There is nothing wrong with being opinionated, see Rails and DHH - it's not everybody's cup of tea, but it worked well for the audience it was designed for.

As I understand the issue most people have with GNOME is the choices the developers seem to be making are making the UI prettier, but making the UX a lot worse. Plus the out of the box defaults are pretty bad - if you install GNOME on Arch it's going to be completely different to a customised distribution like Fedora Workstation.

And those people are exactly the reason why Linux will never be the OS of choice on desktop for the vast majority of people. Which it should be, because it's a great piece of software, underneath the horrible UX.

In this sense, Linux already is the OS for hundreds of millions, in the form of Android.

It just got a very different UI and somehow reworked userland.

Is this what you'd prefer on the desktop, too?

Personally, I think so. Leave the custom Arch or Debian builds for those who need it, and have a polished Linux distro “for the masses”. That’s basically what Chrome OS is, and it’s pretty popular (though, I’d like it if it was more customizable like Android is rather than just being a web browser).

well that opinion is expressed by people who want nearly zero opinion OSs.