+1 to Framework. I self-repaired my kid's laptop twice (spills; once I had to swap the keyboard, and another time - motherboard), and it's being straightforward to fix.
You don't understand why some people might prefer a more precisely defined, simpler-by-default desktop? I can only speak for myself - I've been using linux full-time for ~20ish years, and gnome 3 is the one of the most solid, stable, elegant desktops I've used. I understand why some prefer KDE, but I spend most of my times in APPS, not configuring my desktop environment.
Also, what does "big corporate" customers even mean? At my corporate job, I get paid to do work (within applications), not spend time configuring settings in my DE. I'd be quite curious to hear how gnome specifically prevents you from doing your job.
Last thought, but "just buy a mac" is a rather silly argument; in fact, if gnome is being to mac, that's a pretty high compliment, IMO. If that's not your thing, that's fine, but it's also fine for others to want to use a simple, well-designed desktop.
> I understand why some prefer KDE, but I spend most of my times in APPS, not configuring my desktop environment.
When I first got into KDE, I was young and excited about all of the eye candy and downloadable widgets and stuff. I spent a TON of time tinkering with the desktop environment. But nowadays, I use KDE with something like 85% or 90% of all the options at their default settings. I think that's a really common way to use KDE: everyone has their 5% or 10% of customizations, and it's not much, but for everyone that 5% or 10% covers different options.
I feel that in that way, defaults are very important for KDE as well. They provide a center of gravity for the userbase, and their appropriateness determines how much work it is for everyone to maintain a usable setup.
Anyway, on KDE I have a handful of settings saved in my dotfiles or similar, and the rest I don't really spend time configuring anymore. So I totally understand GNOME users who take a similar approach but fall a little further on that spectrum where the settings are 98% or 99% at the defaults.
I don't know why (maybe it's my reliance on the CLI and the deep familiarity of GNU and Linux together), but for whatever reason, despite being a KDE guy, I strongly prefer GNOME to Windows or macOS. It feels thoughtfully designed, and limited, yes... but not too restrictive. I get the comparison, but macOS feels hamstrung and confining to me, including compared to a nice, current GNOME distro.
I don't have an actionable list off the top of my head, but in particular, about 6-12 months ago, I started digging into how to theme my install. Wanted to have e.g. different system theme colours than Ubuntu eggplant, a different background, different login screen, etc. There were so many different ways and places of doing things (stylesheets packed in gresource files, dconf, more oldschool config files, gnome-tweaks) that after messing around with it a bit I just gave up. Didn't seem worth the time.
It isn't any one particular option that I'm missing, rather the entire experience of modifying its behaviour is a pain in the ass. They seem to labour under the delusion that if they just make this one perfect system, everyone will be happy with it, so they don't need to prioritize customizability. This is rarely ever the case when dealing with real people with different needs.
That has nothing to do with GNOME. That's going to happen any time you try to theme 100 different programs and try to get them all to look consistent. Try to imagine writing one CSS and applying it to every website you visit and expecting it to work correctly. It's just not going to work, you'd have to manually rewrite the CSS for every site. The same is true of desktop applications. The only reason your desktop appears consistent with the default Ubuntu themes is because all the apps already did the work to target that theme. If you want another theme, you have to do all that work all over again. You can't avoid this just by adding more options, it's a large amount of extra code that needs to be written every time for every app.
Out of curiosity, how often do you "set things up from scratch?". It's such a rare thing for me, that usually dumping my list of installed packages / installing those, and then bringing in modified configs, is way less work than learning something as complex as Nix.
I love my framework, and would buy it again. But man, I'm not sold the 12th gen intel chip is ideal. My battery life is pretty awful, and it doesn't take much to start the fan / generate heat. Even doing something simple like watching youtube :/
