Because I, for one, could give two shits about the GNOME desktop environment as a whole, but find that there are occasionally useful applications written for it.
Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color themes).
Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others.
I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses me off.
I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the Galeon Web browser comes to mind).
Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea.
GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to any level of logic or reason had already gotten old a decade ago.
It can get old. Just use something else. I tried gnome3 when it happened and jumped ship like a sinking Titanic. I'm now heavily invested in kde, and version 5 isn't going to change direction into this minimalist nightmare, its still all about choice, except under the hood it gets much faster and cleaner with qt5/ gl accelerated qml.
I have been trying to use KDE lately. I can configure it in every way imaginable, which scratches an itch for sure, but: it takes forever to start up. After login, the gnome desktop will come up almost instantly, but KDE will sit on the splash screen for a solid thirty seconds. Is there some 'go faster' setting that everyone knows about but me?
Disable the splash screen, I always do. Its in system settings around sessions, I think. You get to the desktop in a third the time but it might need a few seconds to be fully responsive. Also, nepomuk starting up will drastically slow down the boot time, so if you don't need the semantic search features disable it.
Really? It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login, but don't do anything until the disk led stops blinking like mad. Depressing...
Me, I've gone i3wm, but it's not for the faint of heart; And it still depends on lots of gnome utilities, like the network manager or the settings daemon.
It's 2013 and the login experience in Linux is that of windows 98? Login
It really depends on your WM. Some of the heavier desktops, yes. With the lighter ones (again, I use WindowMaker), I'm up and running in a couple of seconds (there are some apps and utilities which take a few seconds to launch).
The mouseless / tiling WMs (such as i3wm) are pretty cool as well.
In neither of these cases am I particularly wedded to the tools, and I've tried a few other terminals (the xfce4 terminal app also seems pretty sane). I actually like most of the ideas behind KDE, I just can't stand the implementation of the desktop, but it doesn't go out of its way to piss the hell out of me. I find its PIM, Kontact, is hands down the best such tool I've encountered in any environment (though for straight email, mutt still wins).
No, the problem is that perfectly serviceable applications get utterly buggered by the brain-death of the underlying toolkit. By changing functionality as fundamental as middle-click mouse behavior. And it's reached the point that being a GNOME application is a liability: I'm going to look at it cross-eyed and search out an alternative if at all possible.
As another poster noted, his use of a venerable old window manager, in his case, Enlightenment DR16, means he isn't subject to an entire class of insults: "creeping featurism/bloat slowing down or interfering with overall responsiveness, or this recent distressing trend to remove well-established features and behaviors."
The simple fact is that the basics of a GUI desktop were established 40 years ago[1], and most of the changes since have involved price, performance, graphics rendering quality, and a very small number of behavioral modifications.
Technology offers diminishing returns to scale, and there's only so much benefit any graphical environment can offer by changing. And in doing so it loses its key benefit: familiarity. NO graphical environment is fully intuitive, it's all learned. Tossing out that learning on a regular basis is an anti-feature.
And so pdkl95 uses the decade-old E16, I use WindowMaker, clone of a 1989 desktop. A highly skilled hacker and repeat entrepreneur I know uses twm -- a very heavily hacked configuration, but twm all the same. It BLAZES on modern hardware. First released in 1987.
Even Apple has made relatively few modifications to its OS X interface, Aqua (and most were met with much gnashing of teeth). Microsoft's UI changes are a large part of the negative response to its recent Windows and Office offerings. Really, the improvements simply aren't worth the cost.
Most recently, GNOME Terminal, ironically enough (it's about as non-GUI as you can get for an application, but it's a reasonably nice terminal emulator, and does a few things my trusty old rxvt doesn't: dynamic rescaling, dynamic color themes).
Rhythmbox comes to mind. A few others.
I really don't care where the hell my apps come from, in terms of toolkit. But if they break very-well-established Linux / Unix behaviors, it really pisses me off.
I've also seen GNOME disease utterly fuck up perfectly good applications (the Galeon Web browser comes to mind).
Worse, occasionally unaffiliated developers look at what GNOME is doing after a few too many hits on the crack pipe themselves and think it's a good idea.
GNOME's utter user hostility and imperviousness to any level of logic or reason had already gotten old a decade ago.