Recently Linus got into yet another spat on one of the Gnome mailing lists (an overblown incident IMO). It's hard not to get emotional about these things, and as someone who also gets frustrated by Gnome I can't help but cheer for Linus on this one. Feedback should be one of the most valuable sources of input Gnome could get regarding usability so you'd think they'd care, but unfortunately they don't. Instead, they hold interface guidelines (and their own conclusions about GUI design) in a much higher regard and leave a number of frustrated users behind. It's their right, of course, but perhaps also a mistake if the goal is to appeal to a wide user base. Not all of us subscribe to the Gnome project's idea of "simple is always better", and personally I doubt I'll ever learn to like it, well, at least not Gnome's approach which is to literally strip features away.
Certain Gnome developers are absolutely, positively convinced they're right too, and that's just creepy given how subjective GUI design is. In this particular case they even rationalized with an "it's been discussed before" argument. Consensus among Gnome developers translates into fact, apparently, but there's only one problem - GUI design is NOT an exact science regardless of what they might have you believe, and there is definitely a bias among Gnome regarding design.
I was also shocked when one of the Gnome developers implied that Linus was stupid because he didn't speak Spanish. I know that he (Linus) speaks at least three languages (incidentally the same ones I speak - English, Swedish and Finnish and I've heard him speak all of them) so it's not like he's linguistically challanged or anything. It can be an advantage to know several languages, true, but it doesn't make you intelligent any more than driving a porsche makes you important. We can't be expected to be sharp at all times though, and occasionally even the brightest among us make mistakes and say stupid things, so I think I'll cut the Gnome developer some slack for that reason alone. Still, the arrogance is stunning.
I wish Gnome would revert to what it used to be at around Gnome 2.6. It was OK back then. It still had it's fair share of problems but it somehow felt better and seemed less fragile. That was before they got all fanatic about interface guidelines and began copying OS X. I don't think Gnome is inherently bad. In fact, I find it quite enjoyable at times when I can bring myself to ignore certain quirks - like the supposedly "intuitive" file dialogs (a truly horrible design if there ever was one).
