In contrast I really hate what gnome is doing. Opinionated software is not something I want on my desktop. The huge (touch first?) window title bars, hamburger menus, limited configuration options etc, they're all wrong for me. I'll never use it.
But this is the great thing about FOSS. There's something for everyone.
Also, everything in KDE (at least in the Fedora KDE distribution) amazingly "just works".
KDE has been an astounding revelation for me in how good FOSS can be, and I feel like no matter how much I donate, they deserve more than I am giving them.
And ChromeOS... Lol :)
Anyway, do you use the GTK file picker? Or have you swapped it out, somehow? That's my biggest problem with gnome. I'm frustrated every time it pops up. It has a long list of bugs that have been ignored for 5+ years. The biggest issue being that it only offers list view, no thumbnail view. So, doing anything with media files is extremely irritating. But, for some reason, so many projects still use it.
And don't get me started on the infamous Gnome filepicker. How are the thumbnails going? To which the response from the community has always been: "this isn't a problem since that's not how Gnome users are supposed to use Gnome" lol. Ok Gnome, you do you, just count me and everyone I know out.
I find it a shame that such a toxic and user hostile project has become the default Linux DE on most distros today, while KDE keeps getting sidelined because people refuse to try it since they had a bad experience with it 10 years ago and seem to hold a grudge.
I'm happy Valve chose KDE for the Steam Deck, though it is the most sane choice for it though.
After a decade and a half, things might be moving on that front, if you're on GNOME.
With the whole portal system desktop Linux has been adopting, GNOME will eventually use a Nautilus-lite widget, with thumbnails. There's a lot of Nautilus-related changes coming in GNOME 43 but I haven't heard any official news about it yet, so fingers crossed.
I just open files from the terminal or CTRL+L paste the path most of the time though, which works fine on the GTK file picker too, but the terminal cannot be a solution for everybody.
Wow, I've been out of the loop for a long time. The last release I've been aware of was Gnome 3, and I use Linux daily.
I've been using Debian / KDE as my primary desktop & laptop environment since late last century, and it's been mostly a dream. The 4->5 transition involved some frustration, certainly, but it was relatively short-lived. Compared to forays into Unity & Gnome the experience was, even during those dark days, consistently better.
Sizes of icons, buttons, fonts, window borders, etc etc are all customisable, so it's weird that was a sticking point for you.
It sounds like what you actually struggled with is breaking your environment by doing odd things with the distribution, which is an entirely different problem.
If you remove packages and ignore the warnings from your distro, you should expect unpredictable results. If you remove packages that don't incur a warning from your package manager, and the result is a broken system, then you should file a bug report with your distro.
I see you recently switched to Debian, but you didn't indicate whether you tried KDE on that distro. I've been on Debian GNU/Linux + KDE since last century, so I can confirm that this combination 'works fine here'.
Unstable is a strange word here. When you said you "customized", do you mean you installed new themes and/or changed fonts/layout via system settings? Or did you run third party scripts / various rando commands listed on forums?
I have worked through all of this and much more and my kde setup is baller now on all of my machines. But I basically always launch gnome, because it is a significantly more polished system.
This carries through to the mobile Linux experience as well.
To each their own. The lack of customizability in Gnome drives me nuts.
Linux desktops in general horribly suffer from constantly reproducing desktops from a moment in the 1990s, where you have an anime background and some bright text on a dark background and you post it and everyone goes "ooh" and "ahhh" and "how did you do that." One glaring sign of this is design is called "art" rather than design. And you have a kind of mostly compatible Office suite (like a dog chasing after a car), one month you can do awesome actions in the file manager or have a live background but next month that's broken, and every month a new music player, as if any majority of people use local music and documents anymore. What an embarassing waste of time.
It's sad because great ideas abound, like KDE's semantic desktop (which is basically a decentralized version of what Microsoft is building toward), Unity's 3d desktop (which failed when all that neato stuff meant nothing), scriptable desktops, distributed desktops, all kinds of glorious ideas. However it turns out the infinite monkeys creating desktops get distracted easily.
They should start by deeply adopting ideas like design tokens. Here's another idea: give every widget and pane a unique identifer with version, and link them to the web using Linked Data, so at least the world of confusion support forums could feature some coherence, you could embed support in the widgets themselves. That would be a 2022 desktop.