About Gnome (Shell). I disagree it looks very pretty but the UX a huge step backwards from Gnome 2. Users are better off with KDE, XFCE or Mate.
I still have fond memory of my brother upgrading his windows XP desktop to 1 GB RAM to play BF2142 and I was like "school hasn't even taught me that number yet".
What the hell happened to software development when "only 8 gb of ram" is used sincerely?
I built a AI / ML / gaming desktop last year, and I just said 'to heck with it, 64gb of ram!' Hopefully that'll hold me for a while
Eh, that’s a massively disingenuous take when you consider capabilities. Web browsers back then could not do even 1% of what we can do now with modern browsers, where we can run damn near full fledged desktop level apps in a browser or with frameworks like electron. With that vastly increased power comes increased requirements, which is a complete non issue given memory is dirt cheap nowadays.
I don’t mean “install it and run it for an hour and declare it sucks”, but actually try and learn the way that the devs wanted you to use it, and stick with it for a week or two. When I did that, I actually found myself really liking it.
One of my biggest pet peeves in tech, and I am guilty of this myself, is when people make no effort to actually understand a product, and then declare it as “worse”. I feel like Gnome 3 was a victim of this; it was different than Gnome 2, different enough to where it arguably should have had a different name, but people just universally declared it as shit because it wasn’t exactly the same as Gnome 2.
Regardless, my overall point stands, replace desktop environment with any of the ones listed (though TBH I never have given KDE a fair shake so I can’t speak to it).