I get it that gnome is nowadays an experimental desktop environment, that tries a lot of new approaches.
I just don't understand why many distributions use it as their default DE.
I am fairly sure the people behind Gnome don't actually really know what they're doing when it comes to HID and Ux.
Gnome terminal for example will offset the right click contextual menu with a new line of bin/hex/oct representation of a number that you happen to have selected. By default, no it can't be disabled.
Good luck with the muscle memory to hit the contextual menu items now that everything is shifted down.
When I was in the GNOME bubble, I too thought GNOME was the be-all and end-all of Linux DE usability, with everyone else being savages slapping together UIs without so much as a style guide. Perhaps at some point this may have been partially true.
Today, all major DEs are fine. Plasma did not crash once since 2019 for me and I think its UX is quite nice, in the case of Dolphin in particular visibly better than GNOME's. At the same time, GNOME had routine issues with extensions, semi-frequent crashes, and odd non-compliant bits like refusing to use tray icons, breaking apps that depend on them, and the last time I checked, scaling was a mess.
I do think the GNOME/libadwaita ecosystem is a fantastic achievement and agree with many of their ideas, but it would be dishonest to say all other DEs are inferior and don't deserve any consideration as a default.
Only KDE and Gnome offer proper Wayland support making them in my eyes the only truly modern DEs on your list. Out of these two, Gnome is the only one that doesn’t glitch constantly. It’s true that Plasma finally stopped krashing every time you look at it funny but it’s still a bloated, glitchy mess of a DE. You really can’t count on KDE to provide updates without introducing major bugs and stability issues as proven by recent Plasma 6 release. Believe me I hate Gnome for how poorly managed and anti user it is but at the same time I see no real alternatives.
I don't think this is true, I haven't gotten plasma crashes for a long time now. Even early into Plasma 5 it was stable.
Also bloat is so very debatable. You can't on one hand complain about Gnome being unusable and then turn around and say Plasma is bloated. Uh, that "bloat" is the difference between the two!
The difference between the two is that Gnome is at least trying to constantly deliver stable and high quality desktop experience. I don’t like the way Gnome works, I don’t like the way their organization is run but I like when my computer just works. I don’t have time to fuck around with buggy Plasma widgets. I was a Plasma 5 users for two years until 2022 and I still use it on my Steam Deck occasionally. My opinion is based on experience.
GNOME is well know for breaking often backwards compatibility, especially in regards to extension.
The only criteria which I'd thick next to de GNOME DE in consistency, would be: aversion to customization, opinionated, 80% done in perpetuity, and liberal use of space (low information density)
