I jumped off the GNOME train early because of their philosophy of appealing to the average user by removing options power users want. The UI guidelines Sun dona

I jumped off the GNOME train early because of their philosophy of appealing to the average user by removing options power users want. The UI guidelines Sun donated to them were all about removing customization and "unnecessary" options to simplify the user experience, and early GNOME went all in on it. KDE took a different approach, balancing power user needs vs. average user needs. That's where I wound up after I reached the point where maintaining a 2,000 line .fvwmrc was no longer appealing. My conclusion was that there is no "one-size-fits-all" desktop. Fortunately a good chunk of formerly duplicated functionality has been moved outside of GNOME and KDE so I barely notice when I'm running a GNOME program on KDE these days.