As someone who also uses Linux since Mandrake, I am tired of people telling me there should be just one desktop, file manager etc. There needs to be competition in FLOSS also, nowdays I use both desktop environments, depending on the hardware and mix and match components. For example I prefer Okular even on GNOME.

If people so desire a 'unified experience', you have Windows/macOS. I came to Linux as a refugee from these and am tired of the attempts to pull it in the same direction. Not everything has to be the same, in fact that's a terrible world to live in.

I am also tired of people saying things on Linux are "broken", they aren't any more broken than on macOS/Windows. Granted, you may have to get compatible hardware, which is only fair considering that's what you're doing when purchasing a Win/macOS machine and yet on Linux there's somehow this grand expectation that any random cram HW should just work. You don't expect anything not designed with macOS in mind to work there, so why Linux?

I use macOS at work and experience not so rare kernel panics. There was also just a bug in Premiere blowing up speakers on the MBP, being allowed to log in without a password, APFS logging encryption password in plain text etc. Yet somehow no-one is as strict on that as insisting on Linux somehow 'not working' even as am sitting here being productive on it for over a decade.

I've been using Linux since about the same time, and while I find the five-broken-implementations thing rather exhausting at times, I am more than thankful for it. It's one of the reasons why Linux (and FOSS software) is so damn useful.

Just look at Windows land, where they do have one implementation to rule them all, more or less (Windows 10). Everyone who dislikes its telemetry or almost touch-only interface is either stuck with Windows 7, which won't be an option for much longer, or is stuck venting against Microsoft and grumpily installing hacks like ClassicShell to make things a little more bearable.

When Gnome 3 came up, everyone who liked the new direction kept using it, everyone else moved to Cinnamon or Mate (or XFCE, KDE...)

It's not just about competition, it's about being able to pursue different visions and different objectives.

Users only see this in terms of choice, but there's a great deal of value about it for developers as well.

I really want to know how GNOME 3 even saw the light of day, and why distros like Fedora even went with it. Unusable.

I'm using Gnome shell since the early days and, so far, I'm very happy with it. But, then, I also use macOS on my Macs and I'm very happy with them too. All of them run everything I throw at them just fine.

I find the lack of options to customize GNOME irrelevant - I'm way past the day I cared about the wallpaper or the icons or the colors of the window chrome. I pay attention to what's inside the window, not its border.

The other day I fired up a Solaris 10 VM so I could give Wikipedia a proper Solaris/CDE screenshot and I was surprised it's actually still usable - the terminals are responsive and the rest, oh well... You don't want to use a GUI to copy files, do you?

Easy, Red-Hat used to pay the salaries for a big chunk of GTK/GNOME developers.

GNOME 3 is also far from universally deemed unusable, (I use it daily with great success), despite what the propaganda would have you believe.

I tried to use GNOME 3 after Ubuntu dropped Unity, and it never performed like Unity, hence I am now using XFCE.

The latest updates, show there is still work left to do in this area,

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/monday-25th-february-2019/995...

Pretty much this, I'd say. I know people who like its design and find it very comfortable. I'm definitely not one of them but fortunately no one heeded the calls to just build one desktop environment to rule them all :).