[calvinmorrison]

Nah a bunch of clowns funded by private companies used their salaries to boost their egos to develop stupid anti-user centric desktop software starting after gnome 3 launched. Remove all options, treat everyone like an iPad baby and try to leverage the existing desktop to do a radical paradigm shift, when all people wanted was GNOME2+. This is actually different than KDE3->KDE4 transition, which while it was a total disaster in terms of usability and reliablity, continued to keep the roots of a power desktop in terms of flexibility configuration and software customization.

[zozbot234]

GNOME2+ is still around, that's what Mate is. GNOME 3 and later releases has great support for convergence, which is incredibly popular among users - while also being very easy to use via the keyboard, for a more traditional workflow. Ubuntu's Unity interface was built with similar goals, so this is quite far from a pure GNOME thing.

[ahartmetz]

>convergence, which is incredibly popular among users

I'm gonna say citation needed on that one. In fact, I have seen many rants about desktop software trying to look like touchscreen software.

[zozbot234]

Many high-end laptops have touchscreens these days. So the resemblance is quite appropriate. I would like to see a "compact", non-touchscreen mode in case no touch hardware is being used but it should be optional, for users who are okay with that level of fine-grained control.