If you only believe their side of the story, sure, that's how it goes. I would like to hear the other devs' point of view before jumping to that conclusion, though.

"Why, because I have a personal preference for KDE, am I supposed to ignore GNOME's outstanding interface designs?"

Because there is no such thing as "GNOME's outstanding interface designs". But the rest of your argument makes sense :)

1k upvotes. And yet, if you pointed GNOME devs to this simple reality you were either labeled as a 5 minute tester guy ("try it for a month, accept the new model of doing stuff and you'll be fine!" yeah, sure) or dismissed as a "hater" ("no point in discussing this with you, I'm picking up my marbles and going away" by all means!).

You're not the only one, believe me!

After I realized that no matter what the existing user base would say, the GNOME 3 developers weren't going to make Gnome Shell suitable for the good old desktop work flow (besides making it impossible to have GNOME 2 installed together with the new version ...), I started looking elsewhere. I tried several desktop environments, and then sticked to Cinnamon, a "no nonsense, it just works" shell based on the Gnome libraries.

What I noticed almost immediately was that, in spite of the GNOME devs making fun of people jumping ship and waving them goodbye, Linux Mint received more donation money in a month than GNOME in 5-6.

So there you go guys, people have voted with their feet deserting you, and with their wallets funding other, more worthwile open source projects: I'm tempted to help, just because Cinnamon is based on Gnome libraries, but the conclusion is that you reap what you have sown. No sympathy from this ex-GNOME user.

Rehdon

Yep, I also found that incredibly convenient that you have two separate clipboards with Linux, without having to install any other software.

Moved to Cinnamon a long time ago and not looking back to Gnome Shell, I only hope that don't kill the entire GNOME project since that is (was?) the foundation of Cinnamon.

Rehdon

+1 for the excellent metaphor! XD

Funny that you mention contribution: I've contributed with loads of my time to GNOME 2.x, mainly doing translation and docs but also with the occasional bug report and developer feedback, and guess what happened when I, like scores of other people following GNOME development, expressed criticism of the direction Gnome Shell was going? To use an euphemism, we were ignored and/or told to use something else. So much for the "we want CONTRIBUTORS" theory! Needless to say, I'm not a GNOME user anymore, $DEITY forbid that I hinder their vision!

Not that I subscribe to your "we want contributors, don't give **** about other kind of users" theory: if I contributed nothing but express valid criticism, well THAT'S MY CONTRIBUTION and you'd be an idiot to ignore it; vice versa, if I pay you $$$ and my suggestions are utter garbage, you'd be an idiot to accept them. Considering your attitude, perhaps you should limit circulation of your software to your closest pals and relatives, and delight them with your programming skills. The rest of the world will carry on, believe me.

Rehdon

Subject says all XD

Rehdon

I hear that Cinnamon version 1.5.2 will be out in the Romeo (unstable) repository soon, with lots of improvements. After that 1.6 will follow as a stable release. Sure, Cinnamon is a bit rough on the edges at the moment, but the devs look quite dedicated and the new versions look good.

Rehdon