Just to add: well-founded criticism is not being a “hater”, nor is forking or leaving a project over irreconcilable disagreements. Being a hater is repeatedly publishing absurd screeds, attempting to organize smear campaigns to pressure devs, and using sock puppets to flood social media with negative comments in order to influence users. Sadly there are a few very loud haters in the FOSS community.

If someone is calling you a hater over a difference of opinion, they are just wrong. That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!

> That said, if you’ve been on the other end of frequent attacks from haters, it’s understandable that you might be overly sensitive to it!

Speaking mostly from personal experience, I don't know how the community at large is felling about it, but for me my reaction and experience has been the opposite. The more I come across haters, the less impact each one have on me, because I've seen it before, already know it not to be true, and don't have any needs to engage with any of it again. It's like the more it occurred, the more desensitized I got to it.

Being falsely accused of things you know to be untrue felt really difficult at first, but forcing myself to be more confident in me really helped to not let that get to me and be able to move past it easier.

More on topic, it's really easy to misjudge what is a "campaign" and what is someone feeling semi-strongly about something but writing really "convincingly" about it and what is someone just throwing a off-hand comment perhaps hastily formulated. We don't always know the intention, but we immediately jump to our first guess about the intention, but sometimes people are just casually pointing out stuff without actually having strong feelings about them.

I'd say GNOME and the community were both at fault. GNOME 3 was awful when it rolled out and the devs didn't really listen to the community at all (they didn't have to, but they probably should have taken more feedback). The community at the time was also absolutely toxic and I can't blame GNOME for tuning it all out.

GNOME is much better these days than it was, but I feel like Linux did pay a price for the disruption -- between GNOME, Unity and all that mess, there was ~10 years where all the desktops that a new user was likely to encounter were just half baked solutions for a problem that most people couldn't entirely agree on.

I don't see well found criticism in ops statement just blunt ragebait.