alt Hacker News> GNOME 3 is what happens when you follow the Apple designer-is-always-right philosophy without Apple-level talent.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49833842
But to explain further, Gnome is run by people who have the attention span of a dead goldfish. They're constantly changing things, a good example is the control centre where it used to be just like other systems but in Gnome 3 they made it into a wall of incoherent text and disorganised categories.
They often tend to ditch things halfway and create new ones, Evince -> Papers, Totem -> showtime, EOG to Loupe, Cheese to snapshot, and so on and so on.
And for decades, they kept removing much used features and configurations and broke things and everytime you search for a fix, there was 10 version and a new one each week because Gnome keeps changing things.
In short, Gnome is what happens when you think you're Apple but have the design knowhow and depth of a paddle you couldn't drown a fruit fly in.
It is interesting you make the observation about GNOME and Apple. In 1999, GNOME had the involvement, and financial resources, of some of those Apple people due to Eazel. Andy Hertzfeld, Bud Trimble, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and more all gave improving GNOME and Linux some work.
This wasn’t a hostile takeover attempt; we all tried very hard to be team players, many times to what I think was our detriment. A very nice version of Nautilus was rejected because it was in C++ and we ended up doing all the work in GTK.
We had some very good ideas about distributed objects but they were pushed aside and we ended up using CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo and those distributed object systems ended up being replaced.
The dotcom crash caused a lot of Eazel people to end up at Apple. Nat and Miguel moved onto their dot NET Xamarin effort and many others ended up at Red Hat. There was an experience vacuum and this is one reason why the GNOME UX had so many issues IMHO.