If you are looking for a “normal” desktop, there’s KDE, Cinnamon and Xfce.
Don’t try to turn Gnome into something it wasn’t designed to be.
Gnome is great for a keyboard-and-touchpad-driven workflow on notebooks. You can install one or two extensions to tweak it a bit, preferably through your distros package manager (which solves the issue of extensions breaking after a Gnome update).
But if you find yourself collecting a list of them, or want a more traditional UI, choose a different DE.
You can easily get away with more than one or two. I typically run between eight and ten and have rarely had any issues surrounding updates.
It’s really just as simple as waiting a week or two after a new Gnome version drops before you update. By then, the vast majority of the more popular extensions will have already fixed any compatibility issues or, if not, there’s a very good chance that an outdated extension can be replaced by a newer alternative.
Don’t try to turn Gnome into something it wasn’t designed to be.
Don’t tell me what to do. We all have our own preferences, that’s the beauty of Linux.
Personally, I have tried many different desktop environments with various customizations. I still think that GNOME + Extensions is the most beautiful and productive desktop experience for me.
Even despite the obvious flaws of GNOME, I still find it easier to customize and configure to my personal preferences than other desktop environments.
I think the point they were making was that Gnome is made for a touchpad / keyboard driven approach, so complaining that it’s not something else or that it requires multiple extensions is pointless.
If you use 15 extensions to get your perfect desktop and don’t say a word, no-ones going to care, just don’t complain when it breaks.
If only KDE was as seamless as GNOME on my Optimus laptop… I’ve tried gaming on Wayland (I need wayland for games) on KDE and performance was awful. On GNOME Wayland it’s as good as Windows
This comment reads like you’ve never actually tried Gnome with proper extensions (like arc menu and dash-to-panel), because those aren’t even comparable in quality. I mean that when comparing to KDE as well.
I want to love XFCE, but whisker-menu doesn’t support opening it on meta key release, which is baffling to me. Also the lack of night mode, which redshift is just throwing a random program into the mix. Which if you don’t mind that, then you wouldn’t have a problem with Gnome extensions in the first place.
It’s not, it’s a rock solid, slow moving desktop that emulates a familiar experience for every Windows user and dose so awesome, my dad couldn’t use KDE or Gnome and XFCE is great too but far closer to that ancient description and harder to use than Cinnamon for most normal people, it’s simply perfect for people like my Dad even compared to Windows!
