> - There are dedicated UX teams whose sole focus is to improve UX.

They don't work like the UX teams of yesteryear.

In the early 2000s, companies did user studies. Put a potential user in front of the product, let them use it while the UX team observed. Ask questions to the user afterwards. Make changes, repeat.

But that kind of research is expensive, so it's thrown out to instead just collect tons of metrics that likely don't tell a whole story. They think "Users must love feature X because they keep clicking on it!" when the reality is that they're trying to find something else, but the label for X looks related to what they want.

I agree with all your points regarding the race to the bottom. I think that's why UIs hide so much information. Older interface designs are considered "confusing" or "cluttered" because there's so much there at a first glance, even if all the buttons elements are grouped by functionality.

> There are dedicated UX teams whose sole focus is to improve UX.

Imho, this is a big source of the problem.

Granted: there are some amazing UX designers and teams out there.

But my experience with UX teams has been that in most middle-market companies they're usually less that sort and more the {huge designer ego} + {management consulting political skillset} one.

And it's a tough problem to solve! Because ultimately you want someone who can argue very hard for their approach to improving UX (usually against opposition from others). But when someone's ego exceeds their skill, that leads to disaster.

And without a strong Jobs-esque "this sucks" arbiter over them, their changes make it to prod.

> We now have a plethora of UX logging and can see real time where users struggle.

No you can't. That telemetry gives you view into how users are experiencing the software is a myth because it doesn't include the actions users don't take and it doesn't include the reasons for actions taken.

A Linux user is, and has always been, an edge case

There isn't only one kind of power user, and not every kind of power user will like KDE. I use GNOME almost daily, with KDE being my primary daily driver. I just really don't see how GNOME could ever said to be great for power users. There are so many ways you can tailer KDE to specific things you may find yourself doing heavily, that would be impossible with GNOME's UI. Being a power user and using GNOME, to me just means you're using the terminal for everything, which is totally valid.

Linus also may not even really be a power user. He says himself that he rarely writes code anymore, and primarily just sends emails and reviews code.

I didn't say KDE is the only option for power users, or that there aren't multiple types of power users with different use cases and individual preferences. I'm not sure what I'm gatekeeping.

Is it really gatekeeping to say that KDE is for power users? Setting it up in a way that really meshes with your use case and preferences is a process that you'll spend many hours or days of time on. That's not something that makes sense for grandma's computing workload.

> This is an opinion stated as fact. KDE is mostly for dads that like a mouse oriented Windows/mac like OS but with buttons to customize. Sway, exwm etc are for power users.

So you're saying that prefering a highly customizable GUI means you're be a power user, but instead you're a gasp dad? This isn't Reddit, buddy. Grow up.

As a developer who has worked on similar things, that interface can prevent a lot of trouble of the kind "What if the user edits a setting that updates something in another part of settings, which might also be open at the same time?" - or even the same settings screen opened multiple times. It is rare that such cases come up for users, but they can be very annoying and time-consuming to deal with. Perhaps that was the motivation.