Is the Gnome Desktop Regressing?

To be fair, this critique is largely with the Gnome destkop, I haven't played with KDE 4.x at all yet, although I'm getting pretty close after my recent Gnome frustrations.  My last Gnome frustration was with Ubuntu 8.10 which Gnome (and Ubuntu) decided to complete break the ability to save and restore session state upon logout/login, and issue that I believe remains broken.  I eventually learned to work around this with a stupid script which starts up my most used programs and properly places them on the correct screens.  It's a total hack, and pretty stupid seeing that session state has been a feature of Linux (and most X desktops) for as long as I can remember.  The outcry against this bug on the Ubuntu and Gnome bug list was high, but Gnome developers don't care, they said the old code was broken and they didn't have time to implement compatibility for old applications for such a broken protocol.  OK, that sounds pretty good from a technical standpoint, but is pretty crazy from a user perspective.

Now, I've recently been playing with Ubuntu 9.04 and Fedora 11 (release candidate).  These new releases have introduced and even more annoying bug.  I do almost all of my computing on a Dell D830 laptop with a 120DPI screen.  When I'm in my office I have an external monitor which I use as a dual-head setup.  This external monitor is a dual head, multiple X server setup because I've found this to work best monitors with different DPI's and also for doing things like full screen video on one monitor, and a full screen VMware session while the other monitor functions.  Yes, I could probably use a single panned desktop, but then I can't easily operate each monitor independently, when I switch one monitors virtual desktop the other changes too.  I've used the dual-head, seperate X server setup for years with only a few minor issues here or there.  Guess what, with Ubuntu 9.04, or Fedora 11, this setup doesn't work very well because of, you guessed it, a Gnome bug.  For some reason most applications launched via gnome-panel on the second screen now open on the first screen.  Since it isn't a panned desktop you can't drag them to the correct screen.  It's incredibly annoying that once again, a feature that has worked for years, is now totally broken (on top of the fact that they've yet to fix the last long working feature that the broke).

A quick search shows many people reporting the bug for Ubuntu 9.04, and the bug is also in the Gnome desktop bugzilla (has been for over a month).  Once again it appears that Gnome developers can't release a product that doesn't introduce core regressions, and, when such regressions are reported, their just ho-hum about it, no big deal, maybe we'll fix it in the next release.  It's not the fact that bugs show up that's really the problem, heck, that's expected, it's the fact that there's no triage to get these types of major regressions fixed if a quick manner.  They pretty much repeat the mantra that there's not enough resources to focus time on these types of fixes.  I can understand this, but if that's really the case, then QUIT RELEASING NEW VERSIONS.  Focus your time on making the current version as bug free as possible.  This will do much more for the user experience than constantly releasing new features while breaking old ones.

In the meantime, I think I'll finally go check out KDE 4.x.