> And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.

This is the point where I realized that person was not commenting in good faith. It simply isn't plausible that a GNOME developer was earnestly unaware of XFCE's existence.

I honestly disagree. If I hadn't looked at some of the other Ubuntu flavors at some point I probably would have no idea what XFCE is.

That's like someone on Microsoft's kernel team claiming that they've never heard of QNX.

It's certainly possible, even likely, but such an admission would be a gross condemnation of the knowledge of the developer regarding their necessary domain knowledge.

Maybe for a startup employee or a senior level. For a junior/mid level developer at a large firm transferred from another team, absolutely not. Knowing all alternatives that exist on the market is the job of management, not ICs.

I politely disagree with you. From my experience, cross pollination of ideas from alternatives makes both the person and the product much better.

I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.

This allowed me to think both out of the box and carry good ideas between systems. Some examples:

- Implement just works approach in a set of python utilities developed for a project. Extended development time a little but, removed setup from so many nodes so it compensated itself and allowed me to sleep well at night.

- Copying GNOME2's desktop layout to KDE with some macOS influences allows me to become extremely efficient in my Desktop systems. Since it contains something from everything, everything other DE is familiar and I'm also more efficient in them ("This is UNIX, I know how to use it!" effect).

>I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.

That's great, I do the same thing so I can relate to you, but I hope you understand that the bar for contributions to an open source project is generally more like "did you write code that the maintainer wants to merge" and not "you must familiarize yourself with all alternatives." How you achieve that varies and not everybody has the time to spend searching around on distro forums and Github. Some people might only ever familiarize themselves with one or two open source projects that they use and contribute to. And it's hard for me to see something wrong with that, that's their prerogative.

That's a dismal view, and a condemnation of the quality of work done by such individuals. If they aren't aware of the current state of technology and the market competition, how can they partake meaningfully in decision making?

In a a lot of bigger companies, developers don't need to partake in certain kinds of decision making, management makes the hard decisions for them. Why is this a dismal view? Not everything is a startup, and some people who I've talked to who enjoy the corporate life have told me they see this as a positive because it makes their job easier.

Are you the designer (not "merely" a developer) of a desktop environment?

Why can't Transmission-gtk be just a well written GTK app and play nice everywhere? Why the (forced) distinction?

You might say this is "fragmentation." Up until two years ago Ubuntu had a different shell (Unity) with a different API for this, and up until last year XFCE was mostly still using GTK2 and its deprecated APIs. Things are getting better now (Ubuntu's tray is just an ordinary GNOME extension, XFCE supports the new API) but it's taken time to reconcile everything.

You're either with us or against us!