I think Gnome is great. The workflow is amazing imo, better than a clunky Windows-inspired UX, and it’s nice to have a distro I can depend on being bug free without it being a project that moves too slowly.
And those trackpad gestures. Man. They make even Apple’s trackpad gestures feel like you’re using a £300 Acer laptop.
It’s also nice to have a desktop that actually gives a shit about UX, distraction-free computing, and consistency. It’s nice to have a desktop that encourages great third party apps that integrate well with the system and follow excellent design guidelines. It’s nice to have a DE team that are ballsy enough to go against the Win95 UX paradigm and does its own thing, despite knowing they’ll get extreme amounts of hate for it.
Just because it’s not your cup of tea doesn’t mean it’s a dumpster fire or they hate their users and are doing a circlejerk.
We don’t struggle with the idea of “Arch is too bleeding edge for me, so I won’t use it, but cool project nonetheless” or “Debian is too outdated for me, so I won’t use it, but cool project nonetheless”, so what is it about DEs - or tbh more accurately, Gnome specifically - that has people being like “this isn’t what I want, therefore it’s a piece of SHIT. Why do they hate their users? Why do the users use it? Don’t they realise the devs hate them??”
This elitist, tribal mentality is one of the worst parts about the Linux community, and is, ironically, a circlejerk of its own.