What would it take for something not to qualify as being "unreasonably obstructionist" to you? If there's an open source desktop project that has infinite resources to redesign and rewrite everything at will at a moment's notice, then please let me know. I'll gladly use it. Hell, I'll sign up as a developer.

Have GNOME devs yet acknowledged that XFCE exists? In one now infamous exchange with Transmission developers a GNOME dev claimed that he didn't even know what XFCE was and, furthermore, that cross platform applications like Transmission should choose whether they would be "GNOME apps or XFCE apps", suggesting that they can't be both. The context of this exchange was that GNOME developer asking that a feature be removed from Transmission because GNOME would no longer support it.

That's just one example, but GNOME has a reputation for not respecting Linux desktop diversity for a reason.

I had to dig up the comment you're talking about but just to put this in perspective: You are forming your current opinion about entire communities based on one comment made by one developer 10 years ago. I'm fascinated by all this open source that's out there but if you told me that a developer had to know every single open source desktop out there in order to contribute to one of them then I can't really get behind that. It's very hard to keep track of what everyone's doing all the time.

But in any case I don't understand what is contentious about that. Some pieces are shared between GNOME and XFCE, but a lot of pieces are different and applications have always needed to choose. If they weren't trying to be different they wouldn't have made a separate desktop environment with their own separate libxfce libraries and components. (To GNOME's credit, they have gotten rid of most of the "libgnome" things since then, but now an application that wants to speak to certain GNOME-specific pieces is usually expected to use their private dbus protocols, things that XFCE would never implement anyway)

> You are forming your current opinion about entire communities based on one comment made by one developer 10 years ago

Incorrect. I am using a single example to illustrate a trend. A single example to illustrate what "unreasonably obstructionist" looks like. That particular incident made everybody roll their eyes but it hardly surprised anybody because GNOME has earned this reputation. Even back then nobody was particularly surprised by the GNOME arrogance, and I've not seen this change.

(Also, maybe I'm getting old but 10 years ago really isn't that long ago.)

Please don't use this kind of hyperbole. It's really not an interesting conversation when it leads into platitudes like "everybody did this" and "nobody did that" and "an entire group of people is arrogant and obstructionist" which neither of us have any way of proving or disproving. I wish this open-source-holy-war type of comment was not so common on Reddit and HN, it's about as constructive as the endless Emacs and Vim flame wars.

If you're trying to illustrate the trend that GNOME and XFCE (and KDE, and LXQT, and MATE, and Budgie, and Mint...) all have different goals and ideas for how applications should behave then yes, I would say that much is obvious by now, and it has only gotten more obvious over the last few years. If you have a technical solution to this then I'd love to hear it, but aside from that I don't care to bicker about whose fault it is that your applications broke, because honestly no answer is going to pleasing for you to hear. Unless I'm mistaken then we aren't paying customers, this is all just random no-warranty open source and there's no support hotline that's going to care about what's broken.

Transmission never broke. GNOME devs requested that Transmission break itself on non-GNOME platforms. Falling back on 'well you're not paying anything' really does nothing to dispel the perception that GNOME devs don't play nice with others. If anything, it cements it.

If nothing broke then I don't see what the problem is. And, your assertion doesn't even seem to be correct. I re-read the bug and it's one GNOME developer suggesting for changes to be made only in GNOME 3, because support for a particular feature was deprecated upstream. The developer is apologetic and later goes on to make suggestions about what can be done in Ubuntu and XFCE. I see nothing there about "GNOME devs requesting that Transmission break itself." https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

I'm not trying to dispel any perceptions either, if you have a deep seated belief that GNOME (or XFCE, or anything really) are "not playing nice" because they removed features from upstream, there's nothing I can really say to you to change that view. If you want to challenge your own perceptions, I'd suggest you start developing a new open source desktop and application platform yourself over a period of many years just to see how much work it is, and how it's practically impossible to support everything that every app developer asks for when none of them are paying you a cent.