GNOME has been heading in the direction of “these apps will not run elsewhere without GNOME, and will have a very particular, hard to modify look and feel” for quite some time at this point, so they’re at least as bad.

That’s largely why the Linux Mint team have been forking a lot of GNOME apps into their X-Apps project, so that in theory, those apps will continue to run anywhere, and look somewhat OK, regardless of desktop environment.

In hindsight, their choice of the letter X has aged rather poorly (any association to X11 was tenuous even at the outset, and then there’s the whole Twitter thing), but the project is still a noble one.

nah, the unix philosophy is to write small tools that do one thing well that can be composed to do more complex stuff.

Gnome is just hostile to anyone that isn’t them. That’s why they don`t even support extensions, so you get something breaking with almost every update

Gnome is sleek but definitely not KISS, and the fact that plugins break after every update should be proof enough. Bash scripts will work for years or decades without any modification; that’s the Unix philosophy. Yet write one .js extension for gnome and it will be obsolete by next year, even though devs point to the extension system to excuse themselves from implementing the most basic of features (at least they did ten years ago when I got fed up with their bullshit). And they don’t implement the most basic features because their philosophy is not Unix’s, but MacOS’s (specifically in all the ways that MacOS is not Unix).

People seem to find redeeming qualities to Gnome, and more power to them I guess. But “it is philosophically Unix” is just straight-up an incorrect statement.