I'd be curious which design decisions you thought were awful and were difficult to turn off? I've always though UIs across all OSes are very inflexible (e.g. on a Mac, you can't change command-tab to alt-tab, and can't cycle same-app windows without a separate keybind), so I'm not usually surprised when things are difficult to disable.
My only negative experience with Gnome was not seeing which apps were open at a glance (need to alt-tab and tile all windows). This is mainly a "what I'm used to" kind of thing though.
I recently installed Debian with Gnome on a laptop, and the UI is miles and miles better than what it was 7 years ago. It used to feel old and like a knockoff of Windows XP or something. Now I only want to use Gnome on Linux. Huge credit to the Gnome team for all of these UI improvements they've been making, it's a serious amount of work gone into things.
I'd be curious which design decisions you thought were awful and were difficult to turn off? I've always though UIs across all OSes are very inflexible (e.g. on a Mac, you can't change command-tab to alt-tab, and can't cycle same-app windows without a separate keybind), so I'm not usually surprised when things are difficult to disable.
My only negative experience with Gnome was not seeing which apps were open at a glance (need to alt-tab and tile all windows). This is mainly a "what I'm used to" kind of thing though.