The way the GNOME Project has evolved over the years is just sad. The development ethos seems to be further and further away from the spirit of Free software.
The project does comply with the "letter of the law" when it comes to Free software. That is, the project does give the users their four essential freedoms of running the programs as they wish, freedom to study the programs, redistribute, and modify. But at least IMO this is necessary but not sufficient for "proper" Free software.
At least to me there is still stuff that is required for something to be Free software, even if you technically fulfill the definition. The "spirit of the law" of Free software to complement the "letter of the law". One of these is that you can act in the Free software ecosystem as a productive and good faith actor. In this case, the GNOME Project has decided to unilaterally break the FDO icon theme standard, and for what? Because they want to have the Adwaita icons as a "Private UI icon set for GNOME core apps"? This is not okay.
One must ask if this change truly helps empower the users in their use of the software and their computers.
Yes, and if they think the spec is bogus and obsolete, fine, either help to improve it or just provide no icon theme that pretends to follow it, then distros know they need to install another one for 3rdparty apps...
I feel a lot of sympathy for the GNOME developers. They are 15 years past the "let's build something cool!" stage and into the long, long grind of support and compatibility and being expected to work everywhere all the time. As an outsider, it looks like all the cool kids moved on a long time ago so it's basically just people too stubborn to quit working on it and a few paid devs trying to make something happen with pretty limited resources.
That said, as a developer I have basically had enough of GNOME, and I'm porting my personal projects to ImGUI. Does it integrate in the desktop? Not really. Is it pretty? No. It just is what it is (a library for GUI app development) and it doesn't try to be everything else that GNOME does.
I have no sympathy for them. They implement a spec and make a big song and dance about being open and standards friendly... and then when they don't implement the standard correctly they say they have implemented it correctly, argue about it and then when they are proven incorrect they just close the ticket, even though they could make small changes to fix the problem.
They chose to copy Apple; they chose to go all in on the horrible idea of Convergence, where you have one monitor, and it's a touch screen (and if you don't, you're a second class citizen stuck in the old ways of using, y'know, an actual computer). Modern GTK removes ever more features and has wording like "tap" and "swipe", basically telling you it expects you to be a mobile developer. Everything gets more complex, more poorly documented, and more rigid, and the only thing they tell you is it's gonna happen more, and more often.
If you ask them how to do something GNOME doesn't expect -- like remove rounded corners from your GTK window, they straight up tell you you're stupid for wanting to. Sympathetic lurkers don't know but try to offer some shots in the dark. Later, you figure out it's quite easy -- just undocumented, and the GNOME devs didn't wanna tell you. :D
It's no wonder all GTK apps are toy apps compared to Qt apps and that many projects are switching from GTK to Qt, and never the other way around. Good riddance.
At this point, I'm quite used to it. I don't worry about it too much, eventually they'll make a huge mistake and Gnome will become completely unusable and then their potential user-share will crater even further. And noone will be terribly upset.
I as Kate maintainer can not understand their position in that bug. I see that one might forget about the implications of that rename, but now it got reported and the fix would be, at least the simple one, to just keep the old icons for these names.
That would have zero bad impact on 'modern GNOME apps'.
That would make sense if they cared about solving the issue. Rather than about proving they're right and showing they're in control.
The specific issue and facts don't actually matter. Y'all said something that was different from what they were already doing/thinking, therefore, you must be wrong.
It sounds like an alternative where they just don't pretend they support the thing the don't support was proposed, and shot down because that means they won't show up in UI that only lists things that support the thing?
> I feel a lot of sympathy for the GNOME developers. They are 15 years past the "let's build something cool!" stage and into the long, long grind of support and compatibility and being expected to work everywhere all the time.
They don't have to do that, you know. In fact, it's a pretty common complaint that it's rather difficult for new contributors to get involved with them stonewalling issue discussions and merge requests.
Volunteering is voluntary. They don't deserve sympathy for actively inflicting that onto both themselves and everybody else.
:( given the KDE developers (and other devs) did spend a lot time to ensure the applications they create work not just in their personal favorite desktop environment, this is all rather unfortunate, as it is now like it is in a released distro...
Nobody should be surprised anymore when GNOME pulls some shady and technically questionable crap to try to make their "product" look better by actively breaking other people's work.
That first link especially is hyperbolic disingenuous bad faith nonsense. It draws completely wild conclusions that simply don't follow from the GNOME dev quotes or GNOME's behavior it lists in its support. Trying to have a consistent coherent vision for their own project isn't the same as trying to lock users into their project, let alone trying to sabotage other people's projects, nor do they ever say that's what they want to do, or that they view users as "walking billboards", just that they want GNOME to have a consistent experience so they can have basic quality assurance. They're basically trying to avoid the "carrier customized Android" problem. I glanced briefly over the other articles and it seems like they're the same utter drivel, additionally repeating tiresome, worn out, utterly stupid and wrong claims like that GNOME is "a mobile-first" interface or "not suited to the desktop." I use nearly completely vanilla GNOME every day on my desktop, as a power user, and it's amazing --- far better, in fact, than KDE or any other DE I've tried. I've explained at length why, and why their UX choices were justified, before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39985533
I still prefer MacOS to GNOME. But KDE always just feels like a mess. And everyone's defence is that you can tidy it up any way you like?
There is value in that. GNOME and MacOS can sometimes feel like straight jackets. But you know, I would rather just not fiddle with the DE and actually get down to doing whatever it is I do. And KDE just doesn't give me that with the default experience.
GNOME works great 90% of the time as my DE. That's more than the 20% KDE has got for me.
> That first link especially is hyperbolic disingenuous bad faith nonsense. … I glanced briefly over the other articles and it seems like they're the same utter drivel… …I've explained at length why, and why their UX choices were justified, before…
Yep. There we go. Saying anything about GNOME that isn't adoring praise immediately draws out the victim-playing accusations of bad faith, and refusal to engage with the actual problems. How dare anybody scrutinize the way GNOME developers treat and conduct themselves around other people. Nobody can ask GNOME to listen to them, but everybody else must listen to GNOME. There's genuinely something strange going on with the mindset around the whole project; it's like they've actively weeded out anybody with any functioning empathy, self-awareness, or non-zero neuroplasticity…
It's not GNOME that's crazy; it's literally everybody else [1][2][3][4][5][6[][7][8][9][10] that's ever tried to work with GNOME! They must be out to get you.
> We want to send a strong signal upstream and towards other projects. We cannot and will not support applications which do not support our users and environments.
> …you talk with people and you get an exasperated sigh, like "Why are you bothering to like report this issue to me?," or like "Why are you asking this question, it's stupid." It's a bit caustic.
> They just skip "embrace" and "extend" and just go straight to "extinguish". …They don't just decline to implement standards, they actively work against the establishment of standards at all.
> It's not GNOME that's crazy; it's literally everybody else [1][2][3][4][5][6[][7][8][9][10] that's ever tried to work with GNOME! They must be out to get you.
You're just Gish galloping to make yourself feel better. A lot of people being angry with a project doesn't actually necessarily imply that that project is inherently the bad guy. That's bandwagon thinking: "if the majority of people agree with me, then I must be right."
It can also just indicate a set of expectations that have become culturally ingrained and common in the community — like the idea that open source projects have some kind of obligation to bend over backwards to satisfy every whim of downstream developers and users, even when it conflicts with the upstream developer's vision for their own project — that clash with the beliefs and values of the project "everyone" is getting frustrated with. It can also indicate a culture of groupthink and bandwagoning and mob mentality, where everyone decides they're going to hate on a project and it becomes a self reinforcing cycle. Or it can just mean that the project in question just isn't really meant to be taken and adapted by other projects, because it's its own product, not a tinker toy kit, and so everyone is mad at it because they're expecting it to be something it isn't and hasn't been for over a decade, just because people want to takw advantage of the free labor of the GNOME team in building their product while also having their every whim satisfied. (IMO Miny and System76 have the right idea — fork GNOME or build something totally else — maybe set up a consortium of distros to manage a common GNOME fork? — if you don't like GNOME being GNOME).
I read through, in their entirety, every source you cite up to and including source 5, which I think is more than fair of me considering the Gish Gallop you're trying to put over on me, and all I see are meaningless petty grievances over minor design disagreements due to the entitlement of downstream developers, mostly about meaningless things like app indicators and themes, where everyone wants GNOME to conform to their vision of the next desktop and not their own just for their convenience. None of it seems like a smoking gun to justify hyperbolic claims of GNOME trying to sabotage other project's products out of a desire for market gain or something, or being "just like Microsoft" or anything else, unless you think the very idea of a DE or other project wanting to have its own vision and stick to it is illegitimate, in which case you should be railing against Void Linux for not using systemd, Alpine for not using glibc by default, DWM for not having themes and extensions, etc etc etc. But you don't.
And it's very interesting to me that when System76 displays similar behavior to the GNONE team, like when The GNOME team offered to make some of their extensions part of upstream so they'd get maintained by upstream by default, but pointed out that TypeScript didn't really work with GJS (I've read S76's source code, to get it to work it requires an ad hoc see script), and asked System 76 to consider rewriting the extension, and System 76 refused, or System 76 refusing to work with and accept the firmware standard that everyone was unifying on, you consider this evidence of the vilification of systems of the six, and not evidence of bad behavior on their part.
Or the transparent double standard you display between distro developers and upstream gnome developers, where the distro developers flatly refusing to align with and integrate with the vision of the Upstream project whose work they are picking backing off of is viewed as totally fine it accepted, but gnome refusing to align themselves with the vision of the people downstream from then is somehow evil, when it seems just about equal to me.
And honestly I genuinely do not see the problem with gnome being able to make design decisions about their own fucking desktop however they want, and asking distros to please stop doing the shit Android oems do to Android to gnome and randomly see me and slapping on all kinds of cruft and extensions from the "factory". Also, the idea that the police stop theming post was meant to be a directed targeted dig at System 76 is just utterly nonsensical and overly sensitive, and the fact that you can't see that I think demonstrates what's going on here. There are far many more, much larger, downstream projects that theme. Also, before you raise it, seeming isn't really any better supported on KDE than it is under GNOME, it can break things just as easily, the KDE devs just don't care (which is fine).
> There's genuinely something strange going on with the mindset around the whole project; it's like they've actively weeded out anybody with any functioning empathy, self-awareness, or non-zero neuroplasticity…
But I see you opened with needless insults and generalizations, so I don't think this conversation is going to go anywhere productive. I recommend you go touch grass.
Tell me more how GNOME are the real victims, and calling out the way y'all treat people is "Gish Galloping" "needless insults and generalizations" and "meaningless petty grievances". Words mean things, you know, and other people exist.
You hit 4 kilobytes in this defensive rant. And not a single word of empathy for anything you apparently don't personally identify with, not a single thought reflecting on the impact your conduct has on other people. Not a single spot of introspection wondering "Are we really right"?
I think I'm done being a footstool for you to grandstand about what a great person you are from. You can find a different dance partner to virtue signal with.
Perhaps you should do some introspection yourself into whether you are demonstrating empathy for people you don't personally identify with, neuroplacticity in defending your arguments, or the capacity to think about whether you might be wrong, by actually engaging with other people's reasons for not finding your evidence convincing, instead of merely assuming that all Right Thinking People would automatically agree with you. And then immediately resorting to abuse as soon as someone doesn't find your evidence as convincing as you apparently find it. Because that's what you did. Instead of explaining why the evidence you gave me was actually good, you just resorted to immediately abusing me and assuming I must be a terrible person for disagreeing with you. How dare I challenge your interpretation and valuation of the behavior and quotes given in your sources, right? Perhaps you should consider how your abusive[1] behavior impacts others.
> actually engaging with other people's reasons for not finding your evidence convincing
> immediately resorting to abuse
Lmao:
> hyperbolic disingenuous bad faith nonsense.
> draws completely wild conclusions
> the same utter drivel
> tiresome, worn out, utterly stupid and wrong
> all I see are meaningless petty grievances over minor design disagreements
Nice "reasons".
And no, your 4KB rant about how System76 may or may not also do bad things, how much you hate people who want "meaningless things like app indicators and themes", how much you hate "the shit Android oems do", how GNOME may dictate "their own fucking desktop" but neither downstream distros nor upstream apps deserve the same autonomy, how KDE supposedly "just don't care" about themes (blatantly false, especially under TFA)— ad infinitum— None of that is is actually relevant to how GNOME treats people.
I have no desire to let you "infinitely increase the granularity of the discussion, so that the rhetorical burden on me just expands indefinitely and you can always bring up a new thing and say I haven't dealt with it". The point is how GNOME treats people, and (after your aggressive replies) how you treat people— not whether you can technically personally "explained at length why" it's "far better, in fact, than KDE or any other DE".
> Perhaps you should do some introspection yourself into whether you are demonstrating empathy for people you don't personally identify with
What exactly do you think I am doing, by hearing and listening to the concerns of groups as diverse as Budgie, Mint, Transmission, System76, Inkscape, Ubuntu, Wayland, Kernel, and Subsurface? I barely use like two of those projects Ftr; I sympathized with them only because they exist in the community and I feel for them as persons.
Yeah, if you ignore the reasoning I place right next to my evaluations and just quote the evaluations, it certainly looks like I don't have reasons. Very clever of you. Also, I don't think it's wrong or abusive for me to call something that is clearly hyperbolic, disingenuous, or bad faith hyperbolic, disingenuous, or bad faith. That's precisely what you've done to me, except better: because instead of actually arguing why I'm wrong about any of the things I'm saying, or trying to argue your case at all, you've just vaguely gestured at the data, falsely assuming that all reasonable people must agree on interpretations of the data, and then when I disagreed you labeled me with various things you thought applied to me, although while I described the sources themselves, you directed it at me.
> And no, your 4KB rant about how System76 may or may not also do bad things, how much you hate people who want "meaningless things like app indicators and themes", how much you hate "the shit Android oems do",
I don't hate those people simply for wanting those things at all, I just think that the way they are treating The Gnome developers is abusive and unacceptable, and that they are being entitled and disingenuous in their demands to have those things in someone else's project. That's pretty different. Like, in actuality, I recommend system 76 to all my friends and I'm huge fans of most of their work, I ran PopOS asked for quite some time, I just think they are being unfair in this case.
> but neither downstream distros nor upstream apps deserve the same autonomy,
Because downstream distros are not making their own desktop environment, they are using GNOME's desktop environment. You have to ignore that fact to believe I'm being inconsistent here.
> how KDE supposedly "just don't care" about themes (blatantly false, especially under TFA)
If you actually read my words instead of scanning them to look for things you could be angry about, in which case you would have actually noticed my reasons standing right beside the words that apparently made you just immediately see red, you would have also noticed that I didn't say KDE doesn't care about themes. TDE obviously does care about making it seeming possible and easy for people. Katie just doesn't care that themes, by their inherent nature, can break things occasionally. That was my point.
> None of that is is actually relevant to how GNOME treats people.
It is actually, because what I'm trying to show is that the demands and arguments of the people in the sources are fundamentally misguided, and that therefore their argument that the way gnome is treating them is unfair is unfounded. Also, I read through in detail all of your sources yesterday, from top to bottom, including all of the bug tracker exchanges and all of that, as well as several more posts on ignorant gurus website, and I never once saw an instance of The Gnome people responding with undo aggression or verbal abuse towards him even when he was continually trolling their bug tracker, meanwhile his entire block is filled with aggressive conspiratorial writing.
> I have no desire to let you "infinitely increase the granularity of the discussion, so that the rhetorical burden on me just expands indefinitely and you can always bring up a new thing and say I haven't dealt with it".
I'm not trying to infinitely increase the granularity of the discussion, I'm actually trying to have a discussion where reasons are exchanged and critiques, but all you seem to do is grandstand about morality without ever making an argument or anything of the sort.
> The point is how GNOME treats people, and (after your aggressive replies) how you treat people
Aggression is not a mark of being a bad or abusive person when it is in response to conspiratorial nonsense like ignorant Guru likes to spout. I wasn't the one who initiated this tone of the conversation, that was your first source and your own conspiratorial and aggressive lines about gnome. And I mean clearly you agree with me on that, since you responded with aggression to what you perceived as bullshit, as well, so I don't understand why we have this double standard where I can't do the same.
> only you are real to you
No, I can safely say I understand the frustration of the people that wrote the sources you're talking about, I just think the frustration is misdirected and based on unfair expectations. This is why I have a lot of Hope for Cosmic de , because it's actually designed for the sorts of things people want, so hopefully everyone can just move to it and leave gnome behind. Or just switch to kde, honestly, which seems to be what a lot of distros are doing now that there are starting to notice that gnome isn't actually a good basis for a distro branded and customized experience. I don't think failing to immediately agree with someone simply because they are frustrated or upset and say that they were ill served by someone is a failure of empathy if I think their assessment of the situation is wrong. Everybody has to use their own mind to evaluate the situation and decide for themselves what's happening, instead of taking the fact that some people are angry as evidence that they must be angry in the same direction too.
> Say "Hi" to Tom Emmeness for me. The only ungrowing are the unliving.
Well, one of us was trying to have a discussion about the sources and wanted to hear answers to their rationale for not finding them precisely convincing, and one of us is just assuming that everyone who is a right thinking good person will automatically agree with them and no more argumentation or discussion is necessary at all, so I think it's pretty clear who is the growing and who is the not growing among the two of us.
I don't think five examples is a gish gallop: the point was to demonstrate a trend in GNOME behavior, you need multiple examples to have a believeable case at all.
Five isn't but fifteen begins to feel like one, because the only practical way to respond is to read the sources and give your own high level conclusions, the same way the person who gave them is doing, but then you'll be accused of not dealing with specifics, and then if you deal with some specifics but not all of them, you'll be accused of not dealing with all of the facts, and so on.
I.E.: The more evidence and examples I bring, the more you feel the need to accuse me of speaking in bad faith.
> but then you'll be accused of not dealing with specifics, and then if you deal with some specifics but not all of them, you'll be accused of not dealing with all of the facts, and so on.
Frankly, I think that's a description of what you were apparently attempting to do. For me, it was about the pattern, the damage to communities, and the immediate aggression with which you yourself responded.
You already know you must be right. You just need everybody else to also agree that you are right. How dare I bring pesky reality into the fold.
> immediate aggression... You already know you must be right. You just need everybody else to also agree that you are right. How dare I bring pesky reality into the fold.
How nice of you to describe yourself :)
Dude, I looked at the evidence you gave me precisely because I thought I might be wrong, and didn't find your description or evaluation of it at all accurate or convincing, and I explained why, and instead of dealing with my reasons you immediately began to abuse me because you assumed that all right thinking empathetic people must agree with you. Like, I absolutely did deal with your facts, I read through many of your sources and gave you a description of why I don't find them convincing, what more do you want me to do, go through them quote by quote? That's precisely what I mean by a Gish gallop. The problem isn't the sheer number of sources, it's the way you're using them to infinitely increase the granularity of the discussion, so that the rhetorical burden on me just expands indefinitely and you can always bring up a new thing and say I haven't dealt with it.
Yes, I just fail to see why one not went with some easy fix and then perhaps thinks about enhancing the spec. Errors can happen, I did break stuff in the past, too.
By my reading, this is a Fedora bug, not a Gnome bug. Adwaita is by deliberate upstream decision no longer an FDO compliant icon theme, but Fedora sets it as the default FDO compliant icon theme in their builds. Clearly someone dropped the ball in the communication between Gnome and Fedora.
If it is that way, there should be no theme index that states otherwise in the theme. As mentioned in the bug, that still is the case. Even if not the default on other distros, users will be able to pick it in desktop envs that honor the spec and trust that file.
We no longer do:
Git commit c8b8a4db63b575edf931c3d61aea1ed3d3d287f2 by Nate Graham.
Committed on 01/05/2024 at 21:50.
Pushed by ngraham into branch 'Plasma/6.0'.
kcms/icons: filter out GNOME's Adwaita and High Contrast icon themes
These are no longer FDO-compatible icon themes, and are apparently no
longer intended to be used for non-GNOME apps--going against what an
FDO icon theme is supposed to be used for.
As such, allowing the user to select these icon themes will just give
them an opportunity to break all their non-GNOME apps. Let's filter
these themes out to prevent that possibility.
We still need to figure out a solution for when our apps are run in
distros where Adwaita is used as the default icon theme, but that's a
separate topic.
BUG: 486409
FIXED-IN: 6.0.5
(cherry picked from commit 813d22ff80ede0c7c08e4563621e3778459426f0)
It seems to me (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/adwaita-icon-theme/-/issues/2... who BTW seems to be a GNOME/Fedora dev from Redhat) that Adwaita is GNOME's default icon theme. Either way, I'm not sure why Adwaita decided they weren't going to be an standard-compliant icon theme anymore but were going to continue being used as a standard-compliant icon theme...
My POV is it's a GNOME issue. If GNOME doesn't want to comply with the FDO icon standard, they shouldn't include metadata that allows Adwaita to be registered as an icon theme.
GNOME devs are only paid to care about GNOME. It's been this way since 2014 when they started breaking Gtk3 applications by removing gsettings the community used but they did not.
I can even see why they want that change, but even just keeping the old icons as compat would have been good enough, I just miss the issue why on doesn't do that directly after the issue is pointed out.
It's been 10 years and probably a hundred closed/wontfix issues on the GNOME trackers (this is latest: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5872) and the File->Open dialog in Gtk3 and Gtk4 applications still give an error message when you paste a file path into it.
GNOME business use cases don't get people using keyboard input so they don't care. In this case GNOME business use cases don't use KDE applications so they won't care.
I must confess we have a lot old bug reports around in the KDE project, too, therefore I can see the point that they might no set the priorities on such things.
In the most cases in KDE or Kate it will only happen if you trigger the interest of a dev (if it is no fatal bug) or you can provide some patch.
Wow, those RedHat guys in the gitlab tickets and commit descriptions related to this are insufferable. Is this what happens when you get paid for open source work?
I was struggling to find the word that was appropriate, but you nailed it with insufferable. I can't imagine responding with such disdain for developers and users to a sincere request.
Unrelated, but does anyone know how to get rid of the shitty monochrome icons that semi-recent (Debian stable) KDE uses by default (even for popular non-KDE applications) and restore the actual ones shipped with the applications (and of course, make the rest clear)?
I spent some time in systemsettings5 changing theme options but the only breakage I managed to (partially) fix was the titlebar.
I think you mean 'Breeze'. I think to have other icons, you just need no select a different icon theme, if you installed one, but please not Adwaita :)
The linked content directly leads to what I said. Gnome developers should address this of course (and they don't want to), but I'll repeat recommendation for the end user - use KDE and avoid Gnome. It has been so not just because of the above issue.
No it doesn't, as you'd know if you had read it. The linked content is about a KDE program (Kate) having been broken by the negligent (malicious?) actions of Gnome developers. This is self-evidently not something "using KDE and avoiding Gnome" can help with (or has anything to do with).
If you're using KDE, you aren't likely to end up using Adwaita as your icon theme. The primary users affected seem to be users of the GNOME and XFCE flavors of Fedora where it's the default theme.
That's probably libadwaita (the successor to libhandy), which by the way also forces the Adwaita GTK theme. This post is about the Adwaita _icon_ theme. Those are 3 different components (solib, CSS, icons) that all happen to be called Adwaita.
I'm using this post to air some grievances I have with GNOME.
I've been using it for a daily driver for the past few months and it's come a really long way the past 15 or so years, but they don't seem to have a cohesive vision as to what they're trying to do.
What's with the topbar? Why have the window title button in it at all? It's not like there's a menu to select different windows, and when you click on the window's button, it shows items that are better done somewhere else. It's like some useless appendage. I already know which window has focus, it's the one on top of all the other windows...
Why hide the window's menubar behind a button that doesn't even have a consistent location, like users expect from the "close window" button? Looking at you Nautil- sorry, "Files".
Their CSD titlebars don't work well with Firefox or Chromium, the main piece of software most users are likely to use. Everybody knows that its stupid, but nobody wants to be the one to change they do things, so users are left with tiny chiclets of grabable area in the upper corners of the windows. Completely idiotic.
Why can't I change the time/date format to something sensible in the topbar? Why can't I just move (or remove) the damn thing anyway?
Why all the emphasis on touch in the UI design, but I still can't select text without a mouse? Touch screen laptops have been around for a while now.
It does a good job of exposing functionality, but it feels very confused, overall. And I'm a little upset that the first taste of Linux most people will get is going to be with GNOME. It's had tons of work put into it but it still feels half baked, not for lack of trying, but just a poorly thought out recipe, if you will.
This is why I’m sad we at the LibreOffice project decided to embrace Gtk. We ported hundreds of dialogs to Glade and GNOME decided to fuck us over by deprecating it.
I do remember something about Michael Meeks calling Qt something like legacy or deprecated when asked about the option to port LibreOffice (or was it OOo at the time) to Qt. The irony.
The project does comply with the "letter of the law" when it comes to Free software. That is, the project does give the users their four essential freedoms of running the programs as they wish, freedom to study the programs, redistribute, and modify. But at least IMO this is necessary but not sufficient for "proper" Free software.
At least to me there is still stuff that is required for something to be Free software, even if you technically fulfill the definition. The "spirit of the law" of Free software to complement the "letter of the law". One of these is that you can act in the Free software ecosystem as a productive and good faith actor. In this case, the GNOME Project has decided to unilaterally break the FDO icon theme standard, and for what? Because they want to have the Adwaita icons as a "Private UI icon set for GNOME core apps"? This is not okay.
One must ask if this change truly helps empower the users in their use of the software and their computers.