A very long, very upset, rather unhinged, definitely foul-mouthed, extremely sarcastic rant about GNOME - Sat, Apr 25, 2026

Adapted from a thread on Bluesky and originally published on October 9th, 2025.

My favorite feature of GNOME is opening the activities overview on the top left to access the dock in the bottom center. Truly the peak of UI design. Although needing to install a fucking JavaScript script in order to have desktop icons or a full applications menu is also definitely just truly the peak of desktop environment design. Because needing two different browser engines (WebKit2GTK and Gecko via GJS) is what minimalism means, right? Why shouldn’t your desktop environment unironically take 8 hours to compile on a computer that isn’t even all that slow? And why should minimized programs be distinguishable from closed programs? If it’s not on the screen right this second it doesn’t exist! Nautilus having less features than most file managers, even the most threadbare, on Android is also just perfect desktop environment design! And what’s more minimalist than having three fucking terminal emulators included in your one desktop environment (Console, GNOME Terminal, and Ptyxis)? System tray? Never heard of it! Please ignore the Circle of GNOME programs that use the system tray, because we are GNOME and we decided that the system tray doesn’t exist. And any downstream developers who do use it are holding the desktop wrong! And what could possibly be a more consistent experience than still having GTK3 apps shipping in GNOME 49 but not updating the GTK3 version of Adwaita since the last decade! Desktop icons are sooo last century and here at GNOME we are innovating the desktop computing experience by jumping into the 21st century and removing desktop icons. Oh the desktop folder will still exist, it will just have literally no purpose! We are so obsessed with minimalism that when you open GNOME Software it will have no software available at all! Because really why do you need more software when GNOME knows best‽ Welcome to GNOME! We’ll force Wayland down everyone’s throat 5 years before it is production ready but will also fight every single Wayland developer with every single fucking addition to the protocol because we know better than the developers of the display server we’re using!Here at GNOME we are always pushing the user experience forwards. That’s why if you don’t specifically have xdg-desktop-portal-gtk installed then Flatpaks, the only software method we intend on supporting, won’t actually work correctly and won’t notice your dark mode either! But if you then install xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, you’ll need to kill the standard xdg-desktop-portal befause we can’t be bothered to do that for you with our systemd scripts we otherwise insist on using for fucking everything! Here at GNOME we are always dedicated to making our software accessible to everyone. That’s why we broke screen readers for a decade and base our entire workflow on so many gestures that anybody who has fucked up fine motor skills can’t use our software. Now that’s Accessibility!

So I’m aware that this was full of sarcasm and snark but I need to be serious about this last one. That last issue I brought up is a real thing that I have to deal with because I do in fact suffer from dyspraxia and have some pretty fucked fine motor skills. So to be told that I am just using it wrong because I can’t do the hyper specific gestures that GNOME insists on is actually pretty insulting and I take it pretty personally as a result. Accessibility matters and GNOME as a project has fundamentally taken an anti-accessibility stance as a project.