I'm talking about the desktop environment explicitly, not the underlying OS.
To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons:
- Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present)
- By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
- Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hamburger" menus
- By default, no desktop icons (not even an app grid!)
- Simplistic ecosystem apps with mobile-like philosophy of eschewing functionality that doesn't fit in toolbars and hamburger menus
- Little to no presence of progressive disclosure (enabling power user functions to be present without falling in the path of novices and tripping them up)
- Limited extensibility and scriptability (more so than macOS in some ways), with what exists (GNOME extensions) being fragile and breaking constantly due to needing to monkeypatch UI code
While it's not my cup of tea, KDE and even less trendy DEs like XFCE do a better job at acting like an actual desktop environment and surfacing the capabilities of the system.
> By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
This is explained by the ElementaryOS H.I.G.:
> Apps should save their current state when closed so they can be reopened right to where the user left off. Typically, closing and reopening an app should be indistinguishable from the legacy concept of minimizing and unminimizing an app; that is, all elements should be saved including open documents, scroll position, undo history, etc.
> Because of the strong convention of saved state, elementary OS does not expose or optimize for legacy minimize behavior; e.g. there is no minimize button, and the Multitasking View does not distinguish minimized windows.
More: https://docs.elementary.io/hig/user-workflow/closing
Ah. Well then I'll argue my original statement holds. Op himself likened his product to gnome 2. Gnome 3 was released 15 years ago so if anything I was generous in my original comment.