The stupidity and arrogance of GNOME developers

For years developers of one component of GNOME argued that my fix for a regression they introduced in 2019 was not valid. Only to implement pretty much the same fix years later.

One decade later, GNOME still sucks

It has been more than a decade of GNOME 3's initial release and GNOME still sucks. Two of my most popular posts have been about GNOME 3 (#3 and #5), and in 2023 people still keep referencing them. GNOME 3 is still discussed today as a major blunder, similar to what happened with New Coke, …

GNOME’s horrid coding practices

I stopped using GNOME more than a decade ago, yet my desktop environment of choice--Xfce--keeps using GNOME libraries, and every time I notice a sudden problem, every time it's GNOME's fault. But because I'm a developer, I can track down the problems and fix them myself, though why is it that GNOME developers keep making …

The Linux way: never ever break user experience

Through the years it has become more and more obvious to me that there's two camps in open source development, and one camp is not even aware of how the other camp works (or succeeds, rather), often to their own detriment. This was blatantly obvious in Miguel de Icaza's blog post What Killed the Linux …

The problem with GNOME 3

Since I started using Linux I used GNOME, v1.2 in those times. It has always done what I needed, maybe not perfectly, and not fully, but for the most part. GNOME 3 changed all that. I complained about GNOME 3 since day one, and I discussed with GNOME 3 developers many problems with their rationale …

Top 10 suggestions from the 2011 GNOME user survey

I've taken the time to read one by one the suggestions from the 2011 GNOME user survey, I've only managed to read 20% of them so far, but I don't think they will shift that much (I might update this post if they do). The next version of the survey will have these and other …

Analysis of the 2011 GNOME user survey results

Last year Phoronix launched the 2011 GNOME user survey, an effort I initiated to try to give a voice to GNOME users, a voice I though was sorely lacked. I knew the effort wasn't going to be accepted by GNOME developers, because through the years they have always rejected anything that resembles user feedback: surveys, polls, brainstorm, …

No, GNOME doesn’t want user feedback; how I argued in favor of voting in bugzilla, and got banned as a result

I have long been an advocate for listening to the users (see this old thread in in GNOME's ml), and through the years I have discussed over and over with GNOME developers why it's important to listen to your users, and why they are barely doing it. However, that hasn't prevented me to cooperate in …

After two weeks of using GNOME 3, I officially hate it

I knew I was going to hate GNOME 3 even before trying, but Zeeshan insisted that my opinion wasn't worth much without giving GNOME 3 a fair chance. So we made a deal, I would use GNOME 3 for a couple of weeks, and then I could say GNOME 3 sucks, at least with measure …

Getting proxy support on GNOME; for real (libproxy-simple)

If you open gnome-network-properties and setup your proxy accordingly you would notice that most network applications don't really work. There are several reasons for that. Since as long as I can remember I have looked for a way to add proxy support on my applications. There has been a number of network libraries, none of …