Hot take: good riddance.

@vkc I have no issue with people that prefer GNOME. Choice is good.

What isn't good is :

1) 'a valid user of Linux' is a problem, right there. *Unix* is not just Linux. I understand this is (hopefully) shorthand, but still..

2) Middle button gate. Good : doing your own unique thing. Bad : potentially excluding people and discounting their workflow for no good reason. *Especially* when it did work, and then does not.

3) Using GNOME as a shortcut for making Wayland accessible. Not really a GNOME issue, but if the only way to make Wayland usable for various groups is a specific compositor such as GNOME rather than fixing Wayland to work with *all* compositors, it's a real issue that restricts the choice of using Unix.

@vkc hear hear!

@vkc Middle-click paste is one of those "weird Unix" interaction things that really requires other "weird Unix" things to work well, namely focus-follows-mouse and the concept of an X11-like selection mechanism.

It broke when scrollwheels took over the middle button.

It broke when you slipped while bringing a window to the front, thus causing a selection in *that* other window, and thus losing the selection from the first one that you intended to middle-paste.

I loved it in 1996; not anymore.

@vkc I've never had GNOME prevent me from using another desktop!

I have, however, had another desktop prevent me from using GNOME.

@tragivictoria
Oh cool! You'd know more than me

I try not avoid making assumptions that aren't already save or measurable empirically. I was elaborating on the the cause and effect of GNOME, their actions and how they are received by the larger FOSS community.

GNOME are free to act in accordance with how the foundation and the collective from which it is composed wish to manage the development of their software and surrounding community. There are social consequences however, to neglecting the needs and interests of the people using it.

Telling someone to go fork the software or go elsewhere is not a reasonable response nor conductive to keeping a healthy community and userbase. It only communicates that you are not interested in considering external output which will rightfully make the people who use and are invested in GNOME and its ecosystem rightfully frustrated.

That is why my previous post outlines and urges the necessity of listening to your community and move in lock step with them or else you'll end up in the same circumstance that GNOME currently is.

@DiogoConstantino@masto.pt @vkc@linuxmom.net

@peterrenshaw @aj If Gnome works for you, that's great, but I suspect you're ascribing it functionality that is Linux specific or unrelated to gnome.

The move from CRT monitors to TFT, and EDID existing on everything helped a lot. xf86, and xorg, became largely self configuring.

Unfortunately I have to let you know that if you're running modern xorg *right now* on a CRT (even one with proper EDID) it may still be necessary to manually configure configurations. If you're using multiple GPUs, gnome will not help, because it runs after X starts. I know this because FreeBSD is merrily telling me 'you have to manually specify the GPU' today.

Wayland is 'better' if by 'better' you define 'it starts without configuration', but not if 'it delivers all functionality that could be reasonably expected regardless of the compositor in use'.

Although X configuration files were and are, agreed, A Pain they worked *everywhere*. As opposed to multiple options for compositors, which may not work at all!

@vkc every time I interact with the GNOME developers the way I interact with normal parts of the open source community (i.e., come to collaborate, bearing patches and bug reports, seeking to improve the software), I am met with inexplicable rancor and disrespect. everyone knows GNOME for this pattern of user-hostility. that's why people are emotionally charged

@vkc Oh…my…gosh. I've never liked GNOME (or KDE). But so 🤬 what? My spouse, who is not a programmer, has enjoyed every version of GNOME since 1999 & a Linux-based system has been her primary desktop for decades.

I'm vaguely aware that *yet again*; like some kind of clockwork, the world wants to -post about #GNOME for the 2ⁿ-th time.

I gave this #GUADEC keynote 10 years ago directed at these haters; I'm sad it's still relevant,though.

https://sfconservancy.org/videos/2016-08-12_Bradley-Kuhn_GUADEC-2016_Keynote.webm

Cc: @federicomena @ebassi @karen

@vkc part of this is that GNOME seems to hold the stance that users and developers will never be the same people. GNOME does not focus on empowering users to modify and improve their software. it's really at odds with the ethic that permeates most of the free software community, where you shouldn't have to be a developer to use a program, but users are encouraged to change and improve how their computer works for them

@vkc

I'm old enough to remember this behavior dating back to at least CDE on traditional Unix systems like Solaris in the mid-90s, if not earlier. It was a great feature then.

BUT...

That was back when mice looked like this! They had a literal middle mouse button. This design predated the scroll wheel, which was added much later, and merged in as an extremely awkward and unreliable middle mouse button in some cases. The old behaviors make no sense anymore, at least not as default behaviors for most users with modern mice.

@bkuhn @vkc @federicomena @ebassi @karen Funny I just posted almost exactly the same thing a few hours ago.

These people are crazy and should really get a life

@vkc I'm one of the weird people who actually liked Gnome Shell when it first was released, and I still use it now. I also cut my baby Unix teeth using SunOS on Sparc stations in the early/mid 90's with X11, landing on fvwm as my wm of choice (I still miss middle click root context menus). I love middle click paste and I suspect that if it does get removed from Gnome core, somebody will build an extension to add it back. It's the beauty and curse of F/OSS: a myriad of options.

@vkc I'm not a fan of GNOME because it doesn't work for me but for some it does. Whats great about Linux is the choice. I love using DWM but many don't. Thats fine.

@vkc well I use it quite much, often to copy 2 things at once, like both URL and text to avoid another round trip to another window.

But then I use KDE, so…

@vkc I'm a heavy user of "middle click to paste" so I'd definitely be annoyed if it were removed. Having it opt-in is something I can live with.

I was similarly annoyed when "start typing to jump to a file in Nautilus" was removed and have in fact installed a patched version in some machines to add it back.

That said, I'm a big fan of GNOME's focus on design in general and I think it's great that they're revisiting what an interface *can* be like rather than just following along with old ideas

@vkc probably getting too close to the year now, but I normally recommend GNOME to people who want a "what did desktop and mobile computing look like in 2030" experience

I've also been surprised to see GNOME features pop up in places like Android and Windows from time to time. Of course, since I use GNOME much more it doesn't necessarily mean the other people copied all of them; maybe they had some of them before but I just noticed it in GNOME first. Either way, the ideas are all very neat

@vkc and let's not forget that they're now looking mobile-wards too. I wouldn't be surprised if GNOME's focus on responsive design helped make more well-running #Phosh friendly programs too! (Not to discount the enormous efforts Phosh themselves have put in of course)

@bruce @vkc

Middle click was a feature inherited from X11, and so I think they were thinking of disabling it under wayland because it's somewhat surprising behavior for new users.

I think I saw someone say there'd be an option to turn it back on.

@vkc GNOME does have a fairly long history of being the tail that wags the dog; a lot of the freedesktop.org stuff that made desktop environments objectively worse in measurable ways ... came from GNOME, and was rammed through because it had the funding and distro backing. For example, it used to be that if you asked for a 12 pt font, you got a font that was actually 12/72 of an inch baseline spacing on your actual monitor ... but now you don't, and that's absolutely on GNOME.