Gnome2 was the pinnacle of desktop environments. Simple, clean, fast, lean, light. Works with mouse and keyboard.

Gnome fucked it all up and I cant hate them enough for it. After that they've just continuously pissed on users' feet and removed features after features.

Oh why I dont use gnome2 forks and derivatives? Well I have for 15 years. But they simply do not have the momentum of being the single best DE, which gnome2 likely would've been. We would not have thousands of DEs if gnome wouldnt fucked up with gnome shell.

Yeah I use kde nowadays more than mate.