Let projects have their own goals

Personally, I am ok with projects having their own goals. Let the GNOME project build GNOME OS and craft it exactly to their vision, whatever that is.

If the rest of us want to use it, let's found the "Portable GNOME Project" with the goal of adapting vanilla GNOME to work with systemd alternatives, with theme-able libadwaita alternatives, and the like. Why should the GNOME devs have to fill their days with the priorities of others?

And if there is not enough interest to drive the "Portable GNOME Project", well then I guess those making different choices than GNOME OS does will not be running GNOME.

Do not get me wrong. I want everybody to collaborate. GNOME should work with the "Portable GNOME Project" or even individual distros and developers to ensure that portability is possible. They should at least build the right interfaces and such and try to understand what other people need. But GNOME does not have to ship portable implementations of the kinds of things mentioned in this article. And they should not be held back by limitations found in software the project does not use.

I think the quotes from the Alpine and Chimera projects are interesting. Alpine says they will have to stop shipping GNOME because they use musl. Chimera, who also uses musl, says building the capabilities required has always been the plan. This is because Chimera realized that, if choosing musl meant no systemd, other ways of providing the same features would need to be found.

In my view, the Chimera model is the right one.

I mean, Alpine is free to do as they want as well. However, we need to understand that choosing implementations with fewer features may mean that we are unable to run some things. And if this stems from our choices or "requirements", then that may be our problem to solve. The same is true of distros that want to ship without Rust, or without Wayland, or without Pipewire, or without GTK4, or without Python3, or without "not free enough" stuff, or whatever other hill they want to die on. Choose what you like, but own the gap that creates.