I just spent literally 3 days of my spare time trying to deal with scaling. I ran Linux on the desktop for 15 years. Had to switch to Mac for a while and then back to Windows for a while. Laptops with 4K screens turned out to be an interesting challenge when I finally came back. I had run gnome For most of my history with Linux.
After a few days of fighting with scaling and trying to locate working plugins for things I wanted, I swapped over to KDE. My screen scaling and multiple display resolutions workwd perfectly out of the box and everything that I was trying to find plugins for was already there.
It's taken me since the early 00"s but I might have become a KDE convert.
Kde is my daily driver. Has been for 6 years now. I try gnome here and there just to see how it's progressing. It sucked badly on a 14" laptop with 1440 screen I have. So glad scaling is fixed now
The option was there, but it wasn't ready for every day use. The performance impact was significant. The couple times I tried it, it was practically unusable.
The UI also showed a warning about performance when you enabled it
I recently installed Debian with Gnome on a laptop, and the UI is miles and miles better than what it was ~7 years ago. It used to feel old and like a knockoff of Windows XP or something. Now I only want to use Gnome on Linux. Huge credit to the Gnome team for all of these UI improvements they've been making, it's a serious amount of work gone into things.
I recently tried gnome and then untried it with the uninstall button for making stupid fucking design decisions I need to jump through hoops to turn off.
I rented Superman 64 once when I was a kid. Using gnome was like that.
I'd be curious which design decisions you thought were awful and were difficult to turn off? I've always though UIs across all OSes are very inflexible (e.g. on a Mac, you can't change command-tab to alt-tab, and can't cycle same-app windows without a separate keybind), so I'm not usually surprised when things are difficult to disable.
My only negative experience with Gnome was not seeing which apps were open at a glance (need to alt-tab and tile all windows). This is mainly a "what I'm used to" kind of thing though.