GNOME is a project whose manifesto is called "Let's Make Unix Not Suck", for a very specific value of not sucking roughly equivalent to "Let's make Unix into a shitty version of Windows". I'm picking on GNOME because its development psychology has infested the Linux ecosystem, yielding horrors like NetworkManager, dbus, frickin' systemd, et weary cetera. There's a sense that Unix-style composability, modularity, and (conceptual) simplicity is something that has to be hidden from the poor end user, but the people who are implementing the means to do so lack the organizational competence to pull it off. So the absolute state of things for Linux desktop use in 2026 is a tradeoff between jank and brokenness on the one hand and being exposed to Linux's technical underside on the other. I don't mind so much because I've never minded getting technical. I'm the kind of guy who still logs in at the VT console and types 'startx' to get a graphical session going because I came up on early Linux and appreciate being reminded of what underlies that UI convenience. And it sure beats being stuck on Windows or Mac, where it works until it doesn't, and when it doesn't you often can do little but shrug your shoulders and say "wellp, them's the breaks".[1] And that's before adding in AI cruft, advertisements, mandatory online accounts and vendor spyware.
The price to pay for having a hot rod is a lack of a luxury interior from the finest Swiss craftsmen. But a) you have a hot rod; b) it won't sell your driving data to insurance companies!
[1] In the 90s I heard stories from hackers about normies who just kind of assumed that computers were flaky, fragile machines that lost your work every now and then and needed to be restarted at least once a day in order to function. And when they heard of Linux or FreeBSD, their minds were blown because they didn't know computers could do that. But the computer wasn't flaky or fragile; Windows 9x was.