I have a lot of sympathy for the signers of this letter. As Havoc Pennington (team lead of the GNOME 2 project) liked to point out, every option you provide to users has a cost to the developers in terms of testing and maintenance. Maybe a better way for the letter signers to communicate their position would be to simply say "We don't support nonstandard GNOME themes". Certainly, they're within their rights to say this, and you're within your rights to not use their apps if you don't like it.<p>Another thing Havoc Pennington liked to talk about in developing GNOME 2 was 'crack'. These were things in GNOME 1 that were bad for the community, but that a lot of users were addicted to. Like, for instance, an overabundance of user settings.<p>By all accounts, it's hard to write a GUI app for the Linux desktop, in part because of the huge variety of distros and desktops, and apparently even themes within a single desktop. And as a user, my biggest complaint about desktop Linux is the relative paucity of high-quality applications. (Yes, I know there are many high-quality desktop Linux applications. But there aren't as many as on Windows or MacOS.) I can't help but wonder if most of the community wouldn't be better off if a single distro, hopefully with a single desktop and a single theme, decisively 'won' and claimed a dominant usage share of the Linux desktop. Then third-party developers would be incentivized to just develop for that distro, which might make the lives of both users and developers better in the long run.<p>And of course, since it's open source, if 'the one true distro' went off the rails eventually, someone else could fork it and become the new 'one true distro', with relatively little danger of vendor lock-in.