"Facilitating the unrestricted use of extensions and themes by end users seems contrary to the central tenets of the GNOME 3 design."

It truly needs its own fractal of bad design essay save it would have to a farce in 7 parts.

To say that they targeted a different kind of user is insufficiently descriptive. 3.0 was the beginning of ticking off the users they actually had in order to target users they wish they could get with a total package that such users could never encounter in a million years because joe average wasn't installing Linux in 2011 regardless of how simple you made the interface.

9 years later the Linux user base is virtually unchanged and gnome 3 is no longer horrifying as 9 years of labor have rendered it modestly acceptable after the worst ideas were put off or mitigated.

If you spent 300k building a hovel where the roof fell in quarterly and you after much consternation and a decade of work figured out how to keep the roof mostly in place most of the time I would pretty much expect such a project to be the go to horror story among home builders in the neighborhood.

This isn't meanness its just honesty.

It is not, sometimes GNOME devs even say outright that the project is for their peers and those who share their vision. They do their testing on other GNOME aficionados. In the days of Unity, Canonical did some of their user testing on regular people, those days are long gone.

I don't ever remember cursing my Windows 3.11 machine that the scrollbar and toolbar icons were distracting in File Manager, nor do I crash my car when the speedometer changes and wish that the distraction of the speedo and rev counter was removed.

I remember using GNOME2 and loving it.

I often wonder constitutes a "power user" - someone who wants to actually get stuff done and not fight the UI to discover things??

I wonder when iOS became the ideal - blindly fumble around whitespace to see if some text is actually a button or if there is some unfathomable control hidden that you need a magic incantation to discover (swipe left on a list control is delete - my mum still doesn't know this)?

Is a "power user" someone who has learned all the different ways of interacting with a modern user interface? You used to learn: click, double-click and scrollwheel. Now every interaction with a control is different and impossible to learn or discover simply by using it. Absymal.

Gnome more or less optimizes for minimal configurability, the theory being that most users want the UI to be as clean as possible. They do not particularly care if someone would like to be able to change some annoying behavior, because they thought that behavior made sense and they feel the cost of adding a button to disable it, or even burying a configuration bit in gconf, is far too high. Of course, they do not have the resources needed to run actual user studies the way Apple, Google, and Microsoft do, so their idea of what users want is mostly based on their own ideas about what users want (since they usually dismiss feature requests from their actual users, because those are "power users").

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own UI in the face of flaws that were real and immediate was the process of a power user. Orr was an average user and could be listened to. All he had to do was write a feature request; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be an average user and would have to be ignored."

Also it doesn't even show hibernate button on the "start menu" (or whatever it's called these days) - because apparently the ability to actually power down the box while keeping all states is too confusing to have!

I don't use Gnome because I don't like the direction they've taken it in. But they have absolutely every right to do with it as they please. And I have every right to insist it's totally not fit for my purposes and refuse to use it.

The same way I have no (current) interest in using Wayland because it'd be too much hassle to try to replicate my workflow with it. But they're free to ignore me the way I ignore them.

GNOME has tens of millions of users.

I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork.

FLOSS maintainers are a rare breed. We as a community need to find ways to not burn them out. Even if you have millions of happy users, just a couple of really toxic ones can make it feel not worth it.

I was referring to the hundreds of users who "reacted" to the bugzilla thread on this issue, but I'm sure it effects many many more.

> I do understand your sentiment. I don't like GNOME myself. But there are alternatives. If you don't like it, try using something else, contributing patches with configurable behavior or maintaining a fork.

Generally I don't use GNOME, on this occasion I was working on a laptop supplied by an employer. The frustrating thing isn't that they don't support a feature that I want, it's that they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted.

> they strip away features that existed before, and completely ignore and talk down to users who tell them that the feature is very useful and much wanted.

I'm under the impression that GNOME strives for similar UX to macOS. This behavior sounds just like Apple to me, so maybe it's just the correct way to do it.

I've used both macOS and GNOME as daily drivers and got frustrated with both. I'd certainly get frustrated if an employer forced me to use unsuitable equipment (and some have in the past). But that's not the fault of GNOME developers.

Those hundreds of user are:

1. A vocal minority, most likely. People happy about it don't go on bug trackers to support devs.

2. Not making the software, not part of the decision making process. Don't like the end result ? Fork it if you have the ability. Give constructive criticism if you want and you think the team is receptive to it (or even cares about it. Sometimes, I just don't want your genius idea).

So, yes. They're doing this for free. Don't like it? Fork it, or don't be an ass. If you can't do either of those, the third option is to fuck off.

It doesn't - you are completely free to roll back those changes, or make different changes of your own.

Maybe.

I think the discussion should happen.

Because I don't think "I wrote it, if you don't like it, you write it" is a 100% defense to hordes of upset users.

This doesn't mean you don't have a right to discuss or critique and discuss and if appropriately fork or write you own.

The option always remains to change it yourself or stop using it. It's not as if it's bound to the hardware (Apple) or shipped with the machine (Windows). It's not a SaaS that may vapourise or change underneath you.

There's no way to force consensus in situations like this. The best you can do is force out those maintainers you don't like with a harassment campaign.

If I changed every bit of software I dislike, I would have no time left for my actual job. Yeah, I get it, these volunteers found the time to work on this one project and therefore get more of a say about what changes will be made, but you know what? They also have to use other software, and they would not have time to work on something like Gnome if they were busy making changes to Wayland or the Kernel or whatever else.

Worse, in my experience, Gnome developers will turn down patches that do not align with their ideas about how things should work. I have had it happen to me, I have seen it happen to others -- even when we find time to change something, we cannot commit to maintaining our own private fork, and dealing with merge after merge or trying to keep up with a project that has as much activity as Gnome or Wayland. Obviously some patches need to be rejected, but in the case of Gnome I have found that rejection often comes down to their notorious "less configurability is better" attitude.

As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd? At some point you wind up having to ditch an entire distribution, with all its infrastructure and maintainers, just to get one use case to work. In some cases you are left with a choice between a project that has the features you need but has received no updates (including security updates) in years, or a project that does not have the features you need but is actively maintained. More often than not people will just give up on their use case, which in some cases means giving up on open source software entirely since that use case was the reason they were using open source in the first place. Some might think that is fine, users have the freedom to choose what software to run, but the fact is that fewer users means fewer contributors (including many people who make only the small but very important contribution of reporting bugs) and a less robust open source ecosystem.

They don't get "more of a say", they get ALL the say. This is the way of Free/Open Source.

As for stopping using it, how does that work with critical packages like systemd?

It works the exact same way. If you don't like it, don't use it. Simple as that.

To be honest I don’t see how you can understand the first bit but not the second. Yes, they can make changes that you don’t like without consulting you.

Commercial software, like most things in life, is responsive to incentives. The people who buy things get the most say in the product.

For open source where the end users aren't buying anything, and the developers are either creating product for their own gratification, or for some more nebulous corporate goal, the incentives are rather indirect. And that makes a big difference. Software, under those conditions, will frankly be worse for the majority of users.

This seems to be the dominant culture, but it's actually pretty toxic that people feel entitled to whine about software created by people who owe them absolutely nothing.

Constructive feedback is useful, and appropriate if the creator indicates that they want it.

Whining and ranting is a waste of energy. It makes people feel bad and leads to no beneficial change.

I don't think Drew DeVault wrote this because he's received lots of useful constructive feedback.

I don't think that's quite right. It's certainly bad manners to be rude, but the underlying complaints are one of the better - if not best - means by which the people who make the software can get feedback to ensure they're building the right thing.

Would you invest in a startup whose founders constantly complained about how their potential users whined about their product?

Aside from auxiliary revenue sources like complements and consulting, open source software has value in large proportion to how many people use it. Reputation and goodwill, if nothing else, bragging rights, job opportunities, and so on. You don't get these things from writing software than isn't used.

And you can't really expect everyone to provide constructive feedback. Often, the more emotional the rant, the more pain the user is feeling. Not all humans are dispassionate rational agents. Not every user is a professional product manager able to outline constructive incremental improvements to satisfy requirements. And it's silly to expect that. Product managers are paid well in industry to do this. Doing it for free for open source is just as much a donation.

I'll go further. If you're not willing to tolerate more and more rants as your software gets more popular, to the point that you end up not contributing or quitting, it might be better if you didn't start. Abandoned and decaying software hurts too, and it especially hurts the people who took a bet on it.

(I learned my lesson young. I created a few bits and pieces of open source, and quickly found the the effort of integrating the contributions of third parties more work than it was worth. The only way I'd do open source again is as a developer outreach / organization halo PR strategy for the benefit of a company I'm being well compensated to work for.)

If someone relies on a piece of open source software on the assumption that it will be maintained in perpetua for free, then they’re simply foolish, and they have only themselves to blame for any resulting harm.

> Not all humans are dispassionate rational agents

You seem to be forgetting that this applies just as much to the people who maintain open source projects. The endless negativity inevitably has an effect.

What makes you think people owe nothing to each other in the open source ecosystem? I maintain a package for Fedora, I have submitted a few patches to the Linux Kernel, and I regularly report bugs. Do the Wayland developers not benefit from any of the above?

Even my mother, who is not very technical, has managed to identify bugs here and there which I report on her behalf. Do the Gnome developers not benefit from that?

We cannot all be contributors to every package we use, but we are all part of an ecosystem and we all have the right to ask for changes by others in that ecosystem. You call it whining, but you know what? When developers break use cases, users have the right to complain about it. If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.

Actual contributions are another matter. If you contribute to a project, then sure, you should get a say proportional to the size of your contribution. And I wonder how many of the people who complain about Wayland have made sizeable contributions?

An important point here is that it's up to the maintainers to evaluate the value of your contributions from their point of view. If you don't respect this, you're again trying to impose obligations unilaterally. That is, offering help that may not really have been wanted in the first place and then expecting something in return.

>If the Wayland developers do not want to hear those complaints, they should not be involved in developing software that millions of people depend on, nor should they have tried to replace software that millions of people depend on.

This seems way off base to me. I hope this attitude is not pervasive because it seems like it's a huge discouragement to people who want to write useful software. (If you succeed to any degree, millions of people are automatically entitled to shout at you whenever they experience some inconvenience.)

How many people asked for their distro to switch to Wayland?

You seem to think that these critical packages that millions of people depend on can be treated like hobbyist projects. Yes, when your project is a hobby, you can tell people that their complaints are not your problem and that they should just fork the code if they need something different. However, distros should not make hobbyist projects core components that users are unable to avoid, nor should anyone push their hobbyist project as a replacement for a core component.

The fact is that the Wayland developers set out to replace X11. In what world are they not opening themselves to criticism from people whose use-case was supported by Xorg but not supported by Wayland? By now a decision made by the Wayland maintainers will affect the vast majority of desktop Linux users; why should they be immune from complaints? When people depend on your software you have to deal with their complaints, that is just a fact.

People in charge of large FOSS projects like Gnome should not pretend it's just some hobby project they can do whatever they want with. Those projects are essentially public infrastructure and should be treated as such. It's not their personal plaything.

Yes, people who do the work have the most say, but sometimes they really use that to do stupid things with the code. I don't know how to correct that though. Commercial software is no better about this.

They're not pretending. I'm afraid you're laboring under a misconception. Nothing obliges the GNOME team to accede to the wishes of people who contribute nothing to the project.

Nothing, until users flee and they stop receiving bug reports, patches, donations, and so forth. Moreover, because of what Gnome is, if they drive users away it will also negatively impact other projects, because for a lot of those users leaving Gnome means ditching open source software entirely and switching to e.g. OS X.

Part of the joy of open source are the freedoms it gives you, including the freedom to fork a project that doesn't meet your needs and make it so that it does. This works as it should pretty often - look at the gnome2 forks, the systemd-less distros etc. There's plenty of choice out there, and plenty of opportunity to get involved.

If you're unwilling to exercise those freedoms, then you're just whining about the stuff you're getting for free.

Losing users is always a bad thing for the open source ecosystem. Lost users means fewer bug reports, fewer patches, fewer donations, and less support from paid developers working for various corporations (easy to forget but there are people whose job is to maintain open source projects like the Linux kernel). Fewer users means less incentive for hardware companies to provide any support, even just minimal technical documentation, needed for open source developers to write drivers (let alone contribute to that).

Forks require a significant commitment of time and effort, and really should be considered a last resort. The time commitment is much greater for prominent projects that receive a lot of activity like Gnome or Linux. Most users, even those with the necessary technical skills, do not have enough spare time to maintain a fork when things break.

Your dismissive attitude is fine for a obscure hobbyist project with a dozen users. It makes no sense for desktop Linux distros that now have many millions of users.

I understand that people can be aggressive, rude, and downright hostile. I'm not suggesting that such behavior be rewarded. Nor am I suggesting that every open source project has to do everything any user says. I do, however, object to the notion that there is no obligation whatsoever between the producer of a technology and the users of that technology, regardless of whether money has changed hands.

I struggle to express how strongly disagree. This is like saying that someone who gives away a 3D printer on freecycle is then obliged to help you fix any problems with it.

    THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
    IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
    FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.

I agree with that, projects should clearly state their goals and priorities upfront. But relying on legalese from MIT license is not the solution.

I said nothing of the sort. They have an obligation to the project and its value as a piece of infrastructure used by many (including noncontributors).

Pretty sure they are aware of this, even Gnome. Gnome's Dev Team is often citing user studies etc. and I believe they are genuine in trying to produce software for the public, rather then themselves.

...Though I believe they don't grog how disruptive changes (any change) can be.