Re: What Window Manager/Desktop Environment do you use, and why?

On Sat, 7 Jun 2025 02:23:53 -0000 (UTC)
Borax Man <rotflol2@hotmail.com> wrote:

How do you explain GNOME 3 then?

GNOME Team was actually completely forthcoming about this, at the time:
they, like MS, had bought entirely into the tech-press narrative of the
Glorious Tablet Future, where desktops and laptops would vanish in a
Cloud of pixie dust and the mouse would be obsolete as everyone used
touchscreens for everything and shut up "gorilla arm" totally isn't a
thing so there (remember that? Remember how they were also adamant that
voice control and dictation would obsolete the keyboard for about 15
minutes, before some non-idiot pointed out that whole offices full of
people yakking at their computer all day would result in an epidemic of
workplace shootings?)

So all of the design decisions behind GNOME 3, just as with Windows 8,
were oriented towards facilitating this magical transition that would
doubtless be happening Real Soon Now because Everybody* agreed that it
would - and then when it mysteriously *didn't,* they were left looking
like morons, because they'd uncritically bought into a media narrative
that had no real basis to begin with.

* (Where "Everybody" meant "everybody who's Anybody, because if you
  ain't with Everybody, you ain't nobody!")

But in the *meantime,* they'd managed to piss off hordes of *nix users,
drive a bunch of people to jump ship to XFCE or LXDE, and cause a fork
of their own product, because they never stopped to consider that *nix
users, unlike Windows users, aren't stuck with whatever nonsense gets
handed down from on high by the Design Divas,* and had settled on GNOME
'cause they liked what GNOME *was,* not what the Divas felt it *should*
be. There followed much agitated sputtering from GNOME Team, who
insisted that things were Fine, Actually because they'd put everything
through extensive user testing, to which one might reasonably point out
that *A.* so did Coca-Cola, and *B.* the set of people one gets when
enlisting test users for radical design revisions tends to be the set
of people who already *want* radical design revisions.

* (And even over in Windows territory, it's noteworthy that Win8 was
  what turned alternative shells from a weird niche thing to a common-
  place thing-you-find-on-the-office-PC extension.)

And at the end of the day, despite all the sputtering and post-backlash
justification: GNOME Flashback is now a thing, it looks suspiciously
like GNOME 2, and its webpage includes a sputtering little disclaimer
about how no, this totally *isn't* anything like MATE, so *there.*

Tee hee hee!