GNOME is great as long as you use it the way that GNOME devs want you to (this year). If you want extensions, themes, customization, to use software the way it worked last year, or tray icons, it becomes... less supported.

I tried it recently and went back to i3. For me, Gnome didn't work well for multi-monitor setups and seems surprisingly lacking in customisations. It did seem very polished though.

People often complain about design decisions of the GNOME team: removing desktop icons, status bar, ...

Those people can choose another DE with legacy features like desktop icons. Tradition isn't a reason to keep up bad habits and I'm thankful to Gnome for daring to take tough decisions for the greater good.

I wouldn't use any other DE, at this point.KDE has always been cluttered and XFCE is buggy and not particularly intuitive.

There was a very good post here in Hacker News explaining why the decisions that GNOME (and others as well) have taken are bad: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541

Yes I saw this the other day. The post is incorrect in several ways but there are some valid opinions in there that I agree with too.

Nothing as big as a DE is perfect, thankfully it's broadly moving in the right direction.

They're not "legacy features" merely because your tastes have changed. They're still just "features." Calling them mean names doesn't change that, it just makes it harder to take your argument in good faith -- same as calling desktop icons "bad habits." I'm a happy GNOME user but ascribing moral judgements to common computer functionality is kind of weird.

This is debatable because it's a matter of taste (or habit), but one thing they got right is optimizing the interface for Touchscreens.

How is removing features "for the greater good"?

> like a charm.

Like a Juju one? :)