It's probably the same reason everybody uses Windows and not Linux: familiarity and ease of transition. Sure, Linux has way more personality and distros, but that makes it less appealing of a transition than mimicking what is already known.
At the least, the clones can introduce them to the concepts at a slower pace so they can develop an interest in the more creative projects that people will work.
gnome 4 has been a total disaster, and they don't let you have a way back. nearest i have found is cinnamon.
Whats the disaster with gnome? I haven't used many distros. My primary two are Mint Cinnamon and Unraid. Ive used Linux Lite and it felt like a transition between windows and Mint.
the theme engine of gnome 4 is a clunky copy of the MacOS style with dark and light frames in the same frame, and no support for GTK3 theme engines.
i like Adapta, which in code editors is known as "material oceanic", it is a dark green theme. Gnome 4 makes my desktop into a dog's breakfast of pseudo mac looking garbage.
i'm also very pissed at Gnome devs for the pointless and intrusive Tracker3 search engine back end. it always crawls my massive collections of code and fucks up my ability to work, play games, and generally enjoy use of my computer. Tracker has been a problem since they started that shit in gnome 3. it's idiotic, because for the most part, slocate does the main job of indexing your filesystem, i am more often searching for filenames than wanting to search content, and that's what Tracker3's specialty is.
i just turn it off, forcibly, it always hits me out of the blue after a few weeks running a new installation and i'm so frustrated. i've managed to keep an installation ongoing, but yeah, between the constant mangling of gnome's dconf registry style configuration system (at least as bad as windows registry) and ubuntu's habit of upgrading kernels that are locked in with packages that i can't uninstall, that don't support my video hardware, black screen boot out of the blue, and unhelpfully difficult to access GRUB configuration.
this is why my system now is running arch, cinnamon, themed with adapta, tracker3 is disabled forcibly, as well as in the configuration.
btw, you should see how intrusive tracker3's settings are in dconf.
it's almost like they are putting it in there to spy on us, all they need to do is slide into your user profile via some vulnerable app and they can just snarf tracker's indexes and quickly determine what your business is.
i don't like Mark Shuttleworth, I don't like Gnome Foundation and I don't like the Linux kernel either. all of them are sus as fuck, most likely NSA fronts just like all the rest of tech.
I can understand lots of that is bad (i need to look i to tracker3 now), but what's up with the linux kernel now? If there are important problems with it, I want to know.
mainly just annoying things with the kernel. lots of bug regressions with drivers i think. that can be a security concern but not as obviously intentional as tracker.
