tl;dr - it is not the default, it is the only one supported by Fedora and RHEL devs so they can focus on hardware support
Good for them I guess, Red Hat have historically done quite a lot in moving Linux forward, funding or employing a lot of the developers solving hard and sometimes 'unsexy' problems.
Seeing this title, I immediately felt this is the best (unintended?) clickbait title of HN today. "What? This must be wrong!". I just had to click, especially that the article is on gnome.org. I thought I really missed something serious.
Turns out, GNOME is not the default desktop environment of Fedora Workstation because the team considers that GNOME is the desktop environment of Fedora Workstation, anything else is not tested / supported.
good to see the consistency on their verbose blog post aligned with their design philosophy.
"We copied apple position for buttons and alienated every gnome user from the past decade because it is THE button position!"
"you can't move dialog windows. it's not where the dialog is, it is THE position of the dialog window."
"rewrite entire project from scratch just so we can have javascript extensions? ...there's no alpha or beta channels now, the rewrite is THE stable channel!"
linux was better when it was made for its users by its users. now there's too much focus on developers making a product for users.
why?
the computer most people choose is an android or an iphone, and these developers are not making a product to compete for them, so we're really leaving the biggest group of users in the cold and hunting for artefacts.
> if you tell people that ‘hey, any part of this OS is replaceable and should still work’ you have essentially created a testing matrix for yourself of infinite size
Fair enough.
But between telling people that any part of the OS is replaceable and telling people, for example, that Gnome can be replaced with XFCE, there's a world of difference in terms of the support and testing effort required. It's practically possible to support morethanone possibility for some default settings, even if supporting allpossiblecombinations isn't practically possible.
That said, the Fedora Workstation team is of course free to support whatever it chooses. Just quibbling with the reasons given, not the choice itself.
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[ 144 ms ] story [ 380 ms ] threadGood for them I guess, Red Hat have historically done quite a lot in moving Linux forward, funding or employing a lot of the developers solving hard and sometimes 'unsexy' problems.
Turns out, GNOME is not the default desktop environment of Fedora Workstation because the team considers that GNOME is the desktop environment of Fedora Workstation, anything else is not tested / supported.
All right, I missed nothing noteworthy after all.
"We copied apple position for buttons and alienated every gnome user from the past decade because it is THE button position!"
"you can't move dialog windows. it's not where the dialog is, it is THE position of the dialog window."
"rewrite entire project from scratch just so we can have javascript extensions? ...there's no alpha or beta channels now, the rewrite is THE stable channel!"
why?
the computer most people choose is an android or an iphone, and these developers are not making a product to compete for them, so we're really leaving the biggest group of users in the cold and hunting for artefacts.
Fair enough.
But between telling people that any part of the OS is replaceable and telling people, for example, that Gnome can be replaced with XFCE, there's a world of difference in terms of the support and testing effort required. It's practically possible to support more than one possibility for some default settings, even if supporting all possible combinations isn't practically possible.
That said, the Fedora Workstation team is of course free to support whatever it chooses. Just quibbling with the reasons given, not the choice itself.