at this point GNOME is a joke. I'm not sure KDE is always better but at least KDE is clearly trying. btw Wayland is also a project of the GNOME team and almost everyone is using the KDE extensions to it to make it suck less.

I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all..

One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"

I daily drive GNOME on Ubuntu 22 on a daily basis and its UX is the favorite of all the UIs I've ever used, and I've used classic mac, OS X, all windows versions, xfce, kde and a trillion programs. And both android and ios devicess, both from early versions onto recent.

And GNOME really shines here. I'm on X11 though. Wayland lagged my mouse when I tried it years back, so I gave up on Wayland. Maybe they've fixed the lag spikes.

Most works GNOME did are somewhat invisible to users. GNOME is the main driving force behind immutable OS and containerised sandboxed apps, both are intended to make the OS maintain itself and simplify software management to single/zero click.

Valve adopted them afterwards and now everyone in the KDE team wants to join the ride.