I refuse to follow the road to Android / IOS / Windows8 - dom

Amidst all the upheaval with Gnome 3 and Unity I've been customising my desktop, I left Ubuntu after the first version of Unity and settled back to Debian Sid with Gnome 3, but dislike the defaults and set it to have icons on the desktop (which I customise easily with a right click, select the thumbnail and pick a new image to use, this is then automatically re-scaled, great), I also reinstated the min/max buttons on each window, I love the way Gnome 3 uses workspaces, it's better than any other desktop I've used but I think you can take the beauty in simplicity and minimalism to frustrating levels, thanks a lot Apple you've spread an idea and people are running with it, right into a brick wall. A desktop or laptop PC isn't a tablet or mobile phone, I don't want a central market to download "Apps", I wan't a fully functioning desktop to install (with apt-get in this case), compile or create programmes from many sources. People claim this isn't a dumbing down of computers but progress into a modern clear uncluttered computing experience, that just works, well yes it just works, but it doesn't do very much, I wan't to customise fully, I wan't wallpaper, launchers, and fully featured software, apps tend to be nothing more than toys. To me Windows 8 looks dull and operates tyrannically, I don't want to be dictated to with a list of ugly tiles thanks, Gnome 3 looks simple and attractive but I don't want the desktop icons and full control over windows to be lost in later versions, and I even have a menu on the main screen (with an extension) it's very discrete and blends in, it can be edited with a programme called Allacarte, sometimes you just want access to all the software you have installed without flicking to the gnome shell screen, other times I prefer to press the windows key and type the start of the name in the search feature, and there's also the dock for programmes used very frequently. The reduction of clutter to make a clean well designed system should never be put over and above choice, if that big killer distro appears with all the user friendliness required to crack the market and compete strongly with commercial operating systems I don't want it to impact the rest of linux so much that it takes away choice and makes them boringly homogeneous, linux has to retain a big fat element of do it yourself, that's what brought me to it in the first place.