> Your problem here is you're not focused on helping rebuild any of this social capital. You're trying to take more of it away and replace it with nothing.

Gnome as a project isn't entitled to that social capital, they have to earn it.

>Instead think like a diplomat, think how you can help others reconsider and patch things up.

The ball really is in gnome's court for this one. Some olive branched they could extend would be some kind of dconf setting to enable typeahead in the file picker, being able to double click the filepicker bread crumbs to show file paths (don't force me to learn gnome specific shortcuts for common functionality), or dozens of other small compromises that don't effect me personally.

It's not my responsibility to be nice to Gnome, or to try to improve Gnome's reputation or community good will.

>they're not in competition for anything. Maybe you think they're in competition for developer time,

Did you read the thread? No one claimed Gnome and SDL/GLFW/Allegro were in competition. That would be insane, to try and say that the simple-directmedia-layer and a DE/gui-toolkit were in competition.

You know who does the window handling for 99% of commercial games on linux? SDL. Also volunteer run.

The SDL developers involved have some very concrete problems that they were trying to discuss civilly. The response from the maintainer? https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217#note_3568...

You may think that's a reasonable response to a technical discussion involving like a half dozen maintainers of other open source software, but it's really not. It's a very rude response to a half dozen very maintainers of very prominent open source projects. SDL alone is a pretty big deal, if SDL is saying that your solution won't work for them then you listen, since basically all commercial application on linux use SDL.

Ultimately libdecor was produced which solved this problem in a way that isn't really great, but is at least acceptable even if it makes all those developers do a bunch of extra work just for gnome. It's a compromise, it means that everybody needs to create an extra special solution just for Gnome and if any other DE tried that SDL would rightly tell them to frig off. You don't think that interaction had any affect on Gnome's good will? It may very well be why the steam deck shipped with KDE by default.

Sure, maybe Gnome's image problem isn't their fault, maybe it's all bullshit and stuff taken out of context, but it's still their problem to solve and the first step is admitting they have a problem.

>Think how you can give back social capital to everyone around you including those you disagree with.

I don't think you understand what I mean by social capital. It means how much people respect the project, basically. How much good will Gnome has in the community. Gnome has, through their actions and decisions, lost my respect. They can earn that back, but it has to come from them.

While we may not be forced to use it, they do throw their weight around and have significant effects on the open source community as a whole, so when they break stuff for people who don't even use gnome that does earn them some enmity.

And that's fine, they don't need my respect, or the respect of any of the other detractors in this thread. They can clearly get along fine without it.

But you're acting like we all owe the Gnome project our respect, and that's something I really don't get. I do think it's recoverable for what it's worth, but stuff like that XDG-decoration thread and seeing how Matthias treated respected members of the open source community, completely disregarding their points and smugly refusing to engage in any technical discussion, well that burns lot of community good will.