This. I can obviously only speak for myself, but over the years I've tried a lot of different desktop environments and window managers (http://www.xwinman.org/

This. I can obviously only speak for myself, but over the years I've tried a lot of different desktop environments and window managers (http://www.xwinman.org/ http://www.xwinman.org/ was a favorite when I was getting started with Linux back in the mid 90'ies). Nowadays I use a pretty out of the box gnome (well, with whatever bastardizations Ubuntu has done to vanilla Gnome, with the unity-like sidebar etc.). I just want something that works, not a million papercuts that bleed me dry (e.g. I have a networkmanager applet to configure my VPN, works out of the box, no need to fuzz around with making various scripts or manual editing of config files. Screw that, I have actual work to do as well.), and it seems gnome & ubuntu have been pretty good at delivering. I don't care that my current desktop works differently than my old favorites fvwm or olvwm. I save more time by having my muscle memory get used to current keybindings and my eyes get used to the current look, than desperately trying to make gnome in 2023 look and behave like fvwm in 1995 (or whatever arbitrary snapshot in time one takes as the bestest ever and anything which is different is crap).