Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
Win NT-Vista style, aka the way web browsers show tabs with an icon + label is peak desktop UX for context switching and nobody can convince me otherwise. GNOME can't even render taskbars that way.
The appification of UI is a necessary evil if you want people in their mid twenties or lower to use your OS. The world is moving to mobile-first, and UI is following suit, even in places it doesn't make sense.
Give a kid a UI from the 90s, styled after industrial control panels, and they'll be as confused as you are with touch screen designs. Back in the day, stereos used to provide radio buttons and sliders for tuning, but those devices aren't used anymore. I don't remember the last device I've used that had a physical toggle button, for instance.
UI is moving away from replicating the stereos from the 80s to replicating the electronics young people are actually using. That includes adding mobile paradigms in places that don't necessarily make sense, just like weird stereo controls were all over computers for no good reason.
If you prefer the traditional UX, you can set things up the way you want. Classic Shell will get you your NT-Vista task bar. Gnome Shell has a whole bunch of task bar options. The old approach may no longer be the default one, but it's still an option for those that want it.
> Classic Shell, Gnome Shell task bar options
Yeah mods, hacks, and extensions don't really count for either. The more time passes the more this nonsense becomes mandatory. Luckily KDE still exists for now and has it all native.
If they're using it at work they're going to use it anyways because they probably want to keep the job.
The old desktop operating system UIs were designed for people with zero computer experience, yet now...they would be too hard to learn for someone with only Android experience?
These days, people grow up with touch screen devices. Swiping and tapping is the default, not pushing and sliding.
There's a reason a checkbox looks like a checkbox: it's a concept taken from the physical world to represent a boolean value. In a world where paper checkboxes are becoming increasingly irrelevant, the metaphor doesn't make sense. The same can be said for square buttons and radio buttons. The "push a single round peg in and the others will pop out" UX from old equipment just isn't around anymore.
People who struggle with mobile devices face the exact same problem as the people who struggle with desktops: the metaphors don't overlap so it's hard to predict behaviour.
Still, a lot of that knowledge is lost because we don't need to deal with it anymore. We don't need to manually configure the IRQ of our sound cards, we don't need to run chkdsk, we don't need to download defragmenting programs. This stuff was never really intuitive to begin with, it was just a barrier between "nothing works right" and "I can use my computer as intended".
Now that computers are more reliable and easier to use, not everyone who wants to use a computer needs to know the details about path lengths and file systems anymore.