I've already made my point: GNOME used to be my favorite desktop, now it is my least favorite. Over the past 4 comments I've suggested several reasons for why this might be, none of them hateful towards the GNOME project in any way. The only antagonist has been you, the person insisting that the issue is with me, not the desktop: that somehow, by removing features and breaking functionality that worked fine, it's my fault for not assimilating into your common idea of a desktop. As I can see by scrolling through your comment history, it looks like a lot of people share my sentiment. I will give you one final explanation before completely forgetting about you altogether. I'm done entertaining your time-wasting, gas-lighting nonsense, and I'm not going to let you play Mr. High-road to help you feel better about patronizing someone on Hacker News.

- GNOME's philosophy and leadership is overtly, undeniably authoritarian. They lock people out of using apps by refusing to distribute via any method other than Flatpak, they lock down their desktop to make it harder for modders to do what they want, and they completely ignore their power-users who prefer more options and functionality. 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. For everything that GNOME copies from Apple, "you're holding it wrong" should have been left on the cutting room floor.

- 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. As a developer, trying to conform to the GNOME spec is pointlessly complicated and ultimately meaningless. I still write everything with GTK3 and zero GNOME conformance just as a middle finger to the direction they're headed in. Plus, GNOME's dependencies are bloated, only exacerbated by projects like Flatpak that containerize and further bloat the runtime. There have been a plethora of font-related issues since pango was 86'd, and no shortage of graphical issues on both Wayland and x11. 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.

- GNOME has just been regressing. Tools that used to work, like Glade, now do not. 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, 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? How do you look at that and interpret it as everyone else's fault, because they were never supported in the first place. Same goes for user themes, shell patches and tweak tools. They are all a testament to the fact that people want to extend GNOME, so your next logical step should not be blocking them out. At this rate, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me QT apps were unsupported because they're "not a part of the overall GNOME vision."

- GNOME's got people like you. What do I mean by that? It's not an insult, but I feel like if I don't explain this to you I'll be persecuted until the end of time. When interacting with the community, your job is not to refute other people's complaints. Your job is to listen, and see where people disagree with your philosophy. You cannot pretend like there aren't pain-points in GNOME, so trying to delegitimize other people's experiences will only frustrate them and drive them away. THIS is how people really start to despise the GNOME desktop. If I level a complaint about KDE, XFCE, or hell, even the goddamn Elementary desktop, I generally get a thoughtful response with someone showing me how to resolve the issue, or pointing to an upstream patch that fixes it. Apparently, some people care about maintaining a usable desktop. You can call things like thumbnails in the filepicker inconsequential, but don't come crying to me when you can't understand why people have an irrational hatred of your desktop. The issue starts with attitude, and the culture of GNOME is quite obviously not improving. No amount of CoC pull requests can fix that, especially when project leaders are flying off the handle at System76 for trying to improve on their desktop. It's a horrible look.

I really hope you reply with a long-winded essay in the name of saving face. I really hope you ignore everything I've written like you ignored my simple request for you to stop. At this point, I feel like my assumptions have been reinforced: I still have yet to meet a GNOME developer who was not insistent on being right and harassing people with legitimate criticism. You've seen my comments: I've spent far too much effort trying to be constructive, when all I'd be told in the end is that it's my fault for not using it right. Why bother? Why even have these discussions if we're just going to end them with a pointless us-vs-them fight where you ultimately tell me to stop using GNOME if I disagree. The least you could do is point me in the direction of someone who's capable of making change, because fighting like this wastes both of our time. Yet, you hunt me down on every comment as if my opinion is haram, and needs to be struck down with links to desktop's philosophy or whatever. I don't care. I simply need a computer that does the job: GNOME doesn't do it anymore.