I think you hit the nail on the head. KDE gave you the full DE experience, but there was that pesky Qt license. GNOME was full GPL/LGPL and it felt like it was built to attract power users. Skins were at the height of their popularity (remember Winamp?), and GNOME gave users an easy way to customize everything without having to muck with some arcane config file format. Every release felt closer to some platonic ideal of a fully customizable yet easy-to-use DE.
Then came the iPhone, and suddenly the world went hyper-modern and hyper-minimal. Restaurants names like "The Heavenly Chicken" are now old-fashioned; today the same restaurant is simply "chicken". GNOME was also affected by this cultural shift, and as you point out, ended up abandoning its core qualities.
I believe that hyper-modernism, like other movements, is just a fad, and in a few years we will "rediscover" modding. Everything will be customizable, from the color of your keyboard to the genes that control your eye color. Who knows, we might even shake the dust off the blink tag.
These years also were problematic for Linux on laptops. Power management, wireless and overall experience was very bad. MacBook had a considerable mind and market share among Linux developers. I remember a slide saying "Linux on desktop cannot move forward because of MacOS's advantages and features on mobile", which was very true for that day.
With the rise of Ubuntu, iPhone and MacOS, GNOME wanted to be the MacOS of Linux. Straightforward, minimal and somewhat capable. However, leaning heavily on GConf, burial of features, dumbing down of UI marked their downfall.
I've moved to KDE before that time and was spoiled by kio, integrated DE features and other stuff. 4.0 was rough but, I endured and KDE became something different. A class by itself. The so-called Qt Agreement and dual-licensing also saved them.
I also believe that customization will return. I wish GNOME best of luck and give me some reason to try them, at least in a VM. I won't change my primary DE, but I'll play with others at least. GTK has some nice qualities but, GNOME3 is not treating its foundations and features as it should IMHO.
I can still dig my .kde folder and look what are the settings and how things configured though. GNOME, while being the flagship DE of GNU movement, feels closed, bloated and devoid of any GNU/Linux spirit. Maybe that's the aim for mass market adoption. I don't know.
---
Addendum:
I want to add that initial GNOME3 and GTK3 documentation was horrible. They moved everything to JS based introspection stuff and generated documentation automatically with no explanation whatsoever. We've tried to develop a gigantic project with GNOME3 and the best way to develop software was via trial'n'error in their new and shiny developer console. It was like being insulted continuously while walking in the dark in a room full of Lego bricks on the floor and sharp corners at head level.
To add insult to injury, their touch implementation was buggy. I dug the WM implementation for two weeks and found a comment basically saying that "We hacked this together. It's not X protocol compliant & needs to be re-implemented from ground up. Since you've found here, maybe you can do that, thanks." Grr...
However, the WM code was very clean and readable. I'll give them that.
For the second: not just moved, many options were flat out removed; I dropped Gnome because of this.
For the last one: and broke many apps in the process.
They eventually decided to side-step developers and remove system tray support from GTK entirely.
Edit: changed "demanded" to "requested" to be more neutral. See comment bellow.
Reading further down, it's hard for me to see a demand there, I see a heads-up about an upcoming deprecation and a suggestion of what to do about it. The reason the system tray support was deprecated and removed eventually was because nobody was keeping it up-to-date.
> I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately. I'm sorry that this is the case but it wasn't GNOME's fault that Ubuntu has started this fork. And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.
This is the point where I realized that person was not commenting in good faith. It simply isn't plausible that a GNOME developer was earnestly unaware of XFCE's existence.
It's certainly possible, even likely, but such an admission would be a gross condemnation of the knowledge of the developer regarding their necessary domain knowledge.
I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.
This allowed me to think both out of the box and carry good ideas between systems. Some examples:
- Implement just works approach in a set of python utilities developed for a project. Extended development time a little but, removed setup from so many nodes so it compensated itself and allowed me to sleep well at night.
- Copying GNOME2's desktop layout to KDE with some macOS influences allows me to become extremely efficient in my Desktop systems. Since it contains something from everything, everything other DE is familiar and I'm also more efficient in them ("This is UNIX, I know how to use it!" effect).
That's great, I do the same thing so I can relate to you, but I hope you understand that the bar for contributions to an open source project is generally more like "did you write code that the maintainer wants to merge" and not "you must familiarize yourself with all alternatives." How you achieve that varies and not everybody has the time to spend searching around on distro forums and Github. Some people might only ever familiarize themselves with one or two open source projects that they use and contribute to. And it's hard for me to see something wrong with that, that's their prerogative.
You mean KDE Plasma, right?
Ten years of pushing touch UI design on us, and it's... Still five to ten years undercooked.
According to /r/unixporn... i3-gaps? :-P
(honestly, people in that subreddit seem to manage to make any window manager look totally unexpected visually, e.g. see this[0] for a DWM customization - someone from Suckless must be digging their grave so they can roll in it :-P).
Still, there's only so long I want to wrestle for..
Huh? Canonical switched away from Gnome with the dreaded version 3 and created their own Unity instead.
For me, GNOME made three mistakes and made them back to back:
As a result GNOME3 didn't evolve. It went through metamorphosis. It's core qualities (low resource usage, balance between customization power & approachability, and more importantly familiarity) disappeared. Compounded with backlash (MATE mainly) took the excitement out of GNOME.