Well, it all started with a little thing called Ubuntu Netbook Edition around 2008 or 9, can't remember. People wanted to experiment with different user interfaces and experiences for your core environment to see if they could make UX workflows better, make better use of display real estate, make things more ergonomic, etc. Eventually, the netbook edition environment because Ubuntu's Unity desktop environment, and gnome2 became Gnome3 with similar sorts of interface ideas.<p>It didn't matter that nobody liked the new interfaces. It was dismissed by developers as "people are resistant to change", and that really was the beginning of this paradigm that developers know better than users what they need and the world we now live in of tolerating what is available and people being herded into behaviors by UX designers.<p>A lot of other decisions have been made to fundamentally change the Linux experience since then as a result of the normalization of this, the most popular init system, systemd, subverted our existing ones, we have all kinds of deviations from the Unix way, and some are good I think but generally, administering a Linux system went from something a single person could do and understand the entire system in their head to something that requires continuing education and niche specialization. Systems evolve, yes, but Linux is basically fundamentally different than it was in those days, it's still got the monolithic kernel and the basic Unix like structure, but managing a system is now much more complex than it used to be.<p>I don't think I know anyone who uses gnome. If you're just trying to get the usual desktop type experience you're used to, you can use KDE, XFCE, MATE (which is a fork of gnome2), I recently checked out LXDE and found it to be utterly fantastic so far, it usually looks 95-ish out of the box but themed it looks nice and modern. If I were to recommend a "normal" desktop with a full suite of basic software I'd recommend that. Or, you can build something from components, that's what I usually do these days since DEs come with a lot of stuff I don't need, I like Wayland so I use either labwc for the classic desktop windowing and stuff, or sway for tiling and I'll tell you, tiling is where it's at once you get the hang of it. Those mobile phone looking full-of-extra-steps-to-get-to-anything environments like what youre talking about are absolute trash as far as I'm concerned.