>GNOME is most people's first experience of a Linux desktop.

Perhaps that's proof that it isn't as bad as the vocal minority says it is? And if it was really that bad, wouldn't that be the distros' fault for continuing to ship something they know is bad? I don't think you can spin this in any way that makes it GNOME's fault, they didn't force any distros to make it the default.

>If you have an issue with GNOME and you search for it online, not only are you likely to find it's a known and often long-standing issue, you're likely to find it being either closed or ignored so you know there's no point even trying to file it again.

At that point the correct course of action is to fix it yourself or fork it. This is the same as any other open source project. I've had plenty of other open projects close or ignore my issues too, welcome to the club. I don't understand how you can be a developer yourself and still hold GNOME to this unrealistically high standard.

>GNOME developers cannot then turn around and use extensions as an excuse to actively remove working features or dismiss requests for features now standard to every modern DE.

Yes they can? It's their project, they can remove features or dismiss requests for any reason they feel like. You can also do the same in your projects.

>But when user experience is on the line, you have to actually listen to user feedback and make some tough calls that favor users.

No you don't? How many posts have we seen on HN about startups cancelling projects or shutting down because of management or money problems? Nobody likes to make those decisions, it makes the users very angry, but companies have to make them all the time because they have no choice. I know people like to fantasize about open source being different but it really isn't different. If the company employing the maintainers can't figure out how to profit from a feature then it most likely will get ignored or removed after a while. The Linux desktop is also notorious for being a pit of money that nobody can figure out how to profit from hence why a lot of user feedback is just noise. Look at Ubuntu Unity, that was beloved by its users and still it got abandoned because it wasn't profitable. I always found it weird that GNOME has this reputation for making radical changes when I find them to be quite conservative in some areas and reluctant to make changes that would result in the project totally dying off like that.

>At the very least you can't blame the users for reporting the experience the users had, especially when GNOME has already made sure that filing issues constructively is a waste of time so venting on HN is all that's left.

No, this is wrong. I'll say it again, you have the options to fix it yourself or fork the project. Venting is not the only option left and in fact venting is a completely useless option. I've seen so much venting about this on internet forums over the years, it's all the same comments about the same issues and none of it has changed anything in meaningful ways. The bugs that actually do get fixed were because somebody put in the work with the other maintainers and got it done, at no point were they ever helped by somebody ranting at them about how GNOME is bad.

>How many of those things would you say to a brand new Linux user who tried GNOME in earnest and filed a well-meaning bug trying to participate in the community constructively without being a developer?

I wouldn't, I only say these things on HN because the audience here is hackers. All the time I tell new Linux users to use Cinnamon or KDE because those are a bit more familiar to Windows users.

It's actually extremely disappointing to see developers on this forum repeating the same conspiratorial comments and unrealistic demands that you see elsewhere. Just so you know, at one time I made many of the same comments as you. I hated GNOME and refused to use it. Complainers have been saying the same things for decades now every time a new version of GNOME comes out. I was one of them. But still GNOME has lots of users that actually like it and swear by it. So what's going on here? Maybe it could be that the developers who hear feedback from a large sample of representative users on a daily basis might have a different perspective than everyone else? Maybe consider that your view is biased by only reading bugs that you noticed aren't fixed over long periods and are therefore difficult or unrewarding to fix? I know my view certainly was biased when I said those things.