The transition from GTK2 to GTK3 (and later to GTK4).
The subsequent creation of MATE and Cinnamon.
The controversy (technical, ideological, and political) between FalkTX and Zrythm.
This led to Zrythm having to rewrite (almost) everything from scratch using Qt.
The whole controversy around Mutter.
GNOME’s restrictive design guidelines, which are practically hardcoded into the GTK+ toolkit.
GNOME’s push to force components like libadwaita and libcairo everywhere, both inside and outside of GNOME and GTK+ (very much like SystemD, eudev/udev, and userdb), spreading its tentacles into unexpected places, which means a larger attack surface.
Massive bloat and significant internal overhead, all while stripping away advanced native features for power users and constantly breaking third-party extensions due to chaotic internal APIs.
Questionable architecture and design choices, such as GObject, CSS coupling, or XML-based layouts.
A massive exodus of developers and apps (like Wireshark, Audacious, or Transmission, Zrythm itself, or even entire distros like System76 with their shift to Iced for their COSMIC DE) driven by all of the above, along with other issues like stoptheming.app.
Even though Linus Torvalds’ statements are old, he has consistently stood by them and hasn’t walked them back in more recent comments; in fact, he doesn’t use GNOME and GTK+ stuff.
All of this is happening despite the backlash and requests from most of the community.
In fact, there are a lot of more recent cases:
All of this is happening despite the backlash and requests from most of the community.