I use Arch btw
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Gnome is written by, just hear me out, Malus workers in their offtime who got screamed at by Steve Jobs for misplacing a button by a few pixels. They wanted to write a Mac interface without some tech dictator breathing down their neck, but with the same philosophy of "we know what's best for the users".
Gnome is good as it doesn't had a lot of complexity and looks nice out of the box.
I do wish the gnome devs would be a little more flexible. However, I also wish KDE had a dumb mode that disables the customization. Xfce4 has a kiosk mode
So, here's a thought. Instead of removing customization, people just, you know, not customize things. It's like going into the Settings page, except instead of doing that, you don't do that.
Problem solved.
You underestimate my power, I see a Settings menu, and instantly enter a fugue state, 30 minutes pass and I suddenly come back to myself, my desktop environment looks entirely different, the windows are wobbly, and GTK window theming is broken.
I need help
Here's my complete KDE post-install configuration procedure: go into Settings, search for "Numlock" and change it to "on at boot". It used to include changing Single Click - selects files, but that's the default now, as natural law would demand.
It is still overly complicated. Gnome is simple, stable and mostly unchanging. If also can force settings with dconf.
I would posit to you that it is, in fact, the perfect amount of complicated. If I want to change something, I don't have to program and/or install an extension that will get blown up on the next release of the desktop environment because of the lack of fucks that Gnome gives for people that build extensions for it.
I will concede that it would nice to have dconf. But considering the amount of stuff that can be configured in stock Plasma, that might take a lot more than the 3 settings that Gnome allows you to change.
You shouldn't be using gnome if you are wanting to make major changes. That's the whole point. If you like to tweak things and customize KDE is great and I respect that. However, not everyone wants that especially not on a machine that is for work.
I sort of liked GTK back in the day when it was still the Gimp Tool Kit first and foremost. When it was 1999 and your other choices were a broken Lesstif, an early C++ centric Qt, clumsy Tk, and pre-Cambrian Xaw, it was nice to have something full-featured and tasteful.
Now I hesitate to pull in a GTK app because it won't theme right (I want to use the same bitmap fonts I liked in 1999, but apparently Pango stopped supporting them) and runs the risk of convincing the package manager to dump several gigs of GNOME crud on my drive.
I gather even the GIMP itself no longer tracks current GTK-- it's become solely in service to GNOME and their absurd UI whims (* * * * client side decorations)
I'm with you - I was kind of happy with GNOME2 back in the day, but the forecoming of what was going to be GNOME3 made me jump out that ship and became a refugee in KDE.
It's a shame the Linux ports of Chrome and Firefox are written in GTK because of the reasons you mentioned. Once I heard some guy at GNOME talking about porting Firefox directly to Wayland - which sounds kind of bollocks for a pedestrian like me - but if it's possible, I hope that they succeed and Firefox can become a toolkit-agnostic web browser.
But at the same time I wonder about projects like Xfce and if they ever decide to move away from GTK, like LXDE did. I mean, a fusion between Xfce and Enlightenment would be awesome.
GNOME always seemed to be a solution chasing a problem, particularly once the licensing fears for Qt/KDE were settled.
But now it's one of the things Red Hat seems to impose on the world. Feels like everything controversial comes out of them or Canonical. I guess they have the commercial cash to prop up things like GNOME and Wayland and systemd and snaps until they gain traction, while more community-focused products can't break the world for no reason.
porting Firefox directly to Wayland
I'm trying to understand what that even means.
They still need funding
I don't think I hate something as much as I hate client side decorations, "minimal" interfaces and the whole GNOME 3+ theming.