For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of "simplicity." There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.

The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they're very much "we know what's best for you better than you do."

Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that's primarily it. KDE's accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.

That's just my take, take it as you will.

Honestly, that defaulting to the Search field in the Save dialog when I'm trying to save something just gets me wild. It beggars the imagination why the developers think that's a reasonable thing to do and it colors my whole perception of the DE.

There must be something about GNOME in particular that some people love, and others hate.

GNOME is heavily opinionated.

As such it gets praise from people that share that opinion and gets hate from the people that do not. Many other DEs are much more configurable, giving a broader audience the possibility to adjust everything to their liking.

GNOME is a lightly upgraded MacOS interface. Every time I’ve had to use a Mac has pissed me off so GNOME gives me war flashbacks.

Not necessarily the DE’s fault but ¯_(ツ)_/¯

You know how the ending of LOST or Game of Thrones can bring up feelings in people? That's how it was for me when Gnome 3 first came out. I had been using Gnome 2 for a few years and had a good workflow, and then suddenly, everything changed. Back then Gnome 3 was buggy and lacked a lot of things, which didn't help. It also didn't help that the devs took a "the problem is you" stance to all feedback. That said, I use Gnome now, and I like it, it took some years to mature and become good. But the feeling is still there sometimes.

I was team Gnome before Gnome 3 came out. Nowadays I don't mind it for auxiliary computers that I don't interact with regularly. It has a huge community behind it and that is a quality in its own right. But since MATE never really managed to become a worthy successor to Gnome 2 I guess I'm team Plasma now. I got it "forced" on me by my beloved Steam Deck and I can definitely see why Valve went for it.

Currently I'm experimenting with Hyprland but that is definitely too early to call it my forever pick, so Plasma it is.