Anyway I was thinking about this and I decided I want to respond to some of your comments to correct some of the wrong information in them. This isn't for me, it's for the reader who might get the wrong idea, and it's for you in case you change your mind and decide you want to discuss this. If you don't want to believe me and you still think I'm doing this just to be a smug jerk and make myself look good, well, I'll say it right out. I don't matter, I'm not a person of importance, I'm not here to promote my projects or my company or my blog or my twitter or anything. I only comment here to help people and help resolve the technical issues. That's it. I don't care how you think this makes GNOME look because I don't represent that project, if you take my comments as some kind of slight against something else unrelated to what I'm saying then that's on you. It's none of my business if you've got an axe to grind, I can only try to mitigate the damage. I'm going to avoid the personal stuff because I think I already responded to those.

"GNOME's philosophy and leadership is overtly, undeniably authoritarian."

This is totally wrong, GNOME explicitly doesn't have any BDFL or CTO or anything like that. It's more of an old school open source community like that. KDE is structured much the same way. The way it works is that the maintainers of each individual project are pretty much empowered to do whatever they want. Yes, this means they have authority of their individual projects. No, it does not mean they are enforcing that authority on you or they will never collaborate with anyone. A consensus has to be reached, if you don't want to deal with that then you still can do whatever you like with the project and the code, that's the point of open source. You could later collaborate with upstream or spend your volunteer time however you like really, what you can't do is boss anyone else around and tell them what to do with their volunteer time. As you've noticed, they probably won't take kindly to that. And I've personally experienced that on every project when you reach their limit: for example if you went to KDE and said "I don't like this, rewrite it in Java and make it more like GNOME" they probably wouldn't be too keen to take that suggestion. So I don't think you're being charitable when you try to label GNOME in this way.

"They lock people out of using apps by refusing to distribute via any method other than Flatpak"

This is totally wrong, pretty much every distro I've seen is shipping GNOME apps. I think there is a misconception here that GNOME (or KDE, or any desktop really) has anything to do with distro packages. They never have, that's up to the distro to handle. You can help out here by doing the packaging for your distro, if the app is open source then nobody can lock you out from doing that.

"they lock down their desktop to make it harder for modders to do what they want"

This makes no sense to me, the code is all open source. For me it has been fairly trivial to modify any GNOME app. You may want to try GNOME Builder which is purposefully designed to streamline the process.

"and they completely ignore their power-users who prefer more options and functionality."

I don't think those users are being ignored, if they were then extensions wouldn't exist at all. Are there issues with extensions? Yes, but that's a different conversation which I'll mention later.

"On top of that, their 'my way or the highway' approach is completely user hostile, further evidenced by arguments like this, where you refuse to take notes and offer genuine solutions for the needs of the user."

You are ignoring my comments. I've actually suggested multiple times that we could discuss genuine solutions, I just did in the post you replied to.

"GNOME's featureset is encroaching on basic system functionality, which has not only proven to be a pain in the ass, but it's actually counter-intuitive to basic UNIX functionality. Efforts like dconf have legitimately done nothing for this community, yet their dumpster-fire glow can be seen for miles"

This doesn't really make sense to me and I don't understand what you mean counter-intuitive to basic unix functionality. Dconf is just a file in your home directory. It can be controlled by command line tools and environment variables just like anything else in Unix/Linux. Also you do not even have to use Dconf, you can change the configuration backend although it may take some work. If someone is interested I can suggest ways to do this.

"I still write everything with GTK3 and zero GNOME conformance just as a middle finger to the direction they're headed in."

From my own experience I would advise not to do this. It's making things more difficult for yourself for bad reasons. I've tried to develop projects out of spite before and it didn't get far, it just hurt me, it hurt my users and it wasted everyone's time. It's best to use whatever makes you the most productive and don't worry about what others are doing.

"GNOME's dependencies are bloated, only exacerbated by projects like Flatpak that containerize and further bloat the runtime"

I can't agree with this, one of the reasons I think Flatpak has taken off is because it minimizes the runtime. The Flatpak SDK is actually smaller than my distro's GNOME packages. Yes GNOME does have a lot of libraries if you look at all of them but so does KDE, that's the price you pay for having a lot of features. And I think all those libraries have been a boon to app developers, they seem to really like using them.

"It's crazy to me that the GNOME desktop has had one of the ugliest transitions to a window server they've been advocating for years."

Yeah me too but the work is hard. Sadly X11 has caused some very real and serious technical debt that everyone is still paying down. Also I don't know what you mean Pango was 86'd. Pango is still around.

"GNOME has just been regressing. Tools that used to work, like Glade, now do not."

I assure you, nobody is particularly happy that Glade doesn't work anymore. The project has suffered from a serious lack of contributors and there is only one or two people working on the replacement. The GUI building functionality in GTK4 is actually a massive improvement but that's also made it technically difficult to bring a new GUI builder over to it. If somebody wanted to help out with it I'm sure that would be appreciated.

"Extension stability has gotten worse, which is a shame since extensions are undeniably a part of GNOME. You can tell me that they're unsupported, you can shout at me for using them"

This again is not helpful. I assure you nobody is happy that extensions are unstable, and nobody is happy to be making users upset every release when their extensions break. I'm not shouting at you for using them but you deserve to know: they're still unstable for very real reasons and you are making things more difficult for yourself by trying to push back against this rather than just acknowledging the limitations of the system and working within them. It's non-trivial to take an extension and make it supported. People are doing ongoing work on resolving this but it's a very hard problem, I think they're still looking for help too. I can suggest ways to help out here.

"but if your users have to create their own custom modding options for your desktop, is that not a signal that you're feature-incomplete?"

You could look at it this way but IMO the problem with this line of thinking is that some extensions conflict with each other. You can look in the extension list right now and see multiple extensions that just aren't compatible and will never work with each other because they fundamentally change the GUI in different ways. Just look at how many custom dock extensions there are for example. You could say "well just build in a dock and make it customizable" but that wouldn't make everybody happy either because the extensions allow a lot more customization than would be possible with just a built-in dock. So in that way it's not really possible to ever make it feature complete, some people are always going to disagree about how this goes. Plasma has the same issue and they sort of deal with it by having a large choice of Plasma Widgets, it would be nice if GNOME had something like that but it's difficult because GNOME is architected somewhat differently than Plasma and extensions are technically more powerful than Plasma Widgets.