GNOME is good, actually
GNOME is great.
Desktop Linux suffers from a serious problem. There's a ton of passionate, hard-working developers contributing volunteer manpower, but most desktop applications, toolkits, and environments lack much of a coherent vision and focus. Very rarely will you find clearly defined human interface guidelines or meticulous focus on user experience.
https://developer.gnome.org/hig/
This is ultimately the reason nobody even wants to bother with it on the desktop. Why the hell would they when almost everything feels slapped together? Look, I appreciate projects like KDE Plasma, but while they offer a consistently great lineup of features, there's so much inconsistency among various widgets and toolsets in the ecosystem that it makes my head spin.
Clutter is bad!
I have ADHD. One of the things that I'm naturally bad at is keeping my workspace clean. I have to make a concentrated effort to ensure that various tools and objects strewn around my house are placed where they should be. This applies to how I use computers as well. Left on my own to organize, I can quickly open 300 tabs on a web browser. I'll end up with random images and videos saved and strewn about in various different locations. Certain UI paradigms we're used to on computers I feel just aren't great.
GNOME on some level shares this belief that clutter and poor organization should be avoided in order to have a productive desktop. Most desktop applications and tools that GNOME backs are very minimal and hide a lot of their features. Some just don't have that many features in the first place. Most of this is done in the name of providing the user with a neater, more pleasant environment to work in.
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Desktop icons are completely scrapped. No longer do you have an excuse to throw random files on your desktop and never properly organize them.
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System tray icons and zombie applications running in the background are discouraged, allowing you to have better transparency and control over what's really running on your computer.
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Notification sounds are quiet and utilitarian. Simple and effective "click" sounds when you plug peripherals in.
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Window minimization is discouraged because it again encourages keeping zombie applications running in the background. Instead, GNOME pushes its very pleasant to use workspace system to quickly drag and drop windows to where you want them to be. You could argue this is a similarity it shares with minimalist tiling window managers on Linux.
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The default dock is not present most of the time when working. This seems like a huge deal, but personally I find it very easy to get used to. Being someone that works a ton on Macs and Windows machines, I always feel as if the bottom dock or panel is a source of stress and anxiety on its own. Having a million application icons tossed to the bottom of your screen that will often times bounce up and down to grab your attention is unpleasant. This is such a good change that I actually go out of my way to hide the dock on my Mac systems these days. I pretty much never interact with it.
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GNOME is (mostly) keyboard-driven. This is not only great for ultra-productive touch typists, but means a lot in terms of accessibility. Not everyone is great at handling a mouse.
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You can't really customize anything. This gives GNOME developers the ability to (in theory) better troubleshoot and resolve issues. Unfortunately, distros like Ubuntu go out of their way to aggressively customize the default look.
These choices are largely big points of contention for Linux users, who often times value configurability and fine-grained control over every facet of their systems over solutions that attempt to make certain decisions for them. However, I'm of the firm belief that it's okay for both to exist.
GNOME controversies and weaknesses
GNOME is by no means a perfect project. Ignoring how atrocious GNOME 3 was at release back in 2011 and the large amount of users it alienated, its developers are often incredibly, frustratingly stubborn in solving perceived issues and merging in much-desired features. I have some issues of my own:
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GNOME's compositor and animations are, to my knowledge, still single threaded. This makes for a choppy experience on low-end hardware or even just laptops that clock down into a power-save mode.
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GNOME has yet to implement proper variable refresh rate support in their desktop environment, primarily because of a few long-standing bugs. To be fair, I have actually run into some of the bugs in question: choppy cursors on fullscreened VRR windows, and the desktop assuming often times that non-game applications like Firefox need to use VRR. However, this is an important feature to PC gamers and it's a shame it's taking forever to merge.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154
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Big one. GNOME doesn't really have a solid, robust fractional scaling system. Currently, like macOS, GNOME takes applications, supersamples them to the highest integer, and then downsamples them. While I haven't perceived it, apparently this causes a significant performance hit. It seems like it would make sense, anyway. Additionally, GTK4 doesn't really have any concept of fractional scaling, only really working with integer scaling. With GNOME 46, the situation seems to be improving, but it's funny how most of the time it's handled better with Qt applications on GNOME than their own toolkit. Fractional scaling is important for laptops with small displays. Imagine if you had integer-perfect text on your 13 inch MacBook. Try decreasing the scaling on your laptop or many other kinds of displays.
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GNOME has been hostile to server-side decorations. This hurts its ability to work with non-native applications that do not provide their own window decorations. One of the developers for mpv, a popular video player, notoriously flipped their lid at GNOME developers for not really doing things the way everyone else does. KDE, as an example, utilizes server-side decorations on their X11 and Wayland sessions. On GNOME? It's handled fine on X11, but on Wayland mpv is just a decorationless application. Not a huge fan. I think client-side decorations can and DO look great. You're maximizing every corner of your window instead of wasting it. However, what's not great is being in a weird position where application developers have to bend over backwards just to implement decorations.
Despite it all, I'm not moving to something else
GNOME is really rock-solid stable, has a really good focus on a UX paradigm I pretty much agree with, and has the most financial backing and support out of any free software desktop environment. While I have my gripes, I think a lot of people are genuinely stuck in the past and unable to appreciate the positives of a project that they might have hated over a decade ago.