Dumb title but I didn't know how else to put this into words, bear with me for a sec - I am not just looking for the definition.
Years ago I tried Ubuntu which used GNOME and assumed that its desktop layout was "the default" GNOME. I later tried PopOS which also uses it and it was the same, and when eventually I installed Mint I saw that it's still fundamentally the same with some slight tweaks or different tools.
Well, few days ago I installed Bazzite (Fedora) which is also GNOME. It doesn't look anything like anything I've seen before, either in terms of mindset or technical layout. I've gone from an admittedly old-fashioned, but efficient and reliable!, layout and workflow to something that reminds me more of an apple product - its stylish, minimalist yet inefficient and utterly frustrating to get anything done with because of how opinionated it is.
When searching for common problems I often found comments saying stuff like "but try it out! it's in the spirit of gnome, it takes a while to get used to it but the philosophy is valid" and frankly I don't understand anymore what exactly gnome is and what are its design principles, if there even are any and every distro just does whatever the f it wants and call it "a gnome experience".
Ubuntu never provided a "default" GNOME experience, or at least not since the early 2000s. At one point Ubuntu had it's own desktop environment, unity, and when they abandoned the project and switched to gnome shell, they modified it to look similar to that. So we went from this:
to this:
I doubt that. Pop_OS was never the same as Ubuntu. In the beginning it provided an experience that was arguably much closer to vanilla gnome than Ubuntu:
later they started to add their own flare customising the desktop a lot and rebranding all of this as Cosmic Shell:
Mint never used Gnome. They have their own desktop environment called Cinnamon, which uses some of the same underlying technology, manly the GTK toolkit but is it's own independent project.
It still should be familiar in some aspects. The grid-view of all apps for example should be something that you know from Ubuntu (Pop replaces that part in more modern iterations - kinda). Bazzite still does modifications, they're just a lot more subtle than the ones from Pop and Ubuntu. But I agree with you: Gnomes workflow doesn't agree with many users. There are those who like it and they tend to really like it. Gnome wants you to heavily use keyboard shortcuts and virtual desktops and I found that casual users aren't really a friend of either.
So what is the default Gnome experience? try it out. There is an extension manger installed that ships with bazzite (and if not use the software store to install it). In it you can disable all the modifications. You can also install extensions to fix some of the usability problems. "Dash to Dock" tends to solve like 90% of them (It's also what Ubuntu uses for their modifications)
It's been a while since I used ubuntu and popOS was only for a few days so maybe I was just mistaken, I remember it being somewhat comparable to a classic desktop at the time but it could have been that cosmic shell thing. And tbh until so far I thought cinnamon is gnome so it seems like I was just outright wrong about that one, thanks for clarifying
I'm definitely willing to try bazzite's gnome3 for a while, i just wasn't sure what's the default anymore and if it's bazzite doing something out of the norm or if the ubuntu based distros did.