[md8z]

I don't know what you mean bullshit excuse. Everything has a cost to test and maintain. It doesn't help to say that it's bullshit if nobody has done a real cost analysis. Remember that this is something that has to be maintained for years. If some bugs occur in it later and it has to be removed again then the users will be upset again so it's not really useful for us to say just ship it and don't test, that's what we want to avoid. Yes, you and I could guess what it costs but that doesn't carry as much weight as somebody who actually works on it full time doing their cost analysis.

I get your frustration about your workflow but I'm still upset about my cupholders :) For the system tray and server side decorations, there are technical reasons for those to have gotten removed. Their existence may enable some workflows but it also breaks some other workflows so that's not an area where everyone can win. And if you want to bring them back then I can guarantee you that's not just a matter of flipping a switch, there is real work that needs to be done there and it won't happen if nobody is willing to pay the cost. It doesn't really make sense to blame volunteers for not being able to afford that either when this is something that's so expensive that the bigger contributors like Red Hat don't even want to pay for it.

[simion314]

Sure, but think about it like this:

Your DE has 10 features and 10 users, we decide we remove any feature that is only used by 1 or 0 users. We look around and find that 1 feature F1 is used only by user U1 , we remove F1 and we push user U1 to go away.

2 feature F2 was used by 2 users but now that U1 left , F2 is used only by 1 user, so we remove F2 and kck out the user U2 , we left with 8 users now from 10 and 8 feature

3 feature F3 was used by 3 users including U1 and U2 , but since we kicked this 2 users ut only U2 left using it , so now we remove F3 , kick out user U3 (U3 regrets now that he was a dick to U2 and U2 accusing them of beeing snowflackes and using it wrong)

4 ... repeat until you reamin with 2 users, the designer and the developer (the dev uses other DE on his personal machine anyway)

My second point, GNOME team should just pause and reflect at Apple, see that vision without a connection with users is wrong, Apple has sales numbers and other ways to detect when their big ego vision dude has messed up but GNOME needs to reflect (not change, not implement features just reflect), are we going to far? how do we know when our vison dude has gone too far since we don't have sales number and shareholders keeping the bullshit in check?

There is a chance that GNOME vision is wrong and it can take much more years then it took Apple to do the "courageous" thing and undo the stupidity and replace the vision individual.

[md8z]

For GNOME I guess you could say it's the same way but they are more after volunteer contributions, not money. So they will make changes that tend to increase the contributions, sometimes it's a trade-off i.e. do we make this change to lose 5 contributors but gain 10 contributors in other areas. They're tough decisions to make, and nobody likes to be the one to tell angry users that their workflow is breaking.