I would pick the unholy abomination that is ExplorerMetroUWP in Windows 10/11 over GNOME any day of the week. GNOME is nigh unusable other than as an expensive piece of wall decor.
Not the user you're replying to, but some workflows just don't work well in Gnome (yet).
But the combination of key shortcuts and mouse gestures makes it feel really nice to use in practice. Workspaces work like I'd expect, as do Alt+Tab and Alt+`. The built-in apps and settings have a level of consistency the Windows team could only dream of right now. Notifications in Gnome are fantastic. I could go on.
Lack of customization for one, either I do things the GNOME way or the highway. Screw that, if I wanted that I would be using MacOS and/or iOS instead since Apple does that far better.
Form factor dissonance for another. GNOME clearly targets the mobile form factor, and it fails me for all the reasons Metro in Windows 8 failed me because guess what: I'm using a desktop/laptop, not a tablet/phone.
Yeah if you value customizability at all, you should probably be using kde. I value simplicity and consistency.
I had issues with ubuntu's unity back in the day and I switched over to i3wm, but I didn't find I used tiling enough to make it worth losing the usability of a desktop environment
I think it's more fair to say all form factors are treated equally, to the possible detriment of focusing exclusively on desktop. I think Gnome does well and is really versatile no matter which form factor you use, and I didn't have much issue moving from Gnome 2 to 3, or Windows to Gnome, or OSX (at the time) to Gnome (I've gone back and forth a lot over the years).
For me, workspaces (which Windows lacked natively until very recently) and Alt+Tab/` are how I get around.
The customizability argument is a solid reason to dislike Gnome, but not for all time. Things do get better each release. Well, except for extensions, which always break.
About configurability, I installed more than a dozen shell extensions and my Gnome desktop looks like and behaves like what a desktop should be for me, quite distant from the ideas of Gnome's developers.
Yes. The UX is much better.
Linux customization capabilites are phenomenal I give you that, but it takes a very big amount of time if you want something specific for you, and when an update hits and things just break :-(
Gnome actually has a different philosophy. There wasn't much customization offered at first, as the focus was on nailing a single set of UX and aesthetics. And I think the Gnome team succeeded, but the lack of customization is/was divisive.
I use Linux for my homeserver, and used to have it on my HTPC too. On the HTPC I only used openbox, so in a sense it's even less complicated than xfce. The trouble is with the software for the htpc stuff, like remote gaming, audio, videoplaying retrogames software and so on.
The part that ruined my experience is the amount of configuration needed to get there, and updates that constantly broke either my video player, the audio or the remote gaming. Either a driver update with a breaking change, or the audio config that needed repair and stuff like this. Everytime I'd spend obscene amount of time to try to find what's the culprit, and it usually came down to updates breaking one thing or another. On windows it's seemless and in some ways with better performance and ease of installation. Up and running in 15 minutes and with total control to boot...