When Gnome 3 first came out, it was comically unusable, but now a lot of the big issues have been fixed and I find it only mildly idiosyncratic. I like the KDE user experience more but I also think KDE is much buggier. I switched to gnome last year after getting tired of dealing with my desktop freezing/crashing and it’s been pretty smooth sailing. My main complaints are:
- Switching applications instead of windows on alt-tab (has any computer user ever wanted this?)
- Modal dialogues have window decorations that inexplicably move the parent window when dragged
- Typing in Files starts searching instead of navigating to a file/directory with the typed name
- Opening an archive extracts it automatically instead of looking inside
The default gnome applications are also quite inferior to their KDE counterparts (Dolphin is leagues ahead of Files, Kate is much better than Gnome’s text editor). But I guess you could install dolphin on gnome if you really wanted, so I won’t hold that against the DE itself.
Every day from 2021-2025. The UX is already great I just found it very unstable and buggy