GNOME as a platform (and by extension, all of their associated projects which unfortunately includes the Wayland protocol) has such a bizarre worldview - it's like they think they can treat the Desktop OS, with all of its user expectations and existing working software, and remake it as a bigger iPadOS, to no one's actual benefit.
What do I get in return for having to give up all of these things that used to work? It's not faster, it doesn't do extra things I couldn't do before - it's _strictly_ downsides all the way down
It's cool if GNOME doesn't work well for you, but for me it's near-perfect. For sure it's rough around the edges, but what isn't? GNOME helps me get work done, stays out of my way until I need it, etc.
I see so much general hate towards GNOME on HN, and it's really annoying. If it doesn't work for you, great, I'd like to hear why. But saying it's "strictly downsides" simply isn't true, nor productive.
Issues with GNOME come down to three inter-related issues.
* Configurability - GNOME goes out of it's way to remove any configurability from their DE. First they move settings to obscure places, next they remove them entirely.
* Compatibility - GNOME devs don't provide solutions for common use cases like window positioning or screen capture (yes I know that screen capture is now supported, but it's a compositor specific implementation rather than actually standardized by Wayland), at the expense of end users with those requirements.
* Consistency - GNOME seems to go out of it's way to do things differently from other mainstream desktop platforms. Windows does typeahead search, macos does typeahead search, KDE does typeahead search, GNOME does their own weird recursive search instead.
On their own each of these isn't a dealbreaker (I can deal with weird defaults if I can change them, I don't need as many settings if the defaults are less weird and don't break my software). But all three together is too much - GNOME looks like they are sitting in an ivory tower trying to dictate their opinions on desktop design to the world while having sub 1% market share. People won't drop window positioning or screen capture just because GNOME devs say so - they'll just not support Wayland. I know at least one real world person who swore off desktop Linux as a whole after Wayland screen capture broke at a critical time.
> [screen capture is] a compositor specific implementation rather than actually standardized by Wayland
This isn't actually true anymore. The standard way to do screen capture on Wayland is to use the org.freedesktop.portal.ScreenCast portal. AFAIK that's supported on pretty much every compositor these days.
It's great that it works for you. It doesn't work great for a lot of other people.
The hate is because the "Gnome developers" (and that's an unfair generalization on my part, but let's run with it anyway) have a long history of saying This is the One True Way to do various things, and unlike most other Linux DEs, Gnome has positioned itself as a general-purpose system, and it has the most commercial backing of any other DE. There have even been cases where every other DE wants some Wayland thing one way but Gnome devs want it another way. Gnome developers go so far as to attempt to rationalize why other use cases or desires aren't even valid (which is offensive).
In other words, the hating on Gnome isn't necessarily that Gnome itself is inferior to other systems, it's that some Gnome developers (and many interactions when it comes to standardization and interoperability) are condescending, dismissive, and they insist on imposing their (technical) will on the whole Linux GUI ecosystem.
My criticism isn't of GNOME en masse, but of this Attitude of "The users must be protected from apps and also from themselves". Other posts have outlined some of the concrete issues related to these decisions - usually when developers choose to intentionally remove functionality and knowingly cause user pain, it is in the service of some greater benefit; "This sucks, but users will have a net gain in the end"
My point is, the "net gain" simply isn't there - it's unclear if there is any gain at all from these decisions that plainly cause user difficulty!
What do I get in return for having to give up all of these things that used to work? It's not faster, it doesn't do extra things I couldn't do before - it's _strictly_ downsides all the way down