This is a truly WTF moment about messed up responses to X11 session removal in Gnome.
2 weeks ago I published a blogpost about the upcoming plans of GNOME 49 and the eventual removal of the X11 session. Since then, instead of looking at feedback, bugs and issues related to the topic, we all collectively had to deal with the following, and I am not exaggerating one bit:
- Fascists and Nazis
- Wild Conspiracy Theories that make Qanon jealous
- “Concerned” Trolling about the Accessibility of the Wayland session
- A culture war where Wayland is Gay, and X11 is the glorious past they stole from you
In my wildest dreams I could have never made this shit up. You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on.
Gnome in general is undeniably made competently by competent and talented people. If it wasn’t, it would break a lot more.
Those competent and talented people also managed to make extremely bad choices at every turn, and seem ideologically opposed to the idea of customization, resulting in an environment that is fundamentally painful to use unless you very specifically fit the box of what they expect users to be like.
It sort of feels like an Apple product, in that sense. Very well-made, but god forbid you don’t want to do things exactly as they say you should
There’s nothing wrong with not providing customization. There’s a perfectly decent customizable DE in KDE, anyone that wants to tinker can use that.
I don’t want to tinker. I want something to just work, and not have too many knobs. Gnome fills this need perfectly. Thus, you saying that they made bad choices at every turn seems rather idiotic.
Sure, but them stonewalling KDE for months with libadwaita theming preventing gnome apps from using the breeze theme properly on KDE is a bad decision - one that should never have happened. They eventually worked it out, but they shouldn’t have first told the KDE devs to essentially pound sand, especially given KDE goes out of their way to make their apps use gnome’s themes correctly no matter what, so your gnome system looks right when using KDE apps. The same courtesy should be expected from GNOME, at least to provide the scaffolding for that.
That is the kind of bad decisions I thought of when they brought it up. Or heck, why isn’t dash to dock built into gnome at this point? Like a quarter of the gnome users (and yes, they checked their telemetry and found this to be true) were using it - that’s obviously something that even if it goes against their design philosophy the DE should have built-in at this point. I think if you’re not in the GNOME weeds, you won’t see the kinds of boneheaded decisions they have made over the years.
Thanks, I was going to post a very similar rant.
The “just works” argument IS a valid one and they would have a point – IF Gnome’s defaults were in any way sensible. They aren’t. The entire workflow is a nightmare. (I made the apple comparison – Well, uhh… MacOS is also a walled garden that doesn’t let you change shit, but at least it’s got very decent defaults)
Gnome’s file manager didn’t let you type in FOLDER ADDRESSES until a few months ago, ffs. And sure you could, even then, use an alternative file manager.
… But at that point you are fucking with the premise of “just works”, because you will need to use non-default stuff.
You stay very subjective views as if they are facts. Then you go and add an obvious lie to the whole thing - you could’ve typed directory addresses for years, maybe even since the beginning.
At this point, your post should be taken with a ton of salt, if at all
You’re the one lying. Gnome 46. That’s when it was added.
“Location entry on click” and “Detailed timestamps for files” listed proudly as “features” as if they aren’t default on every file manager that doesn’t treat its users like babies too dumb to use their computers.
see this wouldn’t be a problem if every distro didn’t insist on having gnome as the default and main DE
This is objectively false. Distros that care about choice and tinkering will allow you to select a DE during installation. See Arch Linux for example.
My feelings exactly, stated a lot better than I could have managed.