> I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me.
Why not use the default provided then and take the defaults as opinionated? That's what I do actually. I might change very few options, but I generally use the defaults. It's not that you have to configure kde before it becomes usable, the defaults are pretty ok.
In something as complex as a display stack this is an important tradeoff.
I just want to type D, enter and open Documents/, how hard can it be. It's been almost a decade since they removed it, and I still can't use vanilla Nautilus.
I always end up with Nemo or a patched Nautilus.
rant aside, the rest of gnome seems fine. Don't love it, but also don't hate it. I can add my own shortcuts with rofi/dmenu.
But afaik it still defaults to search.
Have you ever tried Icewm?
Every now and then I distro hop and ended up on LMDE (linux mint debian edition, the real linux mint) which only has a cinnamon offering out of the box. Much to my surprise its actually good. It still has random bugs triggered by stuff I've tried adding to the panel, but that's par for the course with gnome, XFCE, and MATE lately anyway. Over all it's a solid DE now even if the stock start/menu is underwhelming everything is fixable.
Why would we have any reason to believe that there would ever be a super-opinionated desktop environment that would be good? The examples we have -- which notably DO NOT include Windows 95, which had a zillion tiny knobs, many in the UI, but others requiring dropping to the registry (which is no different from screwing with confirmation files)... and, frankly, doesn't even include macOS, the system with some of the best customization of key bindings and the most universal automation -- are mostly bad. Put in the day or two of effort to make something that isn't opinionated work the way you want, and then reap the rewards for the following few decades of your productive career.
Is the problem that you don't want choices as long as the maintainers always makes the same choice you would have when taking options away?
Also I don't like that KDE does not have its native launcher. I need to install some SDDE stuff which works under Xorg or something like that and looks ugly. Pretty weird stuff all that. GNOME just have GDM which just works.
My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.
There are no other 10 DE environments. GNOME and KDE are the only two mature ones. Rest are either obsolete, especially with Wayland conquering Linux desktop, or for weird use-cases, like tiling WMs. I'm used to traditional windows managers, I don't want tiling WMs.