Dear Gnome. This is supposed to be free software, not shareware. Nagging is not welcome.

Dear Debian. You are not supposed to allow anti-features in your repositories.

@pavel I actually don't think gnome should be the default desktop in #debian any more. Mostly because they push external flatpak repositories so hard. Their developers will actually tell people not to use distribution packages, but grab from upstream instead (and I suspect part of that is related to their views about theming and customizations).

It should certainly still be a desktop option, but having the default desktop of a distribution whose core principle is DFSG tell you to avoid DFSG..

@pavel I don't have a strong opinion on what _should_ be the default, but I don't think gnome should be it.

Someone over on bsky responded with a bunch of non sequiturs like "why does it matter what the default is?", and.. I don't know how to explain why decisions about priority matter. 🤦

@Andres4NY On desktop, I'm still using Mate. On tablets/phones, I'm aware of Gnome and KDE.

I don't care much about which, but ... no anti-features please.

@pavel packaging Gnome has been always a huge pain, i can’t say how it goes nowadays but keeping software available for everyone when your distro ships 4 year old versions of the libraries adds a lot of pressure to the developers and maintainers. Flatpak has been a relief for me in many cases because I could install new programs without having to break the base system.

We should spend less time packaging, maintaining and backporting software, the value of software development is not there.

I somehow agree that gnome shouldn’t be the default DE in Debian, but the alternative is worse imho. I would opt for xfce if it was much simpler.