Gnome has always been very wannabe Apple philosophy.

More like wannabe Windows philosophy, at least in the early days. Their founding document was called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck" and was all about how the Linux desktop should be architected like Windows, COM components and all.

Isn't KDE similar in that regard? I don't really know, but when I installed a couple of KDE programs, pacman pulled a hundred KDE packages.

I'd argue that is more a symptom of applying the UNIX philosophy, if anything. A lot of those "hundred KDE packages" are very tiny, highly modular libraries that do "one thing". And no, the apps don't depend on the shell. In fact it's often the distros asking us to go a bit more monolithic again to ease the packaging overhead.

Those packages are separate because the system is modular. I assure you, it's more difficult for the team to do it like this, and in many ways it's a welcome feature. The package number might seem insane, but compare the aggregate size of them vs other DEs. It's still not a fair comparison, but it's arguably better than the number of packages.

Either way, many package managers provide groups or patterns to make it easier for an end user to maintain their system. Pacman does have such a feature.

Look, for example, do you prefer to be able to install SDDM just because you like the themeing capabilities, and be able to do so, with just the bare minimum packages; or, install GDM and having to pull the whole GNOME DE as a requirement?

Gnome has an component, Gnome Online Accounts.

It's purpose is to provide and manage account information for applications that need it, so the user doesn't have to configure their email, calendar, whatever, in each application separately. With each application storing passwords in a who knows where, or each implementing their Gmail OAuth.

So it is quite logical, that application that uses accounts will also need gnome-online-accounts.

'Do one thing and do it well` -- how is that anti Unix philosophy?

> With each application storing passwords in a who knows where

GNOME has a keyring system service for storing passwords, so it's not necessary to get the entire desktop shell to access the keyring.

Keyring is another component, specifically for passwords.

GOA is for storing account information: e.g. you configure your Gmail/nextcloud/whatever account once, and then all apps that need it can access it. So your Geary, Contacts and Calendar (separate applications) do not need each to implement account management and account specific auth flows -- not just passwords, OAuth is all the rage nowadays. And I, as the user, do not have to keep tokens in each app current.

It is also not 'entire gnome shell`. Just the required components.

sure but to setup gnome online accounts the official documented way you need gome-control-center, other ways to do seems to not have official documentation and have failed me.

here the required dependency list for control center on arch: accountsservice bolt colord-gtk4 cups-pk-helper gcr gnome-bluetooth-3.0 gnome-color-manager gnome-desktop-4 gnome-online-accounts gnome-settings-daemon gnome-shell gsettings-desktop-schemas gsound gtk4 libadwaita libgnomekbd libgtop libgudev libibus libmalcontent libmm-glib libnma-gtk4 libpwquality smbclient sound-theme-freedesktop udisks2 upower

Isn’t that a gripe about the individual applications?

Applications which are part of GNOME itself probably try to remain small and integrate well into GNOME e.g. Nautilus and Evolution. Applications which aren’t part of GNOME like Gimp or Geeqie rely only Gtk.

It just hurts if you want use a integrated GNOME-Application with a sole window-manager. That makes sense and we shouldn’t blame the developers for modularity and re-using.