Gnome is the only out of the box desktop environment I like. KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and others drove me to hacking together something with i3 or bspwm. At that p

Gnome is the only out of the box desktop environment I like. KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, and others drove me to hacking together something with i3 or bspwm. At that point, I hadn't tried modern Gnome myself due to what others said about it, and having last used Gnome 2. I ended up using it at work though, and I shortly converted all of my machines over. Its been great. I am glad that Gnome doesn't fall in line with other desktop environments; I don't like the others. Gnome breaking old conventions and making something new is what makes it good. I don't like KDE, and I don't want Gnome to copy it. I also dont get the issue with the top bar. It wastes a lot less space than the taskbars in other desktop envionments. I also do want the time and wifi status somewhere, and Id rather not have some notch. I also only use Gnome on desktops/laptops, but I find the settings menus nice to navigate and aethetically pleasing. The author mentions dragging to top as awkward for maximizing but thats what I use on other DEs as well. And if I want to see a window behind the current one, I bring that window to front, not minimise the front window. Gnome's hot-corner to window selection screen is a huge usability improvement over minimizing a bunch of windows to get to the one I want. You can use right mouse to resize if preferred; its an available setting. I only really use the file manager for moving around files or unpacking zips. Most stuff I'll do from shell or Emacs. I haven't missed any features from the file manager, and I wouldn't want something with more complexity for my usecase. If I wanted a more powerful file manager, I'd install one. A lot of customization is available through extensions, though I've ended up preferring the stock experience plus an exension that adds a button to keep laptop from going to sleep. Another huge reason I would not use KDE is that its difficult to declaratively configure. The DE should not depend on persisted state. This is trivial on Gnome because everything is configured with dconf, and my declarative system configuration (using NixOS) has all my changed dconf settings. I only persist data and minimal state between reboots, and Gnome needs nothing persisted for me to always boot into my clean, configured as I want, Gnome DE.