I get it that gnome is nowadays an experimental desktop environment, that tries a lot of new approaches.
I just don't understand why many distributions use it as their default DE.
Gnome terminal for example will offset the right click contextual menu with a new line of bin/hex/oct representation of a number that you happen to have selected. By default, no it can't be disabled. Good luck with the muscle memory to hit the contextual menu items now that everything is shifted down.
Someone who knows what he is doing does not start over every couple of years.
When I was in the GNOME bubble, I too thought GNOME was the be-all and end-all of Linux DE usability, with everyone else being savages slapping together UIs without so much as a style guide. Perhaps at some point this may have been partially true.
Today, all major DEs are fine. Plasma did not crash once since 2019 for me and I think its UX is quite nice, in the case of Dolphin in particular visibly better than GNOME's. At the same time, GNOME had routine issues with extensions, semi-frequent crashes, and odd non-compliant bits like refusing to use tray icons, breaking apps that depend on them, and the last time I checked, scaling was a mess.
I do think the GNOME/libadwaita ecosystem is a fantastic achievement and agree with many of their ideas, but it would be dishonest to say all other DEs are inferior and don't deserve any consideration as a default.
Also bloat is so very debatable. You can't on one hand complain about Gnome being unusable and then turn around and say Plasma is bloated. Uh, that "bloat" is the difference between the two!
Lucky us then, most DEs work on UI paradigms way older than 2008.
> Doesn’t break constantly: Doesn’t break constantly.
GNOME is well know for breaking often backwards compatibility, especially in regards to extension.
The only criteria which I'd thick next to de GNOME DE in consistency, would be: aversion to customization, opinionated, 80% done in perpetuity, and liberal use of space (low information density)