I can understand that. But how can a group of people, making a freaking UI, make such fundamentally bad decisions as a group? That is what I just do not get.
It comes down to disdain for the end user. Nothing you can say will change their mind because they're right and you're wrong because you're a dumb user who doesn't know what you need and they're the engineer with the credentials to prove it.
I will say though, one good thing about Linux is the ease with which you can choose something different. You don't have to use gnome or unity or snaps or even systemd if you don't want to, you can't say the same for the other two large userbase desktop systems, where youre stuck with the decisions of the designers with no recourse. So if these developers make things that are only uses by people because it was the first thing they installed, that's fine, I have my other options and I like them.
Avoiding complexity, mostly. Sometimes simplicity is the right choice, sometimes it's the wrong choice, but it's often the most stable choice. Stable programs are easy to maintain, localize and secure.
I don't agree with everything GNOME does (like, how do we still not have a stable extensions API?), but I daily drive it because it gets out of my way. For development purposes it's perfectly suitable.
If all you do is run xterm all day it is OK. On the other hand I use most of the Linux machines in my life via ssh from a Windows or Mac machine.
Recent versions of Ubuntu are getting decent in my opinion though although I still mostly use my Linux laptop to RDP into a Windows machine at work or my personal Windows machine.
> how do we still not have a stable extensions API?
Mostly because they allow you to do anything possible to the shell via extensions that is exposed. If they'd limit the APIs to a stable subset it would be much more limited in what you could do with it.
