Something is falling apart at GNOME, and it's not subtle.

Bryan Lunduke put out a long video yesterday documenting what he calls a meltdown inside the GNOME Foundation. After going through the transcript and the comment thread, I think he's mostly right. People inside GNOME are fighting each other publicly over politics, over whether to use AI, over Charlie Kirk and J.K. Rowling. Long-time contributors are getting blocked on Discord. Board members are resigning and the Foundation sits on the news for weeks.

The details are stranger than the summary.

Lorenz Wildberg, an elected board member who ran on a platform of transparency, resigned in August. His resignation took effect September 1. GNOME didn't tell anyone until October 14. That's six and a half weeks of silence from an organization whose stated values include openness. It's also not the first time this happened. Sunny Pierce left the board under similar circumstances about two years ago, and that only became public because Lunduke kept pressing until they disclosed it.

Then there's the ethics committee. It's appointed by the GNOME board and led by co-founder Federico Mena-Quintero. Mena-Quintero has been publicly calling Omarchy and Hyprland fascist and telling people to avoid them. Other GNOME people are telling users not to buy Framework laptops because the company collaborates with fascists, and recommending System76 instead because its leadership is anti-fascist. All of this arguably violates GNOME's own code of conduct, the code the ethics committee exists to enforce. The enforcers are the ones breaking the rules, and nobody is doing anything about it.

The Framework thing has history. Last year GNOME officially turned down a donation from Framework. One of the reasons given at the time was that Framework was connecting people to individuals with "Hitler particles." I wish I was making that up.

On the AI question, there's no coherent position. Some people are furious that AI tools are being used in the project. Others seem angry that people talk about AI without using it enough. Lunduke's description of it as Schrödinger's AI, simultaneously a sin and a missed opportunity, feels accurate based on what's floating around on Mastodon and the mailing lists.

Board member Cassidy James Blase's only public comment on the whole mess was a post about how disappointing it is that people keep sending him Harry Potter merchandise, as if the author isn't using her fortune to spread hatred worldwide. The CEO of GNOME then issued an apology for the board president's earlier statement, which itself said almost nothing. An apology for a non-statement. That's where things are.

Why should anyone outside the GNOME bubble care? Because GNOME is the default desktop for Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, Oracle, and SUSE. When the Foundation's leadership is busy calling hardware vendors fascist and hiding board resignations, that uncertainty trickles down into enterprise Linux. Distro maintainers notice. CIOs notice.

The comment section under Lunduke's video is what you'd expect. A lot of people saying they jumped to KDE or Cinnamon years ago and have no regrets. A few arguing Microsoft or Apple must have infiltrated the Linux world to cause this. Someone suggesting a fork of the last good X11 release of GNOME. One person calling it GNOME of Thrones, which made me laugh.

None of these people seem to be facing consequences for anything. The code of conduct gets invoked constantly and applied to nobody. GNOME keeps drifting, and at some point either the big distros move to something else or a fork fills the gap. Lunduke thinks it'll happen. I'm not sure he's wrong.