A new project trying to get off the ground and currently in an "exploratory phase" is GYESME that describes itself as a "design-led" downstream of GNOME with plans ot only fork when needed that is "minimal by default."

GYESME is a brand new effort looking to build upon the GNOME codebase is a more design-led manner and focus on minimalism and modularity. GYESME is just in the process of being established and was tipped off to its formation this weekend by a Phoronix reader. There doesn’t appear to be much to it yet besides their planning documentation. They self-describe the aim of GYESME as:

"GYESME is a design-led downstream of GNOME focused on architectural optionality. It treats minimalism as a default state rather than a constraint, and modularity as an internal property rather than an afterthought.

The project explores how GNOME can remain visually and conceptually minimal while allowing optional functionality, alternative workflows, and broader portability across Linux environments. ... GNOME provides a clean, modern desktop environment with a strong emphasis on consistency and simplicity. Over time, this has also resulted in tightly prescribed defaults, limited architectural modularity, and the removal or hard-coding of behaviors many Linux users consider fundamental.

GYESME does not attempt to replace or “fix” GNOME. Instead, it treats GNOME as a platform that can be explored, extended, and restructured where appropriate, with an emphasis on opt-in behavior and long-term maintainability." On whether GYESME is a "fork" of GNOME or not:

"A fork is considered only where architectural constraints make clean modularity impossible through extensions alone. Any such consolidation is treated as an outcome of research, not a starting assumption."

This minimalism-focused downstream also notes that they are not opposed to GNOME’s use of systemd but that they aim to avoid unnecessary hard dependencies where possible on systemd-specific functionality where other reasonable alternatives also exist.

GYESME.org notes the project is currently in an exploratory phase focused on research and architectural discussion. Their GitHub repository features more planning documentation as well as a road-map of possible action over the next two years.

Their goals may be noble while it will be interesting to see if the project can successfully execute over the coming months and recruit enough open-source developers to deliver on their design objectives.