>Correct. I prefer having those 1.6 gigabytes of dependencies handled with the rest of my system packages, rather than having them fragmented across separate package managers.

Well now this is different from what you said before. If you only use flatpak (or nix) for those packages, there is no fragmentation.

>I reckon most people would also prefer that, if given the choice.

I don't, I see a lot of people who have no problem with flatpak. Disk space is cheap these days.

>Flatpak is floated as the solution to this precise problem: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787

>Instead of fixing the internal issue with GTK's text rendering, their official suggestion is to just uninstall everything and use Flatpak so you can get their monkeypatches

No, not really. It is a workaround suggested by the reporter, specifically as a temporary means to avoid some regression. No developer is going to say that's a permanent solution.

>I personally don't see Flatpak lasting very long, and I'd rather contribute to projects like the AUR or NixOS that have a longer legacy of stability and more reasonable responses to legitimate community concerns.

That's fine, but just understand that this attitude from those who are in the position to help is the reason why known bugs go unfixed. AUR and NixOS also do not solve the problem, nor can they fix upstream concerns in the community, so you're still not helping much by expecting them to do everything.

>The file portal is bullshit

No, this is wrong. It enables the very thing you want to happen.

>and contributors like the one in the parent thread goes to show that they don't give a shit about people who don't use GNOME.

Actually, it shows the complete opposite. I really don't know how you can see anything else. The change was completely because it was causing bad breakage on KDE.

>I'm not waiting 23 years to put a tiny preview of a photo in my file manager.

That's not that bad in open source, honestly. If you really want to talk missing features, I have been waiting for even longer for KDE developers to make a viable alternative for programs like MS Office, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc :)

>I moved to KDE as soon as libadwaita hit stable repos

Switching desktops seems almost like a rite of passage for Linux users. There's nothing wrong with it. GNOME is not going to go out of their way to please users happy with KDE, just like KDE is not going to go out of their way to please users happy with GNOME. It is unreasonable to expect them to.

>GNOME's developers have been gaslighting community members and other projects for close to a decade now, to the point that I see their contribution as overall hostile to the Linux community (Linus Torvalds calling GNOME a "waste of CPU cycles" famously).

That is out of line in the current world. Torvalds has apparently changed his tune on that, he now uses Fedora: https://www.zdnet.com/article/look-whats-inside-linus-torval...

>Nothing they build unifies the community or takes pointers from their criticism anymore. When I try to imagine the Linux desktop without GNOME, I don't imagine catastrophe. I think everything would be fine, same as it has been for the 30-some years we used x11 without breaking basic functionality.

I am sure hardcore GNOME fans feel the same way about KDE. Actually I have heard both sides say as much, countless times over the last 20 years in fact.

>Arguing about this with people online is a waste of time, I should have just left it at my opinion and walked away.

It is not an argument unless you make it one. Remember, it takes two to tango.