gnome 2 was a traditional desktop. gnome 3 tried something new, and has stuck with it. people who didn’t like that thing made MATE, which is a lot like gnome 2.

gnome is extremely opinionated, yes. personally i like how it’s set up, but the way they build it rubs me the wrong way.

Years ago I tried Ubuntu which used GNOME and assumed that its desktop layout was “the default” GNOME.

Ubuntu never provided a “default” GNOME experience, or at least not since the early 2000s. At one point Ubuntu had it’s own desktop environment, unity, and when they abandoned the project and switched to gnome shell, they modified it to look similar to that. So we went from this:

to this:

I later tried PopOS which also uses it and it was the same

I doubt that. Pop_OS was never the same as Ubuntu. In the beginning it provided an experience that was arguably much closer to vanilla gnome than Ubuntu:

later they started to add their own flare customising the desktop a lot and rebranding all of this as Cosmic Shell:

I installed Mint I saw that it’s still fundamentally the same

Mint never used Gnome. They have their own desktop environment called Cinnamon, which uses some of the same underlying technology, manly the GTK toolkit but is it’s own independent project.

Well, few days ago I installed Bazzite (Fedora) which is also GNOME. It doesn’t look anything like anything I’ve seen before

It still should be familiar in some aspects. The grid-view of all apps for example should be something that you know from Ubuntu (Pop replaces that part in more modern iterations - kinda). Bazzite still does modifications, they’re just a lot more subtle than the ones from Pop and Ubuntu. But I agree with you: Gnomes workflow doesn’t agree with many users. There are those who like it and they tend to really like it. Gnome wants you to heavily use keyboard shortcuts and virtual desktops and I found that casual users aren’t really a friend of either.

So what is the default Gnome experience? try it out. There is an extension manger installed that ships with bazzite (and if not use the software store to install it). In it you can disable all the modifications. You can also install extensions to fix some of the usability problems. “Dash to Dock” tends to solve like 90% of them (It’s also what Ubuntu uses for their modifications)

So, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, LXQT, Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon and a bunch more are what are called desktop environments.

They essentially provide a desktop experience through a framework and development guidelines. Most of the development teams provide a “default” desktop environment setup that should be pretty standard across all distributions. However, each of these distributions want to stand out by applying their own branding. They’ll add customized icons and themes and as much as adding extensions to modify desktop functionalities.

Other than GNOME, most of the desktop environments will change minimally across distributions except for some theming and icons. But because GNOME is the standard default in most distributions, like Ubuntu, Fedora/RedHat, OpenSuse, and many more, they tend to spend more time and effort into making it look “their own special way”.

The other issue with GNOME is that the pure vanilla desktop experience is practically unusable by many users’ opinion. It’s extremely minimalist and it’s quite different from the standard desktop paradigm that most people are used to with Windows or even Mac OS. And it’s easy for new users to get lost. So most distros add some quality of life extensions like application bars, menus, system trays (yes! because there is no system tray by default) and other things to make it easier to use. That’s why your experience has been different across so many distros.

On top of that, GNOME’s desktop environment has changed a lot throughout its iterations. The first version followed a more Win95 type desktop with an equivalent to a Start menu. Then version 2 changed to offer a different desktop with two bars by default: one at the top with the applications menu and system tray and one at the bottom as a task bar. This was customizable. Version 3 changed dramatically and became more minimalistic with a new paradigm and it made users very unhappy. Then finally v4 came out and pushed v3 a little further, minimalizing the desktop even further. And all of this came with major changes to the application frameworks and guidelines. You can see the differences in this video.

What were the problems or areas where you identified inefficiency? I’d agree the “settings” app is overly minimal. Personally I’d rather use the terminal for most things that wouldn’t necessarily have an obvious specific location in the GUI. In general, customisation outside the terminal leaves something to be desired, but I don’t mind how it looks by default. In rare cases I do logout and switch DE’s to Plasma but usually it’s to figure out how some function is named so that I can search up a way to do it efficiently in GNOME, then I just do that moving forward.

I would guess that the main factors are 1. your machine and 2. your use cases. On my laptop for example, I’ve found that three-finger swiping up on the touchpad to get to the task switcher is about as efficient as possible for almost all of my use cases. From there, I’m either clicking on a pinned app (including my terminal if I’ve identified I need it), clicking on one of my open tasks, or typing a few characters for the file, app or setting I want and hitting return. Including typing things like “word” to run Libreoffice Writer. In that way, my experience of GNOME’s ethos is to enable the widest range of functions possible using the fewest inputs, with the caveat that this is only the case certain machines and for people that enjoy things like gestures and hotkeys. I have a bunch of shell extensions like a clipboard history/manager, an on-screen keyboard toggle, toggle to prevent auto-sleep etc. It’s pretty much everything I want.