The big conspiracy is that GNOME is breaking themes in GTK? Oh, the horror!

That's more than a little over the top.

*I'm going to explain to you why GNOME has made the choices it has. *Not
everyone here needs this explanation, but the folks who have so far failed
to understand this have made themselves obvious. Sorry, guys.

It's because the community that GNOME is serving is *not you. *And it is
very, very important for Free Software to serve a community that is not
like us!

One of the greatest problems in Free Software is that, so far, we make it
just for us. So, we are the only folks who use it, and we don't get the
rest of the world to use Free Software, and we lose out on any number of
important things because of that. Important things for the* world,* and for
Free Software. The rest of the world runs bad software and their security
and privacy suck. They buy into DRM. What they do is controlled by big
companies, because they have become slaves of their tools. They don't know
what electronic freedom is. And for us: hardware doesn't support our
software. Media doesn't support our software. I could go on...

So, the GNOME folks decided to make Free Software that wasn't for geeky
nerd software developers, theme-builders and theme-users. And this, to some
of you, is a conspiracy or evil, but it is actually the most important
thing that Free Software could do today.

Now, I know that some of you would rather just make the system for
yourselves. There's two words for that: intellectual masturbation. What has
you angry is *the challenge that you now grow up and start playing with
other people.*

The decision that SystemD sucks architecturally and is worth working hard
to eliminate doesn't imply that we also have to make a nerds-only system to
play with, ourselves. GNOME is leading the way out of that dead end. Try to
understand how and why.

Why doesn't GNOME care about themes? Because once two non-technical people
are running different themes, they can't help each other understand how to
work their systems. They can't even describe what they are seeing in a way
that the other person will understand.

There is one exercise that I recommend. Go in an Apple store. Sit or stand
quietly and look around you. Don't sneer or look offended, do your best to
fit in and just *watch people. *Note how excited and happy the people are
there, because they feel they are empowered by that Apple stuff. And they
really are! Apple understands them, unlike 95% of technical people
everywhere. You can too, if you try. We could *better *empower them, and we
could get them away from all of the s**t that Apple does, if we were not so
inward facing.

    Thanks

    Bruce

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 8:55 PM, Nate Bargmann <n0nb@???> wrote:

> I've read that link and a few more of his posts since a few times over
> the years. I've not found any fault in his reasoning yet.
>
> - Nate
>
> --
>
> "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
> possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."
>
> Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us
>
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