I find they just remove features/make things harder or more annoying than they used to be. It's pretty obvious how to enter a specific path in Dolphin, Windows Explorer, Thunar, etc. In Nautilus you need a key combination. Gedit used to be great but they tucked 95% of features away for no reason, chopped out desktop icons for no reason, ditto title bars, minimize buttons etc. Different is not necessarily bad but it doesn't feel like anything is really better or easier to use with a bunch of features chopped out or hidden.