> There is one main reason I can think of. GNOME is the most used desktop environment, therefore it is the most susceptible to gain demands and pressure from users and companies.

Being the biggest isn't cause enough for this perception.

GNOME, in the past decade, put itself in a remarkable position of prioritizing a perpetual-neophyte persona, who did not & didn't want to understand computers, and rebuilt the product around that persona. For a corporate desktop, where random people are handed GNOME & told they have to use 1 app or maybe 2 or 3 on a computer, this is perhaps reasonably well calibrated. Look at many who fund GNOME Project, and this vision makes sense. But GNOME is a Linux desktop environment, and they have Linux users, and it turns out this chosen persona GNOME Project fixated on doesn't only not line up very well, it actively rejects the premise of supporting the explorer, the tinkerer, the hobbyist, the learner. GNOME Project is quite literally the most visible open-source project on the planet, yet it has the most actively anti-open behavioralism & targeting of probably any open-source project. It's chosen a bounded mission, a narrow one, with incredibly bounded behaviors, and that runs counter to the open-source spirit of possibility & exploration.

> If you dislike the GNOME Project’s philosophy, then the solution is to simply not use GNOME.

In case you missed it the first time the author said it, the author comes back to re-confirm: GNOME is "my way or the highyway."

GNOME is uniquely unflexible in almost all open source software in being so narrowly focused. Unlike most open source software, where adding features & options is usually acceptable in some form or another, given compromise, GNOME believes in their one and only one persona, in the overarching vision of an extremely limited capabilities user. I can think of no other project that makes anti-flexibility such a priority, except maybe suckless, and frankly their extreme conservatism & excess of attitude & loudless is quite a turn off as well.

I've painted a pretty grim picture of what I think of GNOME Project, and I'm sorry to shove them under the bus like this because I think there are noble ideas mixed in with the totalitarianism. But I think their objectives are delusional & off-base, and need re-assessing dearly, not just because many users don't fit their model, but because their model of what a user is is actively bad & harmful & condescending & makes things worse.

To give a nod to GNOME though, the author's other article on the GNOME libadwaita controversy[1] is fairly good in many ways, & talks through some of the pain & complexity & how difficult it is being such a highly visible project that other folks push-the-boundaries on. Freedom leads to "mis-use," what GNOME Project seemingly lives in mortal fear of. The article isn't perfect; I think their KDE examples are 98% horseshit justification (the first qt5ct example feels like strong support that themes work to me, not that they are bad, and most of the rest of the examples are of bad hardcoding that apps should fix, not systematic issues. And the net positive of not needing fractional scaling & being able to adjust your theme seems enormous.). But the support burden experienced by GNOME seems legitemate & real: flexibility has problems. Being an absolutist project that believes in yourself & picks a way & tells everyone else to hit the highway, we don't want to do it is indeed a powerful technique to maintain quality & reduce support burden.

This all circles back to a topic I mention time and time again: the Cathedral and the Bazaar. The "Bazaar" model of software development is complex & hard & there's always unpolished things happening at the edge & sometimes pieces of it stop making sense. There's a alluring temptation to centralize, to pull in, to stop exploring, to obstruct users from going off the careful paths you've built for them, to marshal control. Many people in the world cry out that we must give up the Bazaar and instead build "Cathedrals." GNOME Project decided at some point to become Cathedral builders. And that means telling a lot of people to hit the highway. And alas, it often seems like a Cathedral built primarily corporate users, not actual living flesh & blood humans.

Postscript: as with most do-we-or-don't-we software discussions, I highly recommend "Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus"[2] for more framing, that talks about stances of acceptance vs control. It's helpful to think of GNOME in this framing & it's helpful to think of your own & others around you's approach to code. Recommend.

[1] https://theevilskeleton.gitlab.io/2022/07/28/libadwaita-fixi...

[2] https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150