Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs...
It's such a shame, because fixing most of these small bugs is far less work than building new features. Nobody wants to put the work in though... Nobody has the overarching vision of a consistent UX that just works out of the box without oddities, quirks and workarounds.
> Death by a thousand small inefficiencies, quirks and bugs...
I agree, this is the problem. GUI OS developers like to work on big features and eye candy but forget to fix the basics. I have yet to find a Window system that:
1. Works without glitches in HiDPI setups. Especially mouse pointer glitches.
2. Comes out of the box with fonts that don't feel like thorns in the eyes, including the browser.
Part of the reason no one wants to put in the work is because all it takes is a technical dictator to say "I don't like this approach, let's rethink this", and scuttle your weeks of work. Even if you got a sign-off on the approach earlier. This has happened enough times to me in open source projects that I only submit code to projects that I know have reasonable maintainers that I've interacted with in the past.
Developers frequently hate it when "product people" get a say in the direction of the product, but the alternative is commonly to have developers prioritize perceived code purity over actual user interests. And emphasis on "perceived", because usually the codebase is a hot mess but maintainers want it to be their hot mess, not someone else's.
Oh but people did put in the work[0]. The problem is that gnome maintainers are hostile towards anyone from outside their little bubble wanting to get in some patches.
It's such a shame, because fixing most of these small bugs is far less work than building new features. Nobody wants to put the work in though... Nobody has the overarching vision of a consistent UX that just works out of the box without oddities, quirks and workarounds.