Unfortunately GNOME and consistency never went together.

From time to time I revisit the GNOME dektop to assess if it's a viable alternative to my KDE.

What I still see is random, incoherent apps, meshed together, with the worst possible default values set, for each one of them.

Also the idea that half-baked and ultimately broken extensions, could provide basic functionality that should already be present in the first place, didn't do them any favors. Even the plugin/extension installation mechanism is broken!!

The general lack of configurability doesn't help either.

Considering that Windows 10 is buggy as hell on my wife's ThinkPad Yoga, I don't think that's very high bar to reach.

Gnome is not that great. You can't even put the panel on the bottom of the screen. Which is just incredibly basic configurability and even that is unavailable.

Desktop Linux on the whole is kind of annoying because on each new install, I will inevitably end up spending hours just to get everything working properly again.

I can't speak to consistent, but I think people who call any linux graphical experience polished are fooling themselves in the same way that android users are when they say it's got "just as good an app library"

No minimize/maximize buttons per default. What a braindead decision. I think you have to use gnome-tweak-tool to enable them again...

Gnome saw how terrible Windows 8's start screen was and decided to double down on the phone style app drawer.

Then for good measure threw on the space wasting task bar from MacOS. Oh, and then in Ubuntu the window controls had to be on the wrong side too, obviously.

It's basically the anti-UX.