Linux

Having followed this controversy but lacking the technical knowledge...it's hard for me to judge much.

That said, I'm actually pretty happy with the outcome here. I'm a GNOME lover, but I think System76 doing their own thing is better for them. The way Pop has modified GNOME since cosmic shows a real misunderstanding of its workflow and priorities, splitting everything up to slow things down and ironically getting in the way of the keyboard-driven workflow their awesome tiling extension encourages. They do good work and the vision they seem to be moving toward isn't inherently bad...it just clashes so dramatically with GNOME that trying to beat it into that shape makes for an awkward result that doesn't suit either vision.

yeah, the system76 / GNOME team relationship hasn't been on the best of terms for a while

Glad to finally see what the drama has all been about in context. There are clearly massive breakdowns in communication and feelings interfering with effective collaboration. One may not agree with GNOME's stance on theming and not letting distributors break apps, but it's clear that the GNOME hate frenzy these past few days/weeks has been totally devoid of good faith.

After reading this I've decided I don't want to fuck with system76 OR gnome

While I use Pop_OS! as my daily drive, I hate that they are working on a new DE. The latest Linux video absolutely destroyed Pop_OS!, showing that even though we don't want to see it, Linux still isn't mature enough to be used by the average user. And imho, fragmentation is the reason for this. Just imagine how many years it would take the talented developers at System76 to make a stable and mature Desktop Environment, and how much better KDE or GNOME or XFCE would become if the same effort and time where put into them. I don't like centralization obviously, but we already have so many great options, would be a waste of time working on another one while we don't have a complete user-friendly solution yet.