XFCE started as a clone of CDE. Now compare original CDE with XFCE and it is not really the same thing.
Sure, Gnome change from v2 to v3 was a major change in UI, but mostly for the better and Gnome kept a way to have a more classic behavior.
GNOME makes often changes without long term strategy or asking their actual users. The removal of Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus or background-transparency in GNOME-Terminal where mistakes. On the other hand new applications like Documents or Console required resources but provide no benefit over it counterparts. That said - Nautilus improved a lot in recent years and there are even patches available for Type-Ahead-Find (or Navigation). Same for background-transparency in the GNOME-Terminal. The separated top-bar-menus were also a problem (decoupling menus from application-windows was copied from Apple) but now reverted, they learn.
If the design team is aware of the usage and has a plan things fit well! The overview is great for keyboard and mouse users, the dash make simple things simple, they got rid of the useless desktop-metapher (copied from Win95) and also the system-tray (another thing from Win95). The keyboard focused use of GNOME is use core-feature, fast for experienced users and a relieve for novice users. The GNOME-Shell provided a good UI and removed many questionable ideas of the past.
Wishlist?
Decouple the release cycle of most applications from GNOME, excepting Nautilus and Settings. There is no need to couple Epiphany, Terminal, Maps, Calendar and so. Evolution already skips every second release. And feature-removal should require a good reasoning and not just „I don’t need that myself“. Many options are bewildering, many forks without merges are worse (lost developers and lost users).
Gnome feels very anti Unix philosophy.
Either way, many package managers provide groups or patterns to make it easier for an end user to maintain their system. Pacman does have such a feature.
Look, for example, do you prefer to be able to install SDDM just because you like the themeing capabilities, and be able to do so, with just the bare minimum packages; or, install GDM and having to pull the whole GNOME DE as a requirement?
It's purpose is to provide and manage account information for applications that need it, so the user doesn't have to configure their email, calendar, whatever, in each application separately. With each application storing passwords in a who knows where, or each implementing their Gmail OAuth.
So it is quite logical, that application that uses accounts will also need gnome-online-accounts.
'Do one thing and do it well` -- how is that anti Unix philosophy?
GNOME has a keyring system service for storing passwords, so it's not necessary to get the entire desktop shell to access the keyring.
GOA is for storing account information: e.g. you configure your Gmail/nextcloud/whatever account once, and then all apps that need it can access it. So your Geary, Contacts and Calendar (separate applications) do not need each to implement account management and account specific auth flows -- not just passwords, OAuth is all the rage nowadays. And I, as the user, do not have to keep tokens in each app current.
It is also not 'entire gnome shell`. Just the required components.
here the required dependency list for control center on arch: accountsservice bolt colord-gtk4 cups-pk-helper gcr gnome-bluetooth-3.0 gnome-color-manager gnome-desktop-4 gnome-online-accounts gnome-settings-daemon gnome-shell gsettings-desktop-schemas gsound gtk4 libadwaita libgnomekbd libgtop libgudev libibus libmalcontent libmm-glib libnma-gtk4 libpwquality smbclient sound-theme-freedesktop udisks2 upower
while it may follow the letter of the philosophy is certainly doesn't feel like it's following the intent of it. the components form a sort of cyclic graph, where technically you can install any component but soon you'll find that you need all the others with no viable alternative component that will work reasonably well.
using these component outside of the DE feel like being a second class citizen that will be kicked out at any update, and then you'll have to scavenge for information from unofficial sources and the source code for what has changed that broke your setup.
Applications which are part of GNOME itself probably try to remain small and integrate well into GNOME e.g. Nautilus and Evolution. Applications which aren’t part of GNOME like Gimp or Geeqie rely only Gtk.
It just hurts if you want use a integrated GNOME-Application with a sole window-manager. That makes sense and we shouldn’t blame the developers for modularity and re-using.
I don’t know about Type-Ahead-Find in Nautilus, but typing to search in the file choosers is comically bad.
“Comically bad” here goes slightly beyond not working right to mildly destructive. I don’t know how the software pulls it off, but trying to open a folder found by Tracker search shows a nonsensical UI (no, I don’t want to “replace” the folder) and sometimes removes the x bit from the folder mode. I don’t even know how. A random chmod(2) call deep in glib? Why would the file chooser ever use chmod or fchmod?
Not really, even with Plugins everything is handled by Mutter - you don't have the modularity of Gnome 2 where you can switch out the panel, file browser or window manager as you please.
Fortunately Mate forked Gnome 2 to retain the old desktop.
Despite being in the package list for fedora(?) on recent versions, It fails to install and talk on the bug thread is just to remove the packages from the repo.
As for Xfce changing, that is to be expected since people's needs change over time. It is simply nice when those changes are gradual and not radical.
It's not clear at all - Wayland is in some ways a regression compared to X (try writing your own WM - tinyWM is 50 LOC, whereas the Wayland equivalent TinyWL is over 1000), and doesn't just "improve" X but changes paradigm entirely.
I'd like to see [Arcan](https://www.arcan-fe.com) be the future, it seems more elegant than Wayland.
I personnally totally saw it as a different project as gnome 2 didn't become obsolete immediately and Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly for those looking for a gnome classic evolution that no one was really forced into using gnome 3.
Yeah it did. They announced gnome 3 and deprecated 2 on the same day, and seemed to have made the deliberate choice to not allow them to coexist. As soon as your distro moved, bam, you were done.
> Mate&Cinnamon forks took over so quickly
After some months. This stuff was not there on day 1.
In the mean time, those of us who did not want to work the way Gnome 3 decided we should, had to find an alternative. And when we found a good one (Xfce for me), we stuck with it.
Say what now? Gnome 3 is such a shitshow that I switched to XFCE because of it.