Tim Streater wrote:

Having been working with Mint in a VM I'm just surprised how little of
it is configurable from the GUI

I've never tried Mint, more of a Fedora/CentOS person, but the general
trend has been towards dumbing down the UI

Admittedly early configuration GUIs were a mess of techy tickboxes and
weird fields, but you could get stuff done.

Then the simple settings got moved to be in one place, with an
"Advanced" button guarding the scary settings.

Lately it seems to have become "we know best and have set the defaults
for you" if you want to change them you'd better use the CLI.

Gnome3.14 is even less intuitive than Windows8, no taskbar, no start
menu, and if you dare ask how to turn them back expect to get a snarly
reply of "you need to learn not to want those".