Certainly not. I suspect you aren't familiar with win, it has a lot of these although MS seems determined to wreck them.
I'm no MS shill, I wish they would DIAF, but I do find windows highly reliable and the UI was pretty good until they decided to fuck with it. By comparison I found gnome actively user hostile. Even small niceties that windows has are missing (eg one of very many, go up a folder in windows and the folder you were on will be the one selected, very handy). I would like to sit down with you and compare experiences, but ain't going to happen. Glad it works for you though.
I'd agree if it weren't for the default keyboard shortcuts.
Like every app in existence uses ctrl+tab to switch between tabs, but GNOME's apps (like Files and Terminal) use ctrl+pgdown.
As far as I can tell CTRL-TAB for tab cycling is not very wide spread. KDE uses it, but that supports CTRL-PGUP/DOWN as well.
edit: And I'm not sure why CTRL-TAB even works in KDE because the default shortcuts to cycle through tabs are CTRL-PGUP/DOWN and CTRL-[/] (tested on KDE neon).
GNOME is quite decent in its current form and the most user-friendly desktop out there at the moment. People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.
Ideally I'd be using something like Sway, but I can't be bothered to spend time on making things work the way they need to. GNOME gives me everything out of the box and doesn't get in my way. KDE is much more customizable, but less friendly on the eyes. Windows is probably OK if you're used to Windows (I'm clearly not). I have to use macOS at work and it's just a worse version of GNOME - bad defaults, weird design choices, less features, minimal customizability.
You mean like I spent 2 months with it and just found a list of weirdness and outright bugs?
Perhaps "historical gripe(s)" happen for a reason?
> People who hate on it just have some historical gripe with it, I feel like.
The way it handles virtual desktops with multiple monitors out of the box poorly thought out. With 3 monitors having changing workspaces only effect the primary monitor is very poor user experience. that leaves virtually pun intended without the affordance of virtual desktops at all.
There is a setting to expand virtual desktops to all monitors and now you no longer have to dig through something that looks like the windows registry to enable it which is indeed a nice upgrade but it misses the vastly superior third option of being able to independently switch each monitor.
An obvious affordance instead of digging through a settings menu would be a little iconic padlock beside a representation of the virtual desktop switcher that when unlocked enables you to manually switch a singular monitor or when by default locked allows the monitor to change with every other monitor.
Trivially enables not only all 3 possible workflows but allows one to discover this organically at the cost of a small amount of screen real estate.
This is a singular issue but their entire history is rife not merely with subjective differences in user preference but objectively bad design.
And Gnome is far from a perfect desktop experience out of the box. Once you add a few plugins it’s pretty decent but out of the box. No. Just no.
But the productivity of linux is so far superior to windows. The only reason I subject myself to windows is games and old .net framework projects.
Do you work at Microsoft and have access to the internal bug tracker?
Is this really true now? If so, it's sad how far windows has fallen. It was very easy, almost pleasant to use Windows with no mouse, from 3.0 all the way through XP (which was the range of my regular windows use)
Wait, what?
Honestly this is the biggest barrier to adoption of you ask me. I can’t hand a windows user or a Mac user a gnome desktop (or any of the other Linux options) and just leave them to it.
I tend to recommend a mac these days for people. They just work.
I don't think the UI is the issue. I even think some DEs are better than both Mac and Windows on most topics. I don't like Gnome but it is okay I think, especially on Ubuntu. The rough edges are the issue, and above all, the incompatibility with Office (you might have to interact with people using it) and with the various domain-specific proprietary programs.
Windows also has - different - rough edges (and probably mac but I don't know it enough), but you'll find help online or from a nearby acquaintance.
But if I had to set up a computer for a complete newbie, that would be Linux. In any case I would have to help them, but on Linux there are just less disturbances, less risks, easier for them, the UI is better structured, everything is more predictable and since I'll need to help, I'll have better time with Linux.
The problem with Linux on the desktop is that all polish, quality and consistency is "soon" and has been for 20 years. No one wants to do the last 20% of the job when you can rewrite the interesting bits again for the 10th time.
Microsoft are the same now.
You can also tweak the desired font size to taste