@g4sra and @golinux

Let us really, truly for a moment look at the overall environmental and economic cost of GNOME 3, shall we? This will probably not shock either of you, but for those who have never thought about this, it might be an eye opener.

* Unity
* Budgie
* Cinnamon
* MATE
* Pantheon
* CAFE
* LXQt (albeit indirectly)
* Linux Mint's XAPP Project

Unity: Ubuntu's original response to GNOME 3. Hundreds if not thousands of man hours poured into a brand new desktop environment, over at least 4 years. It stands to reason that if they've put at least 4k hours into this, at a minimum dev compensation of $25/hr, that's at least $100k right there. Possibly much more. And that does nothing to quantify the value of the volunteer hours poured into Unity as well, likely causing this figure to balloon even more. Then, of course, they dropped it when it wasn't profitable. Now a whole new community has spawned around it just to keep it alive, likely putting hundreds more hours into keeping it usable.

Budgie: Built directly on GNOME, but still divergent enough that they have consistently run into problems with theme and representation lock-in. Now, they are looking at having to rewrite Budgie atop KDE Frameworks and Qt in order to just have proper theming and a stable UI. This represents hundreds if not thousands of man hours as well, once all is said and done. It took over 24 hours for Joshua Strobl to rewrite one of his own apps in Kirigami/Qt, based on the timestamps of his streams. So with this figure in-hand, assuming he leads the charge a similar rate, this can climb up to 300-400 hours very easily. Assimung the same $25 rate from earlier, easily another $10k in the hole. At a *minimum*. This does not even count the cost of R&D to bring feature parity.

Cinnamon: Going on 12 years now, built and maintained by Linux Mint after they realized GNOME extensions alone were not going to cut it. Twelve years of continuous development, predominantly by Clement himself but far from exclusively so. Assuming even a quarter of Mint's monthly donations goes into Cinnamon, which are approximately $7-12K a month, that puts the total investment in Cinnamon, that puts the total investment at $288k, at a *minimum*.

MATE: The most direct response to GNOME 3 in this list, MATE is a fork of the GNOME 2 codebase. Still going to this day, much like Cinnamon, its direct costs likely include hosting, web domain registration, and of course the man-hours needed to maintain it. Even though this was probably the least work of everything on this list, its still not a small endeavor. At least 300 man hours had to have gone into this project in the beginning, and by now a conservative estimate would still put it at around 2K man hours at this point. Thats $50k on labor alone. Add in the webhosting costs, and that figure grows to $70-80K at least. And this doesn't even account for the development work Linux Mint put in on their side, to keep it as a desktop for their lineup.

Pantheon's Libgranite: Used almost exclusively in Elementary OS, they have had to build their own UI library for GTK in the wake of Libadwaita. This likely brought in at least 1-200 hours of labor, depending on how extensive the debugging and divergence is. $2500-$5000 worth of work.

CAFE: A fork of MATE 1.25, accompanied with a fork of GTK3 named CTK. All exclusively maintained by Zenwalker, for at least 4 years now. Assuming he puts in ~100-200 hours a year on this, mutliplied by the length of the project's life span so far, comes out to anywhere from $10-20k

LXQt: Arguably the earliest of the crew to see the writing on the wall, long before Budgie or Unity, LXQt was the end result of PCMan realizing that GTK was going down an unstable path. Now, to be fair, Razor was going on even before the merge, but the fact remains, this was labor. Since Razor's inception, plus PCMan's labor to port PCManFM, has to be at least 1000 man hours by this point, if not much more. $25k at least.

XAPP/Libadapta: Both maintained by Linux Mint, these projects were born of the goodwill that was burned by GNOME with the introduction of Libadwaita. Before this, GNOME apps were frequently re-used on other desktops, namely XFCE and LXDE. After GTK3 and Libadwaita later, this goodwill bit the dust, making a project to build cross-desktop base apps necessary. At least 1000-2000 man hours have been spent on this, combined, if not much more. Anywhere from $25-$50k.

Every single one of these projects requires: Hosting, Continuous Integration, local compiling to actually test the code beforehand, debugging, and more. Large amounts of Time, Electricity, and Money spent on all of these projects because GNOME did not listen to its user base. All of this waste, because of arrogance.

And the total cost of this now sits at upwards of $528,000 worth wasted. Over half a million dollars. And this is a *conservative* estimate.

The whole reason I am bringing this up, is because of the fact that a TDE-like approach, like what g4sra mentioned, is humanity's only shot at sustainable computing anymore. Get Hot New Stuff and Move Fast and Break Things have been a financial and ecological leech upon both mankind and the planet. Now, to add insult to injury, instead of making more durable hardware as we reach the limit of moore's law, we simply get AI copilots that nobody asked for, baked into the hardware, and made a  requirement to force replacement. Even a halfway decent mid-tier PC costs at least $600 now, and falls apart in two years or less.