Why did it take so long? That was really annoying.

Yet-- not annoying enough for you to make the change yourself? It's open source, not owed to you.

Yeah, if you're not an experienced developer with the necessary skills and free time to fix an issue then you shouldn't be allowed to say anything even remotely negative about it. Everyone who uses Linux should learn C (and every other language used to write common software), become experienced with Linux development (at every level of the stack - got a kernel bug? better learn kernel dev too), and then fix every bug they run into across the myriad of software they use - otherwise they should shut up. /s

That idiocy aside, there are legitimate reasons why someone may be unable to contribute to particular projects (especially ones like Wine) even if they possess the required technical ability. For example I am disqualified from contributing to Wine for legal reasons.[1]

[1] https://wiki.winehq.org/Developer_FAQ#Who_can.27t_contribute...

This misses the fact that not everyone can make this change. This kind of thinking is rampant in the Linux communities and is not entirely helpful. Maybe we can come up with a better way to respond to these users, and help make them feel like Linux is more inclusive.

There are various commercial distributions of WINE like Crossover that are also much easier to use. E.g. CrossOver from Codeweavers which upstreams their code. Or just a commercial Linux distro.

The answer is that those with the ability did not find it sufficiently annoying. You can motivate them with a carrot next time by finding one of the people and paying them to fix it.

To be clear, "bug" as in something found in the bug tracker. It was a feature request, not a bug in the sense of broken behavior. This is different from e.g. Thunderbird randomly opening the preview pane.