My needs have become more and more simple over the last couple of years. In particular because my work machine is now a company-provided Apple laptop (ew). So,

My needs have become more and more simple over the last couple of years. In particular because my work machine is now a company-provided Apple laptop (ew). So, only all of my personal machines are Linux, and my personal life computing needs are relatively simple, in nerd terms (web browser, ssh in my LAN, and SAMBA-style file sharing on my LAN). So my opinions might be a tad outdated as I haven't really fiddled with my UI that much in the last couple of years (except to switch back and forth between Wayland and X11, and nouveau and proprietary NVIDIA drivers for my main personal laptop). But I haven't participated in a good, old, Linux desktop holy war and rant in a long time, so here we go. :) GNOME definitely seems to be ahead of the competition (including KDE/Plasma) when it comes to basic, "just works", kinds of things. This includes better (hot-plugging) screen management in the common cases and the on-screen keyboard seems to work better/consistently than KDE's. I can't think of more off the top of my head, but I remember thinking there were more things that worked better- maybe audio/volume settings and network settings? I'm even one of those weirdos who enjoys the GNOME Shell workflow/UX, though when I say "GNOME", I'm mostly referring to the whole suite of desktop libraries/utilities/etc. So Budgie and GNOME Classic/Fallback also "count" as GNOME desktops to me. In any case, I do still have several gripes with the GNOME desktop(s): 1. Network Manager still seems to be unaware of wireguard. I hate that I have to manage this from the command line. 2. GDM's login screen doesn't share settings such as touchpad-tap-to-click with the regular desktop. Now, I understand that Linux is a multi-user system and that tap-to-click is configured on a per-user basis, but I feel like there should be (easily discoverable) global default settings. 3. GNOME Shell still feels a little slow and janky at times on my "old" personal laptop (2012, but has a Core i7 and 16GB of RAM). That seems to be the case for all combinations of Wayland/X11 + nouveau/NVIDIA, but I'll admit that nouveau is noticeably worse. It could be that it's an NVIDIA thing. 4. GNOME Shell's app drawer UX still sucks. I don't know what the answer is, and I agree with them that a nested menu that groups things by optional/convention-based metadata on .desktop files isn't a good option, but they still haven't found an answer that works for me. I guess I'm glad that we can at least manage and group things in recent versions, but that's too tedious for me, too. And the icons are still way too big. 5. [GNOME Shell] I thought the distinction between window-menu and app-menu was actually a good idea, but you just can't pull it off when you don't own the whole stack, which is a shame. So, I understand why they abandoned it. But, now that they did, the top bar is even more useless than it was in the earlier days.