[AngriestLettuce]

I don't have an actionable list off the top of my head, but in particular, about 6-12 months ago, I started digging into how to theme my install. Wanted to have e.g. different system theme colours than Ubuntu eggplant, a different background, different login screen, etc. There were so many different ways and places of doing things (stylesheets packed in gresource files, dconf, more oldschool config files, gnome-tweaks) that after messing around with it a bit I just gave up. Didn't seem worth the time.

It isn't any one particular option that I'm missing, rather the entire experience of modifying its behaviour is a pain in the ass. They seem to labour under the delusion that if they just make this one perfect system, everyone will be happy with it, so they don't need to prioritize customizability. This is rarely ever the case when dealing with real people with different needs.

[QUrprUd1nCeicw]

That has nothing to do with GNOME. That's going to happen any time you try to theme 100 different programs and try to get them all to look consistent. Try to imagine writing one CSS and applying it to every website you visit and expecting it to work correctly. It's just not going to work, you'd have to manually rewrite the CSS for every site. The same is true of desktop applications. The only reason your desktop appears consistent with the default Ubuntu themes is because all the apps already did the work to target that theme. If you want another theme, you have to do all that work all over again. You can't avoid this just by adding more options, it's a large amount of extra code that needs to be written every time for every app.