I have been using GNOME as my primary desktop environment since version 38. To be honest, it got bad when Libadwaita/GTK4 released.

I did a forum post on the EndeavourOS Linux forum talking about this, back in late 2023 and i reposted it on GNOME's forums, without any success. From what i know they didn't work on the feedback i gave. https://forum.endeavouros.com/t/constructive-gnome-a-bit-of-...

GNOME on GTK3 was a lot more stable and quite faster, specially for the desktop effects and the design of the overview was a lot easier on mouse users (now you have to scroll all around the screen to just do things).

The focus of this is GTK but i want to quickly mention that GNOME is hostile to developers making extensions.

Recently they updated something in the Javascript they use for developing extensions, breaking all of them, and providing a porting guide very close to the deadline of the next GNOME release, barely giving developers working on their free time, time to port things, or they would get a storm of users complaining to port the program (don't believe me? browse GNOME's extension store for 5 minutes).

The first and most damaging thing i faced as a user was a very nasty bug in GTK4 that made scrolling impossible (the bug is still alive today when using touchpads) https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971 .

The most crazy thing is that this critical bug for UX was detected in mid 2020, yet 4 years later it's still present on GTK. GNOME decided to break people's computers by shipping this critical bug.
To me this is enough reason to not use it as a UI library. Imagine not having working scrolling... Oh wait, it's still going!

But the bugs don't stop there! GTK4 has had trouble with drag and drop support, since Nautilus' (the file manager) port to GTK4, it completely broke DnD support of File Roller (the archive manager). Now that File Roller got updated to GTK4 the problem surely got fixed, right? NO! In fact, now File Roller broke DnD for every program!

You really have to be bad to ship very broken features to an increasingly bigger user base. Even KDE's recent port to QT6 had less bugs!

Another thing that annoys me is the lack of customization. Back in GTK3 days all you needed was a GTK theme, even GNOME's Libhandy could get themed without problems. It got to a point where developers did a nothingburger note on customization https://stopthemingmy.app/ . That didn't stop anyone.

Now you need to know what themes support GTK4 and what theming hack to run on it, and don't get me started on theming Flatpak...

GTK4 never got proper support for theming, making the unreliable hacking methods the only way to theme it, without modifying the program's source. Now it ships in production with Ubuntu 24.04 (they did the right call to avoid GTK4 in 22.04 by rolling back some programs). The closest thing to an "official" theming is the Gradience program https://gradienceteam.github.io/

It's specially bad and annoying, with barely any good themes that support Libadwaita, it got to the point i developed a small program to simplify theming of Linux, called Iris https://github.com/Raxelgrande/Iris .

The other and probably most important roadblock for GTK is that it still lacks support for mobile devices, making the big strength of adaptable design it has go to waste. Nobody is going to buy a Linux phone.

Overall, GTK and GNOME are very lackluster and im pretty sure that i will avoid that toolkit like the plague. All that Libadwaita does is to lock people into GNOME's design, even if you don't like it.
Good luck running programs as good as Bottles and having it look integrated in your desktop. All because they just can't be bothered to at least add a theming API so everyone stops using hacky, problem ridden approaches.