I know, but for me accessibility tools are a must, if needed I will compile, use wine or write my own because i need them. But from my experience (with KDE at least) you can customize every keyboard shortcut with a GUI and I could submit patches for issues I found and fixed. If you use a distribution like Debian or ubuntu then installing the required development libraries and rebuilding a package is simple enough in most cases.

I understand why compiling sucks though and this is why I am considering to use Python for a program I want to make and open source despite the fact I dislike it's syntax.

You might want to look at something like GNOME Builder, which is designed to make it easy to contribute to existing projects and will clone the project and setup the build environment for you.

I'd rather just use software that isn't so inept or controlling as to hardcode values in the first place. Probably why I don't use GNOME.

All software has to hardcode something at some point, this is unavoidable. I don't use GNOME either, but they do make it very easy for newcomers to contribute and to change anything they want. It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

> It's open source after all, the control is in the hands of the user.

That's true of proprietary software to roughly the same extent: if I don't like how things are I am free to make my own or just not use it.

I don't follow. In my experience setting up a build environment and changing a couple lines of code provides a lot more control (and is a lot easier) than rewriting the whole thing from scratch or ditching it entirely for something else. If your distro's package manager supports source builds then you probably don't even need to use tools like GNOME Builder to make quick modifications.

If you find setting up a build environment to change a few lines of code more reasonable than switching to software that wasn't so boneheaded as to hardcode the value in the first place, then good for you I guess. I personally don't have much patience for it.

There is no need to set up a build environment. GNOME Builder does it for you, for GNOME packages. For other packages, on my distro (Debian) the package manager does it for you. It's 4-5 commands to download dependencies, download source, rebuild and reinstall ANY package. Comparatively, the cost of switching can vary wildly depending on the software and available alternatives.