On Tue, 20 Jun 2017 23:32:46 -0700
Bruce Perens <bruce@???> wrote:

> 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.*

Hi Bruce,

Everything you wrote above is true, and yet it doesn't exculpate Gnome.

There were many, many ways to produce user interfaces suitable for
"non-Geeks." Ways that would not have been antagonistic to POSIX and
The Unix Way and to the basic software concepts of encapsulation and
interchangeable parts.

The Gnome people have decided to tie their user interface intimately
with systemd. That's why Gnome is not worth including in Devuan. Not
because it's for "ordinary people", but because it necessitates the bad
systemd architecture you mentioned above.

SteveT

Steve Litt
June 2017 featured book: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key