community at large is felling about it, but for me my reaction and experience has been the opposite. The more I come across haters, the less impact each one have on me, because I've seen it before, already know it not to be true, and don't have any needs to engage with any of it again. It's like the more it occurred, the more desensitized I got to it.
Being falsely accused of things you know to be untrue felt really difficult at first, but forcing myself to be more confident in me really helped to not let that get to me and be able to move past it easier.
More on topic, it's really easy to misjudge what is a "campaign" and what is someone feeling semi-strongly about something but writing really "convincingly" about it and what is someone just throwing a off-hand comment perhaps hastily formulated. We don't always know the intention, but we immediately jump to our first guess about the intention, but sometimes people are just casually pointing out stuff without actually having strong feelings about them.
I'd say GNOME and the community were both at fault. GNOME 3 was awful when it rolled out and the devs didn't really listen to the community at all (they didn't have to, but they probably should have taken more feedback). The community at the time was also absolutely toxic and I can't blame GNOME for tuning it all out.
GNOME is much better these days than it was, but I feel like Linux did pay a price for the disruption -- between GNOME, Unity and all that mess, there was ~10 years where all the desktops that a new user was likely to encounter were just half baked solutions for a problem that most people couldn't entirely agree on.
I can agree with this to an extent. Projects that grow to a certain level of importance start to face new problems around community relations and governance, and it isn’t always a smooth transition. Generally speaking I think GNOME is doing better with this now.
I was just adding to the comment I replied to. There’s a lot of grey area between hater and die-hard supporter but that often isn’t acknowledged in these flame wars.
It’s just the way, innit? People love to (rightly) bump their chest and say Linux is great for how customisable and open it is, but then go bananas the moment one software decides to do something different.
“Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that doesn’t behave exactly like we want it to, then it should not exist as option for anyone, ever.”
Openness, customisation and freedom of choice are great—unless you are offering a software that absolutely refuses to allow customization and freedom of choice, and actively attempts to impose its limitations on the rest of the ecosystem[0], in which case you will get pushback.
There are multiple angles. As the stewards of GTK, they should, IMO, try to keep it flexible and customizable to whatever extent is manageable and reasonable. This post is about Mutter, which is a window manager, which should have very little to do with the app "ecosystem". They can, and should, do whatever the hell they want with Mutter, GNOME Shell, Nautilus/Files, etc.
Even in the link you posted, they're talking about GNOME, not GTK.
> things like primarily designing the interface for a touch screen, despite PC touch screens not really taking off.
That was actually an absolute godsend using the Pinephone, and IMO laid the groundwork for the Librem 5 (and modern Linux-on-Mobile interfaces) to take root. I do not believe PostmarketOS would be doing as well as it is if they didn't have apps that play nicely with touch.
You don't use it, and you don't appreciate it, and that's fine. I'd say it most defintitely has a place though, without even touching on the chicken-and-egg bit about touchscreen / mobile Linux not taking off vs Gnome pushing for touchscreen / adaptability before it goes mainstream
Point taken on GTK, and I can't really disagree since I haven't even poked at writing a GTK GUI in many years.
But, you still couldn't resist complaining about the UI implementations, which sounds more like complaints about GNOME apps and GNOME Shell. Who cares if you think that GNOME Shell looks like it accommodates touch screens? Firefox, for example, uses GTK and doesn't seem to look like a touch screen UI to me as I'm typing into this text box.
I read them, but I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, or why it's directed at my comment. I mean that genuinely.
This Xfce dev says that GTK4 is less capable than GTK3, and they feel that GTK5 will continue in that direction. They also acknowledge certain things in the first comment:
> [0] Full disclosure: I'm an Xfce developer, and have been disappointed with the direction GTK has been taking for some time. I don't begrudge them their prerogative to do what they need/want to achieve their own goals with the toolkit they've built and maintain. But it really is making life more difficult for me.
>
> [1] Part of the argument is that Wayland doesn't natively support things like cross-process embedding, so a cross-platform toolkit shouldn't have these types of widgets (the classic problem of only being able to support the lowest common denominator). But a) you can absolutely build something like that for Wayland (something I've been working on, though it requires tens of thousands of lines of code to do), and b) with other changes, it's incredibly difficult and possibly impossible to even implement the XEMBED protocol on GTK4, for people who do only care about X11.
If the GNOME guys took out stuff from GTK4 or 5 for bad reasons, then I don't like that, either. Which is basically exactly what I said. However, it sounds like some of these changes would be hard to do and maintain well, such as cross-process embedding. Perhaps the GNOME devs made a decision to focus their surely limited resources toward things they think will be long-lasting. And, perhaps, by their estimation, trying to support Wayland and X11 by adding (and maintaining) tens of thousands of lines of code would be a big burden--especially if they believe that X11 is not going to be super-relevant in the near future. I don't agree with that estimation, and I assume that it'll be a very long time before X11 isn't necessary anymore, but so be it.
All that said, it still has nothing to do with Mutter, which is why I replied to the comment that I did. Because GTK, and Mutter, and GNOME Shell, and GNOME apps, and non-GNOME GTK apps, are all different things, and this post was about Mutter.
Probably yes. And, good. It's free software. I still use GNOME Shell, and the minute the make a change that I don't want to deal with, I'll change to something else. Easy as that.