> It’s gone pretty far from what it was 15 years ago

GNOME 3.0 was released 15 years ago last April.

https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2011-Apr...

It is exactly the same desktop today. The most visible changes are that the strange floating word "Activities" is now a strange floating pill instead, whose meaning only becomes apparent once you switch virtual desktops a few times, and that the virtual desktop switcher has moved to become horizontal (i.e. worse and less space-efficient on a widescreen) when it was vertical.

I often hear "try it again, it's really changed" but I see no difference. I powerfully disliked it in 2011 and nothing has changed. It's a bit faster, but there are more hamburger menus now, to the extent that apps like Disks has two of them. It's still horrible.

I am all for UI innovation, but it needs to be informed by what's gone before.

I would like the GNOME development team to spend a while learning to use a few pre-Windows desktop environments efficiently and well, to learn how seriously different layouts can work.

Classic MacOS was sublime. 8.1 was a good snapshot.

RISC OS is a great example.

Original Psion System 3MX EPOC is another.

Psion NetBook EPOC32 is another, and very different.

Some Amiga-inspired environment such as AROS or MorphOS.

There is no "GNOME development team", there are just people that are working together to make an DE (and other stuff). You can do the same if you want to.