The devs have the same kind of “we know better than you do” mentality towards design

It’s not “we know better than you do”

It’s “we have a vision for the desktop environment”

If you granted the user every little thing they wanted, you don’t become a better piece of software. You end up middle of the road. There are limited resources and by keeping a limited scope and having a clear idea of what you want to accomplish- you can do what you aim to do really well. Instead of being mediocre at a lot of things.

My experience with Gnome- it does 95% of what I need a Desktop Environment to do (and certain things others don’t do very well). Some features like

• Being able to push a button, start typing an application’s name, and push enter to start that application
• Being able to push a button, and immediately see at a glance all of the windows I have open and quickly navigate to them
• Being able to easily set keyboard hotkeys so that I launch applications and can run my own custom scripts with the push of a button

Example- I have a script that I set to “Control+Num Pad 5” that opens up a Gnome folder search dialog. I navigate to a folder and click “Ok” and then 4 terminals open on my left monitor. Three small ones stacked on top of each other on the left, one big one on the right. Basically like a tiling window manager. This script has custom commands that run depending on the directory. If I open a react-native folder, it runs an Android emulator and neovim on the big terminal.

• Being able to easily run scripts on files and directories directly from Nautilus (Gnome’s file manager)

Example- When I right click on a pdf file in Nautilus, I have custom scripts that I can run. One is “splitPdf” which creates a new folder called “split” and then creates n.pdf files where n is the number of pages. I also have “compressPdf” which will compress the pdf as much as possible and pops up a notification showing you how much. I have one for .xlsx and .doc files called “printPdf” that converts those to pdf files.

Those 4 things I think Gnome does better than any other default desktop environment I’ve ever used and I’ve used a lot over the course of my life. The remainder of the items (the 5% of stuff Gnome can’t do) I have found custom plugins and in one scenario it took me a couple hours to write my own custom plugin.

MacOS does #2 and #4 well by default (although it’s harder to write scripts with their clunky apple script language whereas with Gnome because you can just use regular old fish or bash scripts). With certain applications (like better-touch-tools or karabiner) you can get similar functionality as Gnome.

Windows with Autohotkey does #3 although you have to again use a clunky language (even clunkier than Apple script)

KDE can do #1 (search/launch apps), but feels slower and less streamlined than Gnome’s immediate overview. It does #2 (window overview) and #3 (keyboard shortcuts), but buries these features under layers of settings and inconsistent menus. For #4 (file manager scripts), Dolphin technically supports actions, but configuring them requires wrestling with clunky .desktop files whereas on Gnome you just use fish or bash or python or javascript or whatever the hell you want and stick it in a directory.

In my opinion, Gnome is miles ahead of KDE and while it’s obviously not as polished as MacOS, it has accomplished so much more with its limited resources than a megacorp like Apple does.