I still remember when Gnome 2 reached its peak with Ubuntu in the early 2000's. It was pretty much the complete, reliable, configurable, and robust desktop that

I still remember when Gnome 2 reached its peak with Ubuntu in the early 2000's. It was pretty much the complete, reliable, configurable, and robust desktop that Linux ever needed. Anything since that has been a downhill, with new features being presented at the expense of other features and no-frills-but-functional design. I sometimes feel for Windows users whose basic desktop proposition has remained largely unchanged for quite a many years, disregarding some cosmetic updates. The endless need to change things eventually caused Gnome 2 to gradually become unavailable. It would've needed maintenance, updates to support new library versions, and nobody was interested. There's MATE but each time I've checked is a non-polished mess based on Gnome 2 codebase. The original Gnome 2 was lean and tidy on the surface with lots of power underneath, possibly thanks to curation by Ubuntu. The Gnome Classic in Ubuntu is okay-ish but it has a lot of leaky abstractions as well, and you feel it's sort of out of place. It takes some tweaking to change the window manager as the newer window managers tend not to be configurable enough so that I can't set my keyboard bindings to what I've had for decades. The only thing that does remain the same is the shell which I gladly accept. Having grow up using an Amiga, however, it still feels weird not to have a fully-integrated, native desktop GUI that very much defines the feel of the operating system itself. Gnome 2 had that chance. Other Linux environments before and after Gnome 2 are mostly just a shell to run terminals, the editor and the browser.