What I see with gnomes though is that shedding the customization doesn’t actually make for a more solid project. The fact Wayland fractional scale took as long as it did to stabilize despite mostly working tells me gnome didn’t care about the real hardware that makes up the bulk of what exists in the world.

Similarly, it seems like plasma has a massive technical edge just in handling things like pipewire capture, etc. I find KDE is typically smoother and the gnome overview animation almost always stutters regardless of the computer I use it on from discrete gpu desktops down to mobile things.

So I can say that it seems from my experience the gnome project has naval gazed and built a model of the computing landscape they target that is divorced from reality.

I think your defense gets at the difference between a power user and a ricer. They are orthogonal. Gnome rejects ricing. There is one way. That’s fine. I configure stock KDE by changing 2 settings, 1 of which exists in gnome. But I do need to actually do things with my computers which is why the androidification dig hits.

What I will praise unreservedly is the gnome circle apps and broader which are typically polished focused and attractive.

So to me gnome fails at a desktop but has managed to foster a culture around themselves that leads to solid app development.

I have no idea how modern KDE is, because I abandoned KDE due to the KDE 4 disaster. Nonetheless, KDE 3.5 was much better than Windows XP, even if its default configuration was somewhat similar.

Actually I consider KDE 3.5 the best desktop environment that I have ever seen, much better not only than the contemporaneous Windows XP, but also than the contemporaneous Mac OS X. The reason was that KDE 3.5 had an extreme customizability, so everyone could reconfigure it according to their tastes, so it no longer resembled any other desktop environment. Unfortunately, almost everything that I liked in KDE 3.5 was removed in KDE 4 and replaced with rigid choices that I disliked.

After KDE 4, I never had the courage to try KDE again (I fled to the refuge of XFCE), but I hope that it has recovered and now it is at least at the level of its past glory, if not better.