When I installed Arch about a week ago I instinctively installed Gnome as my desktop enviroment. I stared using gnome about 10 years ago and have used it on and off since then. And I'm one of the people who liked the change to gnome-shell, at least the idea of it. There is a lot of really good ideas in that new interface. And usually you can get it working quite well with some extensions.
One trend that I haven't liked very much though is their "pruning" of features. I understand their reasons for it, simpler code and easier to maintain, but unfortunately it has gotten to a point where they are removing features that are essential to get work done efficiently. I know you can usually work around it, but it is getting ridiculous.
A while ago they removed the split pane (F3) feature from nautilus. Something I had been using daily up until that point. And when I installed the newest gnome on Arch I noticed that they have now removed the opition for transparent background from gnome-terminal. I know that can be viewed as pure eyecandy, but I used it to get a sense of what was going on behind all the terminals I usually have scattered all over my desktop.
This brings my to the main point of this post. Is it a viable reason to remove features for code maintainability? I understand that code maintainability is essential for any project, but if you remove important features to get leaner code, don't you sort of give up on the user. I do understand that in this case it's probably also a matter of trying to simplify the user experience, but that can usually be done without removing features.
The classic style of solving the problem of feature creep is to start from scratch every few years, and then you implement the most important features first, and the rest will follow. That way you can eliminate old feature, but you still get new feature creep. This is for example how KDE 4 was done. Gnome is apparently taking the opposite aproach. Start with lots of features, and remove them all one by one, and see where it starts hurting.
Is this a viable alternative to software development, or is feature creep like inflation, technially a bad thing, but the alternative is even worse. I'm starting to think that this might be the case. The problem is that if a rewrite hasn't yet implemented a feature that I need, I have a sense that it's probably coming soon, even if that soon might be 3 years from now. But if someone removes a feature that I find important, I don't have any hope of getting it back, so I'll have to switch to something else. As terminals go it's xfce4-terminal, and as desktop enviroments go at the moment I like Cinnamon.
I still respect the Gnome project, I use a lot of their software. But I think they are mucking things up a bit. I can't quite figure out who they're developing their software for, maybe Mac users.