> GNOME users are accustom to polish not being the priority of the developers.
Wasn't the whole spiel of Gnome 3 that it was all about "UIXP" and perfection on defaults, sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? That's effectively all about interfaces that do very little, but do it very well - i.e. they are super-polished, if less featureful.
It is true, though, that a lot of people stopped using GNOME. In fact, despite Ubuntu and RedHat effectively pumping users into the ecosystem for years, most Linux folks I know use either KDE or boutique DEs.
I don't know enough about GNOME's history, but I wonder if the people making those promises fell into the trap of believing that a more polished desktop environment would be one with cleaner code, and when they said super-polished they meant clean abstractions.
A super-polished UI (in the sense of "well-rounded, meets expectations, minimizes user surprise, behaves predictably") has messy abstractions because humans are messy. I've never met one that looked good on the outside and didn't have ugly snaggy bits on the inside to get all that good-lookingness to actually work in the corner cases. Perhaps GNOME has fallen into the trap of sacrificing features for purity of form. If they're saying things like "We'll have thumbnails when someone can figure out how to do it cleanly" they've fallen into that trap.
> sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary?
Scratch "if necessary". Power users have privilege, so deliberately throwing them curveballs for the sake of equitable outcomes seems to be the GNOME way.
Wasn't the whole spiel of Gnome 3 that it was all about "UIXP" and perfection on defaults, sacrificing power-user functionality if necessary? That's effectively all about interfaces that do very little, but do it very well - i.e. they are super-polished, if less featureful.
It is true, though, that a lot of people stopped using GNOME. In fact, despite Ubuntu and RedHat effectively pumping users into the ecosystem for years, most Linux folks I know use either KDE or boutique DEs.