Sep 26, 2024, 07:26 by daniel.ranc@telecom-sudparis.eu:

Abraham,

Thank you for this rant which i would have been too shy to write myself on the list, but i am completely with you on that issue. I would even add that major applications such as Thunderbird are, at times, subject to very strange bugs and behaviors related to "new features to make it slick", slickness in which i am not interested at all, so that i always install Seamonkey as plan B.

I relate these problems to project governance issues rather than budget problems (which they are constantly invoking). Sad.

Copy to my friend Tarus, who's involved in Open Source matters.

Cheers Daniel

ps. i confess between us that the dinosaur that i am uses FVWM :-)

On 26/09/2024 03:02, Abraham S.A.H. wrote:

...

I have bitten by that too, on three systems that I maintain.  Even on the one which uses Xfce desktop.  This random breaking changes to GTK and Gnome related stuff is disrespectful to users.  And the usuall answer is that “If you don’t like it, use something else!”; but they are damn everywhere.  Gtk used to be the goto universal toolkit on GNU/Linux platform that everyone would use to make his/her app; now they are maintaining and developing it only for Gnome and Adwaita adhering apps.  Anything based on GTK keeps not fitting in any other DE or any machine that Gnome project doesn’t like or care to support.

And worst is, that any complaint anywhere usually results in aggressive or hostile responses.

-- Best Regards, Abraham Sent with Tutanota; >> https://tuta.com

Well, as far as I know, Gnome is one of the most sponsored Free Software projects.  And The most sponsored open source desktop environment.  And developers are mainly employees of the sponsers (mostly by Red Hat). It's often claimed that Gnome is a community project.  Compare it with Emacs, which has about 19 mailing lists; one of them being the development mailing list (emacs-devel) that all development discussions happen openly there.  And one can submit his/her patch or code to be included in Emacs! — and unlike Gnome, they even don't scream being a community software project. Actually, many of Emacs features are from the free volunteers that donated their code; just through this mailing list.  In contrast, in Gnome, even major bug reports get closed as not planned or not supported, or that it’s not a bug in Gnome software, because you installed that package from your distro rather than Flatpak, or you installed that extension from AUR instead of web interface. And basically, there is no easy way for user-developers to change GTK or Gnome DE out of what Gnome project foresees. If a feature is not planned you are not allowed to implement it, even with two or three developers. — Well, seems fair, since you just implement it, but they have to maintain it. All that aside, Gnome project has its board and its developers and sponsors, and they have the right to decide about the direction. All okay. Problem arises when you have to pull in gtk4 and gtk3 packages only for installing ‘ibus’!  Now, that one is ridiculous. And that is my whole point; gtk is everywhere because it was there from when none of these were an issue. -- Best Regards, Abraham Sent with Tutanota; https://tuta.com