I agree that there is a balance between customization and "cleanness" in design and implementation. However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far a

I agree that there is a balance between customization and "cleanness" in design and implementation. However, I think the GNOME 3 and 4 designers went too far and alienated many users: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-3-4... https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-7d96c3287f7 https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-42-the-nonsense-continues-... https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design_is_antipattern/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/wte7tr/gnomes_design... https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Moves_against_Themes https://linuxreviews.org/GNOME_Developers_have_Made_Their_Mo... https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming-wider-community-not-happy/ https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming... When a designer's "coherent vision" eclipses the needs of the software's users then users get frustrated and either fork the project or go to another project. MATE (https://mate-desktop.org/ https://mate-desktop.org/), Cinnamon (https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon), and Unity (https://unityd.org/ https://unityd.org/) exist largely because of how far the GNOME 3 designers went and how they were not willing to compromise their "coherent vision": https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=121162 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworld.com/article/208708/canonical_ubuntu_splits_from_gnome_over_design_issues.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101129161856/http://www.pcworl...