KDE is now my favorite desktop

GNOME is pretty, but it’s not great when it comes to progressive disclosure – what you see is what you get; there’s no depth in which power user features can be found.

macOS is nearly the opposite in this regard. I wouldn’t mind giving it a facelift but doing it GNOME style would mean it losing much of what has kept many users on it.

The way for power using gnome is through extensions. But once you got used to the gnome philosophy, you find that you don’t have to fiddle with the UI that much.

Do you have any examples where power features aren't accessible? The OP used a wifi applet as an example of exposing information. I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal (that's always open anyway)? It's desktop agnostic, works even without a desktop. And then there's no need for an entire applet dedicated just to wifi for the rare occasion you need to lookup your MAC address.

One small example is how holding down Option/Alt modifies behavior in various ways throughout macOS.

Often it functions as a “do this for everything” modifier. So for example, option-clicking the minimize traffic light minimizes all windows from the application the window belongs to, and option-clicking a disclosure triangle in a nested list expands or contracts all child nodes.

There’s tons of little things like that which might sound silly but become significant time and sanity savers after making a habit of using them.

Nice in theory, but my experience has been that extension devs burn out from having to update their extensions so often to keep them from breaking. There’s also some things that extensions can’t fix.

The silly thing about Gnome extensions is that you have to configure them through a web browser rather than OS dialogs rendered with their own graphical toolkit.

> I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal (that's always open anyway)?

I'm a regular Linux user, but I wouldn't know how to get all the data from the Wi-Fi applet using the Command Line. GUI have the advantage of discoverability over CLI: with a GUI I get a bunch of useful info in a single place, with a CLI I first need to know that a data is available and then I need to look-up the right invocation to get this data.

UI also represents an opportunity for standardization, which is a powerful force for onboarding non-technical users and in time, turning them into power users. Standardized patterns illustrate to users that there's a method to the madness and that computers are finite, learnable systems and not seemingly arbitrary chaos or unintelligible techno-wizardry.

That is untrue! There’s a CLI for loading them, and a settings api. The web thing is just one of the distribution channel.

Don’t use private API then. While the public API is not stable, there’s few changes there.

I don't know what falls under public and private API but across my GNOME installs over the years there are numerous extensions that've broken and been abandoned, which suggests that most of the things that people want to customize sit on the private side of the line.

> I'm not sure if this isn't as common as I think it is - but what's wrong with typing `ip` into a terminal

Well, for a start, `ip` isn't enough to give you anything. You'd need at least `ip a` or `ip r`, but then you'd have to already know that or go hunting in the manual (the `ip` help really is pretty bad). For something you might only need once a year (and will forget before you need it again!), having it in the GUI is very valuable.