GNOME is a perpetrator as well. I usually check the GNOME release notes (since I use GNOME on my NixOS laptop) and on a semi-regular basis there is a note that says: replaced app X by a completely new rewrite Y. And there is still no support for basic things like marking up/annotating a screenshot, even though the basic image viewer has been rewritten N times (anyone remember Electric Eyes?).
With the history of unclear alignment, it would be foolish for everyone to rely on Gnome.
But there's a ton of investment and value in that platform. (Much of it before Gnome even started, but now under the Gnome umbrella.)
So "competition" has been giving us alternatives.
Maybe ongoing competition will help keep pressure on Gnome, to be closer to aligned with the user bases.
I have no hope for GTK. It is a GNOMEy toolkit now.
G(nome)T(ool)K(it). It always was. It is a CADT program: every new version is a complete and incompatible implementation of the old version.
I believe it was the "Gimp Tool Kit" originally, and Wikipedia agrees:
> GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit[3] and GTK+[4]) is a free open-source widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs)[5]
Maybe the confusion is that it was sometimes called "GTK+" in the brand name originally (though most people just said "GTK" anyway, and that's what the code identifiers said).
Gimp (the photo/image editor) was already pretty sophisticated for years before Gnome was even started.
The first Gnome-branded library that I recall in the GTK space was Gnome Canvas.
The earlier commenter's point stands. Though my impression was that GTK was de facto taken over by Gnome around GTK 3 (though you could still write GUI apps without bringing in the fleet of Gnome desktop services).
I understand people here and there on forums express discontent, but I don't think that demographic is big enough to drive both significant development and the adoption that makes development sustainable.
You must not be that curmudgeonly! I haven't tried Wayland yet, and so long as people are still arguing about it, I'm too afraid to even try it. :-)
Wayland is only one of the many Gnome desktop feature and technical decisions that not everyone agrees with. Some decisions are regressions, and outright defective, for years and counting.
There's an awkward situation, in which the companies paying for the programmers effectively get to decide, and the governance doesn't necessarily reflect the user base. But, like "they who has the gold, makes the rules", they who does the work...
So the healthy competition comes in when someone someone can afford to spend time to build alternatives. Sometimes expending effort just to undo changes of someone else, on a fork.
For example, when Gnome decided to take the desktop behavior in their own creative direction, the Cinnamon project gave everyone back a more familiar and intuitive desktop, which continued to work with all the application programs that people had been using.
(Strangely, Cinnamon seems more an enterprise-desktop look&feel drop-in replacement than the default Gnome desktop. When I would've guessed Gnome corporate funders would've been focused on getting Linux desktop on corporate desktop as their first priority, and then second priority would be mobile. But I don't see the default Gnome desktop getting them either. Cinnamon, on the other hand, is immediately usable by any corporate worker who's used any Microsoft desktop since Windows 95.)
Already a decade ago, I commented on a news-for-nerds site like this one, “Well, GNOME makes choices we don’t like, but they are focused on the corporate-desktop market.” But then a GNOME developer replied to correct me: “That’s an old misconception, we are not mainly focused on the corporate desktop”. So who exactly they are designing for, remains a mystery to me.
it seems to have better display scaling which is useful when I switch between large monitor and laptop screen.
It’s really disappointing how often disagreements in the open source world turn into religious wars. I think it’s because so many would rather yell and scream than contribute a single line of code. So much wasted energy.
A lot. I have no idea how to start "Wayland" on Slackware. I use FVWM.
OTOH, i saw Wayland in Tails. It is slow and ugly as hell, window managent is nonexistent.
Competition in this space has been everything except healthy. Wayland people have been essentially sabotaging X11 development.
Example: people wanting to keep X11 alive have been literally banned from the freedesktop.org infrastructure: https://linuxiac.com/xlibre-xserver-project-plans-revival-of...
> In a dramatic turn of events, Red Hat employees banned developer Enrico Weigelt from the freedesktop.org infrastructure. Weigelt’s account, repositories, tickets, and merge requests (more than 140) associated with the Xorg project were also abruptly deleted. As a result of these actions, in a message titled “History repeats: Redhat censored me on freedesktop.org,”.
(more in the link).
As somebody that has a functioning desktop environment (XFCE) and that doesn't bother much with new stuff, this is incredibly annoying, as the Wayland people have been breaking the linux desktop for everybody while pushing for incomplete alternatives (case in point: another comment to this same thread: wayland breaks accessibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45824341 - they should have first developed it AND THEN push for it but no, they had to push incomplete and non functional garbage down everybody's throat).
I'm not really against Wayland per se, I'm against the fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way.
Yeah - that has been my experience with ebassi etc... too. Also prior to that with Poettering. These people seem on a mission, a crusade. Anyone not conforming to this will be ignored or isolated/banned.
It’s a big change but it wasn’t pushed at early stage: he had a working implementation. No fluff, no bs. After fedora first and rhel later, other distributions followed but nobody’s getting sabotaged or prevented from working on other init systems.
Don’t even get me started on gnome though, and their progressive dumbing down of gnome as a desktop environment…
He is Microsoft's mole.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/12/the_price_of_software...
> fascistoid appoach that wayland people had all along the way
Ironic to promote a far right dev, and demonizing folks who are sick of his shit.
Nate's attempt to defuse this failed dramatically. People become more and more problematic in open source. Many open source projects are turned into personal money-pots for a few, or straight up corporate-controlled shills. I miss the oldschool days here. Those things rarely happened from 2000 to 2010. Now they are suddenly widespread.
Edit: And, DHH sitting on Shopify board and leveraging it for more top-down control at the same time. Watch how former shopify employees jump out of nowhere telling you "we have no such bias", which is hilarious. They never admit to having signed any NDA, for instance; they will simply ignore this question if you ask them.
That being said: i will gladly run working software written from a far right developer rather than half-assed broken software written by a far-left developer. Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Anyway, the thing is: fascist behaviours aren’t an exclusive monopoly of far right people.
I still stand by my point that wayland people have had a fascistoid behaviour all along.
> Politics does not influence my choices in software (quality does).
Then why are you linking to a guy who has been making broken changes?
> Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a display server ("Wayland compositor"). It became the default window manager in GNOME 3,
Gnome alienated some developers around the time of GTK 3, and there have sometimes been regressions, and some opinionated unconventional design choices that everyone else was stuck with. (At the same time there was much positive benefits from the efforts.)
Even though I don't use the default Gnome desktop on most of my systems (I usually prefer XMonad or i3wm atop X11), I still end up using applications programs written to GTK and Gnome libraries.
Maybe this even harder push by Gnome on Wayland will drive even more effort into the alternative software, and continue to fuel the healthy competition that (for better or worst) the Linux desktop is stuck with.