>Removing explicit difficulty settings doesn't mean everyone gets the same experience. A well-designed game tailors the difficulty to the skill of the player either by providing progressively harder achievements/endings/sidequests or by dynamically altering the difficulty based on the demonstrated skill of the player.

Dynamically altering with params decided by a some dude, is it really so hard to understand that people are not the same, look at modern games they even give you more options, extremely granular(damage multipliers, crafting multipliers, XP multipliers, ...) tons , we don't need some dev to hard code some numbers in a .cpp file when it can be coded in an .ini/.xml and exposed to the user.

>Completely agree with you that accessibility settings that minimize animation effects, increasing contrast, etc should be supported in every game that needs them. Having said that, GNOME seems about as good as KDE with respect to accessibility settings -- fine but should be better.

GNOME has no choice to support accessibility, I think RH is forced to do it to sell their OS to gov agencies, this why it makes no sense that you allow UI changes only if you label them accessibility, but if a healthy person wants to change the colors or fonts the designer is objecting. I did not moved to Wayland yet but for my case Global Keybord Shortcuts are an acceptability thing, I need to trigger my own scripts (for TTS) with keyboard shortcuts and some time ago this was not supported by Wayland or you needed to do hacks.

>Do you really feel this way? Most games I play do not have some of these settings you mention (bloom, FOV, etc) especially on consoles. I have never felt particularly insulted by this. If anything, I find it more frustrating when I open a new game and the first task I have to complete is "look up three pages of cryptically named settings to get it to run acceptably well" because that makes it feel like the developer gave up 75% of the way through tuning the game for different hardware profiles and just said "screw it, we'll make the player figure it out".

I am not referring to performance tuning, I refer to shit effects that can cause people headache , like camera shake, bloom, weird god rays or flares effects, small FOV or too large FOX, head bobbing.
And 100% I appreciate when a game let's me decide what I should turn off to make the game work smoother, I can give p on grass and other foliage, put shadows on medium or low but I want to keep textures on high. I don't lke whne I don't have a choice. Games like Fallout/Skyurim have a .ini with more tweaks that we players use to turn off reflection, configure grass distance, very good to get the games run on Linux decently and fix weird glitches.

>I am skeptical that GNOME is popular solely because someone is "forcing" Linux users to use it. Most GNOME users I know have tried at least a few other alternatives before settling on GNOME as the least bad option. (Especially once they discover that GNOME's equivalent to "Advanced" settings are called "Tweaks" and "Extensions" which is odd at first but seems to work fine in practice.)

We will never have un-biased data for GNOME but there are studies that show that the default matters a lot. I don't read Linux related articles or podcast anymore so I don't know what is happening, just heard a small rumor that GNOME did something stupid again and it's split it's remaining users again into 2 factions.

So maybe we can agree:

1 settins/features are not free

2 a dev/designer forcing his personal subjective opinion as default and at the same time blocking alternatives is very bad

3 using the majority opinion and forcing it on the minority is also bad, the argument that only 5% use this so let's remove it is stupid, and in fact when features are removed the developers are never transparent with the numbers

4 features for power users need to exist, maybe GNOME can't have a file manager,browser or terminal with Tabs because is too complex but it is stupid to argue that this features are bad in general and this power users are "using it wrong". Better is honesty, "We don't have a file picker because RH pays developers to work on other tickets, and the volunteer want to work on something more sexy, it is a cool feature that we would like to have but we are unable to add it" (really hate the you use the file picker wrong argument)