I ran Linux for a time in the late aughts and came to prefer Gnome to KDE at the time because it just felt more polished. I switched to macOS for many years now, but recently started playing with Linux again on a Thinkpad I got a deal on. Modern Gnome feels unreasonably uncomfigurable without extra tooling, and even with it the options I want are difficult to make work correctly.

I want my window controls on the left, and I want global menu. This was pretty standard and reliable in Gnome ten-fifteen years ago but now both options barely work. What the heck happened. Both of these worked pretty flawlessly in Unity. I'm still pissed at Ubuntu for killing it.