I already see the commends and only have one question, why are Linux users so fucking dum? countless people enjoy KDE, countless enjoy Gnome and others prefer Cinnamon or Pantheon, can't we agree to say which we like/don't like whenever it's relevant rather than trash on the other DEs every time the name pops up?...
Someone here used many words to try to convince me that I was incapable of good decision making and therefore owed him and the thread an apology for saying that I liked debloated OS installs while also liking GNOME.
The way I see it, gnome is friendly enough to use that new users who don't care about its flexibility will continue using it without issues while people who are bothered by the lack of flexibility are knowledgeable enough to change their DE or install a spin of the distro with their favourite DE
Most people just want a browser and a word processor plus simple spreadsheets once in a blue moon. For extremely simple and popular use cases many distros already work okayish OOTB, including those with GNOME DE.
While I absolutely don’t like GNOME and its design principles (prefer KDE), but I can see why it works for many people.
Now, for anything but the most popular use cases, that’s a whole different story altogether. I just spent the whole weekend installing and reinstalling every imaginable flavour or Arch and OpenSUSE and trying to get Hyprland or KDE to work on my NVIDIA gpu without issues and failing, then trying to stop my screen from flickering like a drowning sailor desperately trying to Morse code and SOS while on Alder Lake iGPU, and failed too. Two hours ago I wiped for what seemed like the 420th time and went crawling back to W11.
I can't be the only one who couldn't care less about Epiphany. I have zero faith behind a completely random browser that's just made on the side. What's the point, who is it for? Firefox beats it on like every use case scenario. Waste of dev time imo.
The ultimate desktop would be something like: KDE’s usability in terms of a bottom bar, notification area and menu (or ArcMenu and Dash to Panel under GNOME) + the design consistency of GNOME + optional desktop icons + window switching like Apple’s old Exposé or the current Windows Task View (Win+Tab).
Windows got one thing (almost) right, fast and snappy multitasking and that’s about it. GNOME adds long animations and takes the focus from the applications to itself - it become the “center of user's attention”. This isn’t good, a DE should be almost invisible, as minimalistic as it can be so the user can quickly switch between windows and get their job done specially on smaller screens. I guess most people run/enjoy GNOME never touched Apple’s old Exposé (macos Tiger and before?) or the current Windows Task View (Win+Tab) thus aren’t aware how far and how productive they can be on a very small screen with a simple way to move around.