So I've been thinking about how I'd fork Gnome. Because there are enough things wrong with it that I think getting rid of the original/current staff would help towards fixing a lot of things.

I would start by shredding several documents which I find completely irrelevant to developing a desktop environment. Then I'd rename it from Gnome to Pixie; changing the logo from a bloated footprint to a cute mythological creature the internet hasn't ruined.

Speaking of bloated footprints, that'd be one of the first things I'd work on. I'm not certain what the vector would be, but I feel that importing some of the major addons as features instead of steadfastly refusing to code them in might be a start.

If push came to shove, I'd abandon GTK3 for literally anything better, if it was the culprit.

So, what project would you fork?

If we're talking fork a program/project not considering programming ability (or lack thereof) I would want to fork one of the two main browsers (Chrome or Firefox, doesn't matter which - both suck, though Firefox sucks more in my experience, as it somehow manages to feel more slow and bloated than Chrome) with the specific aim to reduce resource consumption (e.g. in terms of RAM). It's really annoying how browsers eat up at least half the RAM. In general it's annoying how everything digital has become more bloated nowadays (e.g. games now require 4 gbs of RAM at least and are bigger in size for no reason, except perhaps for prettier graphics, which need more RAM and processor and videocard power).

In regards to forking Gnome now, well Mate is a thing, and it did result as a fork of Gnome. It uses Gtk too - it used to use Gtk2, at least up to Ubuntu 16.04 iirc, but now uses Gtk3 too. Still I like that DE quite a lot (it certanly is lighter than Gnome too) - its only downsides are that it isn't quite configurable in terms of desktop theme colors (precisely because of Gtk), and it doesn't have a built-in setting for rotating multiple wallpapers - but again there are other programs for that (though it would be nice if it were built-in, as it's a basic enough feature e.g. KDE has it afaik - maybe something to consider for a potential fork -though preferably improvement- of Mate...)
If you want something lightweight and most definitely don't like Gtk, you can also look into Lxqt. It was nice enough last time I tried it through a VM, though I feel more comfy with Mate myself.

P.S. Because other people looking at this thread might not know (software - and free software at that - is a niche subject after all), Gnome ([url=url=http://www.gnome.org/]http://www.gnome.org/[/url]) is a desktop environment (DE) (DE are like different interfaces for the same underlying operating system) for the Linux operating system (and also available for other Unix-based OSes) that is very heavy on resource consumption and whose programmers have made some very controversial decisions regarding the interface. Mate (mentioned above) is another DE that started as a fork of Gnome with a more traditional/windows-like interface. It's rather lightweight and somewhat customizable. KDE is yet another DE, heavier than Mate (compares with Gnome in terms of heaviness), but way more customizable. And there are more...

Ew... that sounds nasty.

Yeah, it does sound weird taken out of context. Feel free to read my explanation of the terms used in both his posts and mine (listed again below for your convenience): And what I forgot to mention above is that "forking" in software lingo means taking an existing software and modifying aspects of it.

Gnome is nasty. In various ways. Hence why I made the thread.

Two ideas for browser forks:

1. Fork lynx, bringing it up to the standards of the modern web (understanding things like the VIDEO tab, allowing the video to be opened in an external program). I'd also fix issues like not being able to interrupt some transfers. Furthermore, I might fork that into something like lynx-js, to get a text based browser with JavaScript support, but the js-less version would still be maintained.

2. Fork Chromium, rip out the V8 JavaScript engine and don't replace it. The result would be a graphical browser that uses a modern layout engine, but lacks support for JavaScript and anything depending on it. I suspect such a browser would be faster and smaller due to not having to load a JavaScript engine. While we're at it, create an electron-like variant, which would allow applications using an HTML interface to be written and deployed, and it should hopefully be smaller than vanilla electron. (Note that, without JavaScript, the application would need to be written as if it were a server-side application, in a language of the developer's choice.)

3. Take PPSSPP, and make it able to emulate Nintendo DS games with the same performance. (Well, this isn't a trivial task, and would probably not work as a fork, since the entire emulator would need to be re-written, anyway.)

While I do agree with you that every thing seem bloated in the internet, I have 2 browsers open with several tabs each (not every tab is loaded) and currently sitting at 2.6Gb reported by Windows Task Manager. It doesn't seem that much really. Could it be the add block and script blocker?

Also, Ram is cheap if we are talking about modest amounts.

Galaxy! GOG's optional client.