[throw_a_grenade]

I'd guess it's because of the general attitude of the project's community, specifically GNOME people and their “my way or highway” style of answering questions e.g. about CSD or other non-critical stuff, not directly related to core protocol. If they were a bit more accommodating to reasonable requests from outside, they'd get less backlash in comments. There's plenty of exemplar behaviour elsewhere in adjacent communities, they could have taken hint multiple times.

That they provide this stuff for free would be a good argument if the stuff wasn't pushed down people's throats with no working alternative and Xorg being discontinued.

[nicman23]

meanwhile i have 0 issues atm with kde wayland which i have been running for 3 years

because the devs actually have implemented things that i cared about

[FooBarWidget]

And how would they be able to "push stuff down people's throats" if people could walk away towards alternatives? When such alternatives don't exist, that's exactly how "they do stuff for free and nobody else is putting in the work to make something else" looks like.

The problem isn't they "pushing stuff down your throats", it's nobody else (including you) making alternatives that you like better. You are voluntarily ingesting their stuff because your only alternative is starving.

[suby]

> And how would they be able to "push stuff down people's throats" if people could walk away towards alternatives?

It's a forcing of their narrow opinion on what should be allowed onto the ecosystem at large, because all of these things are connected. You can leave to a different DE/distro, but if every DE is doing its own thing for global hotkeys or whatever, then software in the ecosystem is going to be hacky/bespoke or have an unreasonable maintenance burden.

Even if you in particular can move elsewhere the ecosystem is still held back. We only recently got consensus on apps being able to request a window position on screen, which is something x11, macos, and windows all allow you to do. CSD and tray icons are other examples of things found everywhere else that they did not want to support. Some applications are just broken without tray icon support.

This bleeds over into work for folks releasing software for Linux in general. By not supporting SSD they were pushing the burden of drawing window decorations onto every single app author, and while most frameworks will handle this, it's not like everyone is using qt or gtk. App authors will get bug reports and the burden of releasing software on Linux needlessly climbs again.

Hard to convey how unreasonable I feel their stance was on tray icons / SSD. It should be the domain of the DE from a conceptual but also practical point of view, even from just the amount of work involved. It reminds me of LSP's enabling text editors to have great support for every language. And again, Gnome was the odd man out in this, they want extra attention and work when Linux is the lowest desktop marketshare by far, and they themselves are not the overwhelming majority but they are large enough that you really do need to make sure your software runs well on Gnome even if you want to support Linux.

People think Gnome push stuff down your throat because they have the power and influence to impact the ecosystem, and they use that power and influence to die on absolutely absurd hills.

[simonask]

I dunno, I think tray icons support is kind of the absurd hill to die on. They're a Windows 95-ism and generally extremely horrible in terms of usability. Apps use them and desktop environments support them mostly out of a lack of imagination, and they are frankly extremely overused.

I'm personally a KDE user, but I'm with the GNOME folks on this one.

[roryirvine]

They may have been introduced in Windows 95, but they didn't actually become particularly common until years later. They weren't originally intended as a long-term feature and, in Win 2000, Microsoft started recommending that people use custom Control Panel objects or MMC console snap-ins instead. But the MMC wasn't an option in Win98/Me and, by the time MS finally managed to produced a consumer variant of NT, use of the system tray had become entrenched.

I'm not sure what Windows is like these days, but in MacOS they're patently absurd. My corporate Mac laptop has twelve of the fucking things, and I've never actually had genuine need to click on any of them (and 5 of them are from Apple and so of course use 4 different corner radii between them - the 3rd party ones are at least a little more consistent).

[prmoustache]

Nonsense. Gnome is not Wayland.