It definitely seems like Gnome has developed a toxic anti-user culture lately. Calling wiki contributors "clowns" and Gnome users "the peanut gallery" is exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to being surrounded by nothing but sycophants. And that inevitably leads to ridiculous bugs and design failures, like not being able to set a desktop background color, or planning to remove support for X11, or not having preview thumbnails in a file picker.
The GNOME development lifecycle, illustrated for newcomers:<p>1. Mark all current issues as stale or wontfix when no new work is getting done<p>2. Partner with/create new software feature that is going to "finally fix the Linux desktop"<p>3. Expand codebase around new feature, leaving an abundance of cruft and dead code in their wake<p>4. (YOU ARE HERE) When everything inevitably breaks, they abandon the new feature and blame some perceived open-source boogieman<p>5. Development falters, funding cuts out, maintainers bail or something else happens that causes progress to return to a standstill (return to Step 1)
Inflammatory title.<p>I'm a KDE guy through and through, however I think he is referring to <i>a</i> clown on the Arch wiki, not calling Arch wiki members clowns categorically.<p>Still not very pleasant.<p>EDIT: well, he did say clowns, plural. Meh. Assuming good faith and whatnot
TL;DR: There is a GNOME feature toggled by an environment variable, which tweaks how apps are rendered, sometimes making them better. This developer proposes effectively removing this (making it into a "debug flag", which seems to mean only those using debug builds can enable it), while linking to a page on Arch Wiki which details how to use this environment variable, and calling the Arch Wiki writers "clowns".<p>The absolute disdain and hate the GNOME team has for anyone who uses their software in a way they didn't intend is staggering. Where does it come from? What's it like working on the GNOME team? Is it a cult where you're indoctrinated into believing that GNOME has the one true way and the rest of the Linux community are barbarian hordes? I really want to know.