As far as I know, Gnome 2 is the last example of a Linux desktop environment that underwent professional usability testing (on regular people and power users) before shipping.
Personally, these days, I prefer minimalist WM’s and CLI administration tools for stuff like WiFi, but all the newer heavy DE’s I’ve tried have obvious (to me) usability regressions vs gnome 2.
It is funny how little usability testing is done on desktop environments these days (I also wonder if Microsoft bothered with Win 8, or if apple is with iOS these days cough podcasts cough).
I've been very, very impressed with the MATE desktop. It's actually GNOME 2, carefully upgraded to GTK 3, then with a sensible set of improvements. It's available on most distributions, but the lead developer is also the lead for Ubuntu MATE.
Also I think the general idea that options == bad started in the Gnome 2 era.
not sure what you mean by 'professional', but KDE is still there chugging along (and IIRC default by suse, which is basically the 'red hat' of europe..)
Unfortunately not, no. They use GNOME as well, with some customizations: https://www.suse.com/de-de/products/desktop/features/usabili...
As much as KDE is better than GNOME in almost every way (opinion: mine), this is the one use-case that GNOME is built for. For use in centrally administered environments where the user is not really supposed to touch anything. Which is the primary use-case for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (or other enterprise desktop distros, too).
openSUSE is still on KDE and I'm really hoping that SUSE doesn't violently take that over to make it their GNOME vessel. openSUSE's primary use-case is for home-users, who do need to administer their PC, and it's sort of a power user distro anyways (YaST, btrfs+Snapper, not Ubuntu), so KDE is perfect for that.
Does Gnome really have a niche there? I know of three places with large Linux deployments (as in hundreds of stations). None of them use Gnome -- its interaction model is so weird and foreign that getting people who aren't Linux/FOSS enthusiasts to use it difficult, painful and frustrating for everyone, users included.
All three are SuSE shops, actually. All three run KDE; one of them is more relaxed when it comes to software engineers so a couple of folks run Cinnamon, but that's about it.
The unsettling phenomenon is that most non-techie users don't need something super smart and intuitive, they want something like Windows, because that's what they've used so far to get their work done and they see no reason to learn something new.
If it's different, but approachable, they'll adjust (perhaps that's the value in customizable DEs like KDE; you can start with something that everyone's comfortable with, then they can tweak it to make it "better"). But if it's radically different and you need someone to explain them exactly why it's better and how they've been using computers wrong this whole time, that doesn't work in the real world.
So for most people it would be a "Windows 7"-esque GUI.
• There are the kind that want more "power" exposed through the GUI, with administration happening through the same interface as regular usage. This culminates in things like Windows Server administration via snap-ins. This is traditionally what a "power user" refers to.
• There are the kind that want to treat their PC or mobile device as, effectively, single-node enterprise systems, with administration happening through alternative interfaces that were designed specifically for administration, usually of large clusters of systems. These are the folks who are at home with Windows Group Policy Objects; Linux config files; MDM profiles on mobile; etc. Basically, sysadmins who happen to be administering their home network. These also get called "power users", though maybe "hobbyists" (that hobby being https://reddit.com/r/homelab/ building) might be more apropos.
Most modern OSes seem to be moving away from supporting the first kind of "power user", seemingly because features that support that use-case are also "sharp edges" where less-knowledgeable users can hurt themselves.
But modern OSes are exposing ever-more configuration functionality to the second kind of "power user." Windows now lets you do more things through PowerShell commands than you ever could through the Control Panel. macOS has always left the more arcane functionality to the terminal, creating POSIX-ish tools like diskutil(8), defaults(8), scutil(8), lsregister(8), etc. And Linux, underneath, is still just glued together 99% via editable plaintext files (the newest iteration being systemd unit files.)
As "the second kind of power user", I like using GNOME just fine. (It's actually a little bit "more powerful" for me than macOS is, even, because I'm also the third kind of power user: a developer willing to tweak the GNOME source to get what I want. ;)
Could cut straight to the GNOME logo after that sentence. This is sort of what they do, yeah. And they do have their niche with that, which is big enterprise-y, centrally administered systems.
If the user doesn't need to administer things themselves, then not exposing ways of administration in the GUI means less ways for the user to hurt themselves. Or rather to do something not so smart and then need tech support to fix it. Can't accidently hide your panel, if you actually cannot hide your panel at all.
I have no problem with one of the many desktop environments specializing in that, but the Linux desktop is mainly controlled by companies who then develop and set GNOME as default on their distros, which are also used by people who do need to administer their PC.
Ubuntu and Fedora have GNOME as default. Debian, too, which doesn't really have an opinion, but it's what they've always used and it's stable. Arch and Gentoo don't have an opinion at all, for obvious reasons.
openSUSE is still holding against, but SUSE uses GNOME in SLED, too, and has been spreading a sort of "We like all desktop environments in *SUSE-land"-mentality, which makes me feel like they're wanting to swap out KDE here, too, at some point.
But yeah, if you haven't yet, do yourself and the Linux desktop a favor and give KDE a fair try. Or pretty much anything else than GNOME.
I'm not saying it's impossible for you to like GNOME better, but there's so many desktop environments out there that are developed from users for users, which are actually objectively better than GNOME in so many categories. Even the most lightweight of desktop environments like LXDE/LXQt often have more features than GNOME.
And KDE is what you get when you take this feature per resource usage ratio of these lightweight environments and then multiply it by the resources that a modern system can easily provide. If you ever wanted to have all of the features and options that a desktop OS could have, KDE comes far too close to that. It's the flagship experience for power users (not the type that only ever wants to see a terminal).