I used Gnome for years and can honestly say that if you put a lot of effort into it, mess with configs, and install a few extras, it rises to a new level of kind of shitty but usable.
Fuck, KDE was pretty a decade ago, and Gnome is still just plugging away, being the bare minimum.
Part of it is the fact that Ubuntu is an entry level sort of OS, it’s been simplified down and made easy. So the sort of people who have it are often less tech-savvy, and when something does go wrong, they ask a lot of pretty basic seeming questions.
This isn’t helped by some of Canonical’s design choices. Nothing overt, but Ubuntu has a flavor that’s distinctly Ubuntu, and knowledge of other distros is sometimes a detriment in solving problems.
Canonical is also a company that just rubs some people the wrong way. There was some data collection shit where they asked users to opt-out of collection, after installing the data collection app.
Then there’s Snaps… it’s their own unique take on program management. Which is a Canonical thing, reinventing the wheel so that they can have their own unique little thing. Like Mir and Unity, which were then both abandoned to the community.
It’s good that the community can take over when Canonical drops something, but still…