It's part of "What's been keeping Linux from having good UX up to this point?"
Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.
Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.
> One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"
You click the previous folder in the navigation bar.
Most works GNOME did are somewhat invisible to users. GNOME is the main driving force behind immutable OS and containerised sandboxed apps, both are intended to make the OS maintain itself and simplify software management to single/zero click.
Valve adopted them afterwards and now everyone in the KDE team wants to join the ride.
Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.
KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.
> I'm so continuously confused why Minecraft doesn't have a show-off mode where a team of people can build something, and then someone else can spectate it, without causing undue server load.
You'll be confused by Minecraft in general then. Mojang's core team seems like they never changed a bit in all these years despite becoming a billion dollar studio, for better or for worse. Last time I played it, mods can still make the game run twice as fast.
It might be the year of Linux gaming systems. The desktop went from terrible to bad and is still at least a decade behind unless some organisation invests dozens of millions and gets themselves an actual professional dev team.
On mobile the map prevents the user from scrolling down, you need to drag the padding area instead. Google maps embed doesn't have this issue as it requires two fingers to pan.
To solve the issue from the source, you need to enforce security through means like mandatory access control. The problem is that existing desktop and server systems are too mature for that to be practical, you'll have to rework almost everything and users will certainly reject it violently due to the breakages.
In many ways non mobile computers are very much still stuck in 1999. Android is significantly more secure than other Linux systems because it's much younger and had the chance to integrate mandatory access control into the entire stack.
> How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute.
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.
> How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.
> Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.
> Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.
Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.
So designers stayed far, far away.