GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

I can tell you one thing, without any doubt: the guys who do sway, despite saving the entire ecosystem for Wayland by creating wlroots library, have no idea what made i3 great, which was: fantastic docs, website, man page. While I have not looked at sway's code, I did look at i3's, and it was fantastic, discipline of i3 project is second to none.

Sway man page to my amazement was basically empty, no content. And sway's claim that it is a drop in replacement for i3, including using i3config if detected, is simply false, it's not, it doesn't even use same syntax for various features, took me a few hours to get most of the stuff running to be similar to i3. It is similar, however, but not realistic since you have to change so much to make it work.

I moved to i3 because I was incredibly impressed by their docs, their man page, which follows the OpenBSD idea that a man page should be complete and answer all questions if you are offline. Sway is only similar to i3 in form, not content. I am going to keep using it in order to run at least one physical wayland install, useful for development and testing, since my demands are very low, but it does not at all surprise me to see that sway is below i3, that's where it deserves to be until they finish the hard work that makes i3 great.

I was heavily influenced by i3's project attitude towards documentation, and try to emulate that completeness, particularly in man pages and other tools conveying information to users about the program.

But I am profoundly grateful to the sway team for making their wayland compositor library fully open to the world, and taking the time to make it be universal, not just for their sway window manager, which is a huge amount of work. I don't think many people out there not familiar with wayland actually understand how extremely important that action is and was, since rather than having endless compositors to debug, now we have only the main ones, kwin, gnome, enlightenment, and wlroots, more or less. Still random compositor projects out there, but that's the main ones in reality now. Xfce is using wlroots in their early wayland compositor work, there's even an attempt to use wlroots as kde compositor instead of kwin.

Need I remind you, that GNOME3 in its initial form had dynamic desktops that completely upended all kinds of workflows? It introduced "Activities" view instead, made the top bar nearly useless, and removed pretty much all possible customizations.

So... how about you apply that same sophisticated analysis to what Gnome has done?

(Especially noting the difference that having actual non-exclusionary F/OSS competition brings?)

Keep in mind here that the person I was initially responding to was lamenting the lack of originality (versus simple mimicry) in F/OSS offerings. The responses to GNOME doing just that (with v2 and especially v3), including your responses on this thread, demonstrate the absurdity of that statement.

*every* platform out there (commercial or F/OSS) holds strong opinions on its user interaction paradigm. Sometimes those opinions change, and drastically at that, from one major release to the next. For example, in the past 30 years, The Windows UI paradigm has seen at least three major overhauls (Win3->Win95->Win8) with more minor/evolutionary ones with each successive release. Gnome has done something similar (G1->G2->G3). XFCE has gone through at least two, as have Android and MacOS. Meanwhile, the first-party software from the commercial platform vendors themselves is usually by far the worst offender when it comes to violating the native platform UI guidelines -- take-it-all-or-leave-it UX-is-everything Apple is probably the worst (serial!) offender, and they're routinely lauded for this attitude.

So, I stand by what I wrote; Gnome has been heavily criticized for both mimicry and originality; they're going to get grief no matter what they do. If you want "mass appeal" just do a 1:1 clone of Windows (or maybe Android) , or better yet just use Genuine Windows (or Android) to begin with. Or Gnome can instead build the software/environment they want, and the folks who like it can use it, and everyone else can freely choose to use something else.

(And if you genuinely don't have a choice in the matter about using Gnome, it's because your employer mandates it along with any number of other things you give up in exchange for a paycheck. Welcome to Life.)