Well, you fell on the sad trap of the “default flavour” of many distros.

I think GNOME only has that presence because… It’s american. Otherwise… No one can beat the possibilities and features of KDE Plasma. Truly a complete desktop, so good you could downgrade it to work like GNOME if you wanted.

You are not a Plasma user it seems.

KDE Plasma Hack masterrace

Was the Ventoy binary blob issue resolved and it’s cool again?

That one is infuriating. Having a good client is so key to adoption… And Element is still really, really bad. Yes, it has almost all the features, but refusing multi-account is so so so annoying, and being Electron garbage is horrible. They have so much funding it’s ridiculous.

XMPP is another case where adoption has mostly failed exactly because there are no “flagship” clients that do it all.

That’s why DeltaChat looks so good. The official clients work great everywhere, and they can do it all!