How do gnome developers make decisions?

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1

Good evening,

I’ve been using gnome for ages now and even though I am very satisfied about how things evolved I have my concerns..

Let me get this straight, I totally understand your approach of keeping things simple and stable for the upcoming community.

But I feel like you’re not making friends with long-time users.

I’ve been using the backspace key to go back a directory in Nautilus for years. I’m used to it, my fingers do it automatically. You removed this key binding due to some “problems while renaming things”. I personally never had this issue not a single time but okay, do whatever you feel like might make things better for the people.

But why do you not let users decide, what keys they want to use? Why do you force preferences based on your personal likings to us? I’m a developer myself and you could easily add a section in the preferences menu to set up custom key combinations. Literally easy as 123. But you chose to completely remove it.

Another thing that drives me crazy,

the grey background. We’re in 2026. People got 4k screens with the best colors ever and you chose to give us a grey background on the login screen or on the overview. Why? I mean if you really find this pretty, at least give people the options to change it. It’s not that hard. Even windows let’s you set a custom wallpaper for the login screen. Why forcing us to a boring looking grey background? Isn’t Linux about freedom? About customization?

Like I said, I get the point of keeping things simple and stable, but please let us know, how choosing a custom background or custom key combinations would affect security or system stability in any way I’m curious..

In fact, because of these stubborn decisions, people are searching for workarounds to get things done. And these workarounds consist of manipulating system files and creating real security/stability issues.

2

Hi and welcome to the forum.

This isn’t the best place for rants. If you got any problem, please just mention it normally. We are all volunteers here, doing this stuff in our free time, reading rant after rant isn’t what I would call motivating…

3

well this topic has been around for a long while now and you still seem to ignore us (the users). I’m not aiming at insulting anyone, but you should understand that we are sick of these decisions. it’s not a first time thing.

4

Feel free to ask for a refund.

And I am personally sick and tired of entitled people who cannot understand GNOME isn’t corporation with army of full-time employees :frowning: Like yes, GNOME have tons of problems, but entitled users coming with complaints does not help and it’s awfully demotivating. If you want to help with development, feel free to contribute, share your design ideas, feedback etc, but please, remember you are interacting with people who are doing it in their free time.

5

This is not about you not having the developers or time to get things done.. this is all about you changing things and carelessly removing features without giving us options. Also I’ve been contributing to lots of things like I said I’m a developer myself don’t try to fob me off with basic excuses. You’re not out of time you’re ignoring our opinions and there’s thousands of people agreeing with me.

6

I recommend reading Choosing our Preferences by Havoc Pennington. It’s an old, but frequently referenced document that establishes the rationale behind being careful with adding preferences, and it has influenced a lot of decision making in the GNOME community over the past two decades.

I’m not saying that it applies 100% to this particular situation or that you have to personally agree with it, but it should answer your main questions.

7

Okay that’s enough, this forum isn’t for entitled users who cannot understand what volunteer work is.