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Reminder: System76 is not to be trusted
(blogs.gnome.org)
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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2026
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libre
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Yeah I hate the arguments (which come from mostly GNOME and MacOS users) that take the form of "It doesn't stop you from doing this thing I personally feel is a bad idea, this is evidence of it being half-baked"
On XFCE I can put a dock/panel dead center in the middle of my desktop. I don't do that because I can't think of any possible use case for doing so. No one needed to explicitly tell me not to.
And then the more extreme example is that with Windows 11 you apparently can't even place your dock on the side of your screen at all any more.
So people with ultra-widescreen monitors just end up with a bunch of useless bullshit at the bottom of their screen lol.
In GNOME you can also put the panel/dock in the middle of the screen. There just isn't a nob or lever taking up space in the user interface to do so.
Unlike MacOS, GNOME shell is a live running environment that can be virtually fully scripted at will. There exist community driven extensions that are allowed to innovate outside of gnomes timeline that do what you're talking about. This is what pop had done until they decided it was somehow easier to make an entire desktop from scratch than work with gnome on upstreaming.
You want icons on desktop then that's your prerogative, but you can't assume as a participant in gnome that your say should automatically be fulfilled just by the virtue of you being a user.
There isn't a knob or lever taking up space in the UI to do it in XFCE either. You create a new panel then drag and drop it exactly wherever you want it to be.
I wasn't comparing Mac OS and GNOME.
I'm not complaining about GNOME and its users doing whatever they want. I am complaining about GNOME as a project and community fostering a culture of shitting on and occasionally using their position to strongarm and bully other people and projects who are doing whatever they want to do, especially on the grounds of it not being "sleek" enough for their taste, bulldozing over useful features and desktop paradigms, and no, not just "traditional" ones. I wish I had the privilege of not caring about what GNOME does but we don't live in that world.
Can you give an example of this? I really am not aware of any case where gnome folks had that much sway over other projects.
GTK is/was the defacto standard GUI library for Linux for well over 2 decades. Of course their decisions impact more than GNOME desktop users.
GTK used to be the library you would target when you wanted what I'd describe as native Linux look and feel. Now that's not really a thing any more.
The native Linux look and feel is not a real thing. It was a coincidence created by the fact that gnome and gtk was, as you mentioned, the de facto Linux toolkit and the design culture at the time.
Unless youre advocating for a world where everyone must be forced to compile down to gtk, you're welcome to keep your revisionism to yourself.
What are you even talking about. Of course native look and feel existed as something that both application developers and users desire.
It's not an absolute but an application can feel out of place or it can fit into a desktop environment.
GNOME's plugin are constantly breaking with updates. That was really annoying