Dumb title but I didn’t know how else to put this into words, bear with me for a sec - I am not just looking for the definition.
Years ago I tried Ubuntu which used GNOME and assumed that its desktop layout was “the default” GNOME. I later tried PopOS which also uses it and it was the same, and when eventually I installed Mint I saw that it’s still fundamentally the same with some slight tweaks or different tools.
Well, few days ago I installed Bazzite (Fedora) which is also GNOME. It doesn’t look anything like anything I’ve seen before, either in terms of mindset or technical layout. I’ve gone from an admittedly old-fashioned, but efficient and reliable!, layout and workflow to something that reminds me more of an apple product - its stylish, minimalist yet inefficient and utterly frustrating to get anything done with because of how opinionated it is.
When searching for common problems I often found comments saying stuff like “but try it out! it’s in the spirit of gnome, it takes a while to get used to it but the philosophy is valid” and frankly I don’t understand anymore what exactly gnome is and what are its design principles, if there even are any and every distro just does whatever the f it wants and call it “a gnome experience”.
It’s been a while since I used ubuntu and popOS was only for a few days so maybe I was just mistaken, I remember it being somewhat comparable to a classic desktop at the time but it could have been that cosmic shell thing. And tbh until so far I thought cinnamon is gnome so it seems like I was just outright wrong about that one, thanks for clarifying
I’m definitely willing to try bazzite’s gnome3 for a while, i just wasn’t sure what’s the default anymore and if it’s bazzite doing something out of the norm or if the ubuntu based distros did.