Torvalds ran into issues when he upgraded his desktop system to the latest version of GNOME 3 and tried to change font sizes. Fixing this resulted in breaking something else. And things continued in this vein.
The exercise annoyed him to such an extent that his anger exploded. "Who do I need to f*** to get standard font size and panel options, instead of having to wade through this kind of 'unsupported and random extensions that look ugly as hell and break randomly' crap?" he asked.
GNOME 3 has attracted a huge amount of user discontent since it was released in April last year. Efforts to make things better by releasing fixes do not appear to have worked because the basic attitude of the developers appears to be that they know best.
An unofficial site, called extensions.gnome.org, which hosts extensions that offer functionality which is difficult to find in GNOME 3, hasn't helped either.
Configuration options are limited and are often buried deep, requiring hand editing of files to get a small change to show.
This isn't the first time Torvalds has found fault with GNOME; last year, he criticised the project for its "head up the a***" attitude.
And some years ago, he referred to the developers as "interface nazis."
