I prefer Gnome. It's simple, it's to the point, and it stays out of the way. My focus should be my work, not my DE.
Funny because Gnome's defaults are so not what I want, that it really doesn't stay out of my way, on the contrary, it keeps frustrating me, and the worst part is that it's really not easy to change it to your liking. Had to use Ubuntu Gnome at work and it made me pull my hair out.
At least with KDE, IceWM, XFCE, OpenBox, etc. there's gonna be some setting or at least a config file to change what bothers me, instead of looking for the 20th extension which either is out of date and doesn't work on Wayland, or will break at the next Gnome update.
Gnome is only good if what's out of the box fits you like a glove, and then it's VERY good. Otherwise, forget about it, it's like trying to run a marathon in a shoe that doesn't fit you: it will be very painful. And I'm too old and set in my ways to completely overhaul my workflow and usage patterns to a new DE paradigm, the way Gnome expects of me, instead of sticking to those DEs/WMs I know already work for me.
YMMV.
Then they log off, and go back to their polished MacOS or Windows machines to play games or watch movies.
But ultimately, I am in a terminal probably 90% of my time, and I want a DE that facilitates that... which GNOME does.
I feel like this would apply better to stuff like i3, IceWM, OpenBox etc. , no? Gnome is definitely for those who want to use a GUI, not get rid of it, otherwise they would use something a lot more minimalistic instead of something that eats up 1.2+ GB of ram just to launch an app.
>For a lot of people it's a comfortably simple container for a terminal, web interface, or GUI driven config management tool and nothing else.
But you can do that with absolutely every WM/DE though.
that being said, I fell in love with Adwaita's design and the GTK headerbar applications for their simplicity and elegance. I so fell in love with it that I begrudgingly decided to switch to GNOME desktop on Ubuntu, just so these applications would feel native.
a few years in, and i'll be real; you're absolutely right about how GNOME expects you to totally overhaul your workflow. that being said I regret to say that now I am fully married to the GNOME workflow and can't even bear to use MATE anymore (other than for brief stark fits of Compiz nostalgia)
I have seen this comment in regards to Gnome a few times across various discussions. Not really sure that this actually means. Gnome shows notifications at top center which is more distracting than notifications in lower right corner. If you want to quickly search and launch something you have to go to overview mode which shows all windows, workspaces, dash, which is very distracting when all you wanted to do was search application.