I remember in the early 2000s preferring Gnome over KDE, because it genuinely seemed simpler and cleaner. The something changed, and it became less useful.

Articles like this are a "wow" moment. You can sense the author's frustration, but it seems perfectly reasonable to be frustrated.

I've loved XFCE for over 15 years. When I started experimenting with tablets recently, I started with and stopped at KDE, because GNOME sucks. GNOME's UI and UX is a mess, because everything old is thrown out even if it works. It's like they're actively trying to sabotage themselves at every possible turn.

I find GNOME to be a weirdly fascinating project from this perspective. On the one hand I agree with basically everything the article points out. They appear openly hostile to both their users and developers (outside of a very small core), seem completely uninterested in cooperating with the larger Open Source desktop ecosystem, and seem to want to push people away as much as possible. None of this is even new, people have been complaining loudly about all of this and more for what feels like 10+ years, without any of the core developers caring. Yet despite all the complaints and negativity from the community about both their process and product, GNOME is still very popular and used as the default desktop by many of the major distros, and certainly much more popular than 'superior' projects like KDE or XFCE.

Reads like Gnome is cargo culting Apple/Mac.