By "core contributor" I did mean developer but really my point was that there is an explicit gap in the roles of the people involved in these platforms. You have a small group of people explicitly focused on development, and a much larger group of people explicitly focused on usage. Windows and Mac OS X are in the same situation. The best strategy for the people developing these platforms is to focus on a generally applicable UI to accomodate the large heterogeneous group. Ultimately this will result in the platform being more omakase (if you will) and less likely to be everything for everybody, though a decent default.
I don't mean to say that this is a fault with GNOME/KDE themselves but more of a likely unavoidable consequence when you build a product for a large general audience.
If you're a programmer this is really annoying. When something is broken or annoying to you, you have the ability to fix it but because there is so much organization/process/design around these systems, the activation energy is too high.
But if you're a programmer you don't have to deal with this. You can just use a simpler system meant for hackability, a system where the users are the developers.
I see nothing wrong with big vertically integrated Linux systems like GNOME/KDE and in fact I'm glad they exist. If they did not, I would not be able to genuinely recommend Linux to my non-technical friends. Apple has shown the vertical integration is an efficient and successful way to design products for large groups of people, not unsurprising that those systems are mimicking that.
By "core contributor" I did mean developer but really my point was that there is an explicit gap in the roles of the people involved in these platforms. You have a small group of people explicitly focused on development, and a much larger group of people explicitly focused on usage. Windows and Mac OS X are in the same situation. The best strategy for the people developing these platforms is to focus on a generally applicable UI to accomodate the large heterogeneous group. Ultimately this will result in the platform being more omakase (if you will) and less likely to be everything for everybody, though a decent default.
I don't mean to say that this is a fault with GNOME/KDE themselves but more of a likely unavoidable consequence when you build a product for a large general audience.
If you're a programmer this is really annoying. When something is broken or annoying to you, you have the ability to fix it but because there is so much organization/process/design around these systems, the activation energy is too high.
But if you're a programmer you don't have to deal with this. You can just use a simpler system meant for hackability, a system where the users are the developers.
I see nothing wrong with big vertically integrated Linux systems like GNOME/KDE and in fact I'm glad they exist. If they did not, I would not be able to genuinely recommend Linux to my non-technical friends. Apple has shown the vertical integration is an efficient and successful way to design products for large groups of people, not unsurprising that those systems are mimicking that.