When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me", which is fine, but surprising coming from someone who claims to have used tiling window managers.
Which then translates to bugs here and there, inconsistency and may other problems.
And while Gnome is a pain in the *s sometimes because they remove features, it's still better than the alternatives to me.
On the one hand, the benefit of customizing a system for yourself should be obvious.
On the other hand, adapting yourself to a system also means adapting to other people. This allows improving the shared understanding of how computers should be used:
- Designs can push users to more efficient workflows.
- New features, use-cases and apps can be developed based on shared assumptions.
- Other developers can integrate with or expand on the existing designs. eg: MacOS launchers [1] build on various system features.
In IntelliJ, I regularly discover new functionality that I wouldn't even know existed had I used a text editor with extensions.
Customise your system too much, and you cut yourself off from this "conversation". Perhaps this is why some users still live in heavily customised terminal environments, despite massive improvements to GUIs [2].
[1] Raycast, Alfred, Launchbar [2] https://capiche.com/e/consumer-dev-tools-command-palette
I acknowledge that some people like crafting their own computing environment[1], and it can be really interesting and rewarding , but some people like to work on other things, or simply lose interest in fiddling indefinitely with config files and all (like I have).
For the latter, there's Gnome.
Why are you using the verb "claim" if not to throw doubt over op's word ?
> When someone says "that works out of the box" what I hear is "I don't want to spend time customizing things to work better for me",
I call that putting words in people's mouth.
That's me.
I have tried every major DE, and something or the other is not right with all of them!
I used to use gnome with a lot of customizations.
Over the past couple of years I decided to adapt my workflow and muscle memory to what's provided by default. Works well for me now, even though it was a little awkward at first.
I'm currently using gnome with no customizations.
I'm not claiming gnome is the best DE or anything.
I also really like XFCE btw.
And imho dynamic tiling is the wrong approach. Automatic rearrangement of windows never works well in real situations that just don't fit a small selection of fixed layouts. Not sure why static tilers are so rare, but Gnome offers static tiling and is very polished, so I guess that's why I like it.
A lot of environments have a function to relocate the focused window to a predefined portion of the screen. For example left and right half. This makes it a stacking environment with limited tiling features.
I used to tile terminal windows but now do everything in tmux. I spend 95% of my day in either browser or terminal.