Re: @ovation1357 - What a hypocrite!
AC - That's simply not true and by posting a link to Linux from scratch you show a fundamental lack of understanding of this problem - not least that if I built my own distro from scratch I would still be impacted by this as soon as I wanted to use Firefox or Chrome or Thunderbird or GIMP or Libre Office and many other major applications.
The GNOME team are making a concerted effort to completely remove support for some of the standard user interface elements that we've all been used to for 30+ years. They're so set in their opinion that the title bar of a window is a waste of space and that hamburger menus are the future, that they're ripping out support for even having the free choice to do it differently.
If I were to 'make it better' to suit my needs as you so helpfully suggest there is no way in Hell that those guys would accept a pull request from me to add the very features they've just purposefully removed..
I'm not unjustified in being angry about this. Just because it's 'free' doesn't mean that people have no right to complain, nor that we should just accept inconsiderate changes.
Let's also not forget that there is loads of commercial backing for GNOME - it's a big project and it's got money and paid developers. I'm not having a pop at the kind hearted individuals who give up hours of their spare time to maintain some crucial library or essential utility - it's only the corporate stooges who have the level of power and control to make changes this big.
I personally don't care what GNOME does to it's own desktop - they already lost me years ago when they suddenly abandoned GNOME2 and offered a buggy, experiential and hugely different environment in its place; but I care very much when they impact other desktops...
Like many others who aren't interested in fashionable GUIs I switched to the MATE desktop as a way forward. It's been a stable solution for me for about 10 years now. Others went to Cinnamon and XFCE and have enjoyed similar peace and stability. One thing these all have in common is a heavy reliance on Gnome's GTK3 library. The environments are built on it and it's an essential component because practically every major desktop application in the Linux ecosystem is built on it. So it is just plain wrong of GNOME Foundation to dictate to that whole ecosystem that they now have to draw their user interface in any specific way just because some dude thinks it'd be way cooler to have hamburger menus and popovers.
Firefox and Thunderbird are leading examples of applications which still give users a choice to enable a classic menu bar although there's a distinct danger of that opting being removed in a future version of GTK.
It really wouldn't have been very difficult for GNOME to design this new UI code to be configurable and to give people a choice of classic Vs alternative. It wouldn't be that hard to allow adaptable menu/UI code that you can write once and then render different ways but instead the few developers who have kept giving users a choice are having to maintain two separate blocks of code. Most have just deleted the traditional menu code and rewritten it the new GNOME way so there's no turning back.
So basically GTK based UIs are now screwed with no easy way of fixing them. Even if GNOME had a change of heart it would be hard to persuade all the various projects to redevelop their UI and menus again so soon.
The options are grim:
Stay on older versions of everything to avoid this, which is obviously unsustainable.
Persuade a _lot_ of projects and developers to re-add classic menus and title bars - Very unlikely.
Fork every single application involved so as to fix the UI - huge amount of work and ongoing maintenance which just creates fragmentation.
Or perhaps to hope that a GTK compatible alternative library (such as STLWRT referenced in the article I linked) is able to render these applications in a classic style mode.
Essentially, the gnome team in its arrogance (and possibly ignorance too if they really didn't foresee this impacting non-Gnome users) has caused a negative change which is already so ingrained as to be near impossible for any individual or small group to reverse.
I'm seriously angry about this and I've had something like 6 months to think about it. It's bad practice and it's the exact opposite effect of what free software is about.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
