To put it another way: maybe some specific mode of "Linux gaining ground on desktops" with "configurability and techniness" is your goal, but people working on any given desktop (including GNOME) may not share that goal in the same way you do, and it doesn't make any sense to expect them to.
To elaborate a bit about why I'm saying this; For quite some time, onboarding people to Linux was pretty easy. "Just use Ubuntu" was a really good answer. And then Unity came along, with a) bloat and b) this new paradigm that was ostensibly as simple as a Mac, but different enough that people wouldn't recognize it. And this was a terrible direction for Ubuntu to go, especially since XP was on its way out.
And now, when people ask me, hey, how do I get started with Linux, and they've heard of Ubuntu, I can't just say "Yeah, go for it." I have to launch into a thing and name 2 or 3 different distros, primarily due to the weirdness of GNOME. I appreciate freedom and choice, but I'm also quite free to say, I believe the following: I really wish the GNOME people would more-or-less give up, because they have mindshare not off of the quality of their current interface, but because of the momentum of their old one plus Ubuntu. I believe that (much like Windows, frankly) if they actually had to compete in this space on the merits, they'd lose out.
KDE (and LXDE and others) are doing a better job of making a predictable useful interface.
But anyway it sounds like you just fixed that by using a different distro, you can even just suggest the KDE or LXDE spins of Ubuntu. Those still exist, and it's not hard to use them. If you're already using them then it's very hard for me to see what your actual complaint is or what you're trying to discourage. It's true you're free to express what you want, but please consider that what you're expressing may not be something that was done with having the full information. I've noticed there is a lot of confusion about what GNOME is and a lot of people seem to mix it up and equate it with Ubuntu or Red Hat or something, which is understandable, but it's not true. I'm only here to explain why.
And just to make it painfully clear: it is already hard enough to maintain open source and fix all the issues and improve the quality of the current interfaces, without people constantly demanding that open source maintainers give up and stop fixing bugs. If you want to get things fixed, you really don't need to do this.
Thus, I'm commenting as a fan/user/potential customer, who might find this useful in some way. Or not. Sports fans can talk about their team or the state of the game or what they like and don't like. That's what I'm doing. I'm not "demanding," and if anything, I'm arguing for less work. By the GNOME people, because their thing is a waste of time. Go work on the better things :)
This is incorrect. GNOME users would not consider it a waste of time, just like KDE users would not consider it a waste of time for someone to do work on KDE, or Mac users would not consider it a waste of time to work on macOS, etc. Please consider that your suggestion can be considered rude, you are simply not the target audience.
In general, open source doesn't work like this. These are volunteers, nobody can really tell them to go work on something else, because they work on what they feel like, which may or may not be seeking the approval of people like you. If you want to find another project that seeks your approval, that's great, go do that, let us know about it later and maybe I'll even try it out. If your goal is to harass open source developers until they quit open source, then please stop doing that, that would be making it worse for everyone.
There are "moneyed" business interests who have a lot at stake at their team winning mindshare and profits. Now, I have no problem with businesses being businesses generally. But part of their "product" is these interfaces. And so again, what I would suggest is that pushing GNOME type interfaces is, long term, a bad strategy that is likely to continue the trend of "Linux" being a second class citizen, by wasting energy toward the impossible goal of beating MacOS at their own game.
Conversely, pushing more configurable and slightly more techy KDE-like interfaces I think has stronger likelihood of making "on the tech margin" people more excited and interested in Linux, and ends up helping more people overall.
Now, I could be wrong about this -- but, while I definitely agree with "no one should to demand what open source developers do, especially if they're not being compensated" -- it's equally as bad (if not worse) to suggest "let's not offer big-picture criticism of trends in open source software that affects a lot of people."
I adhere to the idea that you should never be rude unless you feel there is something at stake that makes being rude worth it, and I think "trying to gain ground on the Linux Desktop" a thing that affects LOTS of people outside of the developers, is.
They surely where born that way, GNOME only exists due to the original Qt license.
Then Gtk+ was always the go to framework for C devs, while KDE was embraced by C++ community on GNU/Linux.
Murray did a very good job for the C++ refugees on GNOME/Gtk, but that has always been a minority versus being on KDE land.
Also I really wouldn't say that C and C++ are equivalent to political parties, that's like saying the same thing about coke and pepsi.
You haven't seen any drama, really?
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/05/qt_lts_goes_commercia...
C vs C++ flame wars have been a thing since C++ was born at AT&T.
Since you aren't following up the news,
"CppCon 2015: Kate Gregory “Stop Teaching C"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWhqhNdYyk
"We stopped teaching C"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZUTJ2UNXxI
You can find similar stuff from C side, specially if you back in time to GNOME mailing lists, Usenet archives from comp.lang,languagex
As for your posts about C, I can give a personal anecdote: I would agree with those sentiments, C has a lot of really bad problems as a language. But yet, I still write it a lot more often than C++. So It's not as simple as you're making it out to be. Also I checked some of those slides and I wouldn't describe anything there as a "flame war."
>Everything that implies taking sides is politics, no matter what.
If you really want to look at things that way, you could, but this seems to not be strictly true. Just because there is taking sides does not mean there has to be fighting or politics.
On GNOME the documentation seems to have stagnated, then we had Anjuta, now GNOME Builder (which tries to be XCode like), a UI design tool that is being re-written from scratch, the various frameworks don't seem to compose, and then each binding does their own stuff, only adapts a couple of Gtk tutorial samples to their own language.
Naturally being GNU/Linux, everything that falls out of the UI only has POSIX or GNU/Linux specific C APIs to refer back to, yet another experience completely devoid of how things work on macOS (there is no Foundation, Accelerate, Core...).
I find this statement humorous because I've said much the same thing about Linux Desktop GUIs in general. "It's like they were made by someone who's only ever had a GUI described to them in an email". Compared to a system like the original Macintosh or RiscOS that thought hard about how to abstract things for a graphical display and a mouse, or even Windows that just copied as much of that as they could get away with, it's really quite terrible.
This is a vice, not a justification.
Roughly, I'd characterize it like the following: I believe that the best way for Linux to gain ground is to be a serious, perhaps even a little boring, but definitely "grown-up" desktop. Simplicity is very important, but tt should lean toward configurability and techniness.
What it should NOT do is what GNOME is trying to do, which is trying to streamline and appeal to everyone. This approach is like trying to beat Apple at their own game, which is dumb -- given that beating Microsoft at their own game is well within our reach. Heck, look at Windows 11, we're like a third of the way there already.