I gave it a fair shot for about a year, using vanilla GNOME with no extensions. While I eventually became somewhat proficient, it’s just not good.

Switching between a few workspaces looks cool, but once you have 10+ programs open, it becomes an unmanageable hell that requires memorizing which workspace each application is in and which hotkey you have each application set to.

How is this better than simply having icons on the taskbar? By the way, the taskbar still exists in GNOME! It’s just empty and seems to take up space at the top for no apparent reason other than displaying the time.

Did I do something wrong? Is it meant for you to only ever have a couple applications open?

I’d love to hear from people that use it and thrive in it.

  • 0xtero
    9•1 year ago

    Vanilla GNOME without extensions is very challenging to use IMHO. It lacks serious Quality of Life features (well, it doesn’t lack them, they’ve been purposefully removed).

    It’s so frustratingly close to being excellent, clean desktop - but then it takes some really strange decisions with basic usability (like panel, taskbar, windows without controls etc).

    Luckily those are easy to fix with couple of extensions.

    • @[email protected]OP
      7•1 year ago

      Indeed, I’m trying dash to panel and it doesn’t feel like it fixes quite a few of the issues I was having. I’m just afraid this is going to break every GNOME update and it’s going to be annoying.

      • @SillyBanana
        2•1 year ago

        Updating is not too bad, as long as you don’t update as soon as new major Gnome version is available. I usually wait a few months, and by then all extensions are either updated, replaced by a fork, or obsolete.

      • @[email protected]
        1•1 year ago

        The more popular extensions, like Dash to Panel, are typically updated in time for the official update launch; it’s the smaller ones where the dev may take some time to update, and even then you can often manually edit the .json to manually make it compatible.

        Or you can do what I do and run Gnome on an Arch-based distro because it usually takes them a month or so to add the new version to their repo, by which time all of the major kinks have been ironed out.

    • Bri Guy
      3•1 year ago

      I used Pop_OS for a while and I think they’ve added a lot of great UX improvements to GNOME. When I tried vanilla GNOME I was about to pull my hair out and didn’t really want to spend all the time downloading extensions/tweaks just to make it usable