I think there is a disconnect in what you call a feature and what is a design decision. GNOME consciously deviated from the “desktop” paradigm. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or everyone has to like it but this is what they did. I’m not trying to nitpick here but I think it’s important to see what is actually happening here, desktop icons are not being worked on not because they hate the users and are lazy in implementing things but because there is no traditional desktop. The overall GNOME UI is not made along this line of implementation, instead it has the activities view. Again, I’m not saying you have to like this and maybe it’s a dumb way to make a UI, idk, but criticizing it for not having desktop icons is like criticizing MacOS for not having a start menu. It’s just not made that way.

I think quite a big problem with KDE that they are also trying to break away from is making the UI resemble too much of Windows. New users then will expect things to behave exactly like Windows when it just can’t. That doesn’t mean that there are missing features necesserally but that things are implemented differently and the uninitiated user should know that from a first glance.

Overall I get the sentiment. GNOME is different and needs getting used to and does not fit all workflows out of the box. It has missing features that I wish would be implemented but overall I like the direction they took. It’s new, different and after a couple of weeks of adjusting I really gotten to like it. I don’t really miss desktop icons because I haven’t used them in Windows anyway, I personally like to launch my programs from the start menu/app launcher.

People bash the GNOME team for being too strickt with their design rules and implementations but honestly, I like that they have at least a central vision that they are trying to implement. I don’t agree with all of them but so far, all in all, I like the direction GNOME has taken since switching to GTK3 and update 40. Things haven’t been fast for sure, the road was bumpy and it took some time and several revisions but the fact that such a comperatably tiny team, a lot of them working on this in their spare time, managed to make something that I can honest to God say is a comparable replacement to the Windows or iOS user interfaces is remarkable.

And Wayland also threw a wrench into everything and required several rewrites to old protocols but we are really getting some long awaited features like the task bar icons are being actively worked on, a lot of window UI enhancements with LibAdwaita, HDR, fractional scaling and more.

That’s not really fair. GNOME has been working on LibAdwaita and GTK4 for quite some while to actually have stable and usable tools to make the missing functionalities happen. And they been adding these in a really good rate in the last 2 releases. Until now we really just didn’t had the tools to implement a lot of stuff.

If you look across to KDE land, and not to bash on them I love KDE, they’ve been much quicker to introduce features but then also spent many releases fixing bugs and sometimes completely re-implementing those features to work properly.

I gave an effort to DDG for months and I really wanted to like that but it hasn’t been that good for me. Image search especially is really subpar, but also in general searches a lot of times I had to resort to using !g after messing around trying to actually find what I wanted.

I don’t like Google but I have to admit that their principle product is above the competition right now. I hope it’ll change but honestly, with adblock if Google search is the only service I’m using from them and it’s working out I’m kinda okay with that.

If they start plastering their results with even more ads tho, I’ll definetly jump ship in a heartbeat.