yeah. gnome become this mess exactly by the time most laptops OEM were jumping in on the netbook fad... and some of them started to ship laptops boasting linux in the marketing campaign, because, well, they needed something that ran well on low powered 2003 devices with little batteries. most used ubuntu, which was ubuntu the company's goal at the time btw.

then gnome was coopted and took a nosedive and OEM went back to using microsoft for everything. and ubuntu had to write their own shell to survive because gnome tought it would be smart to ship a broken 2.x version with no settings app