I’m really surprised this post’s been up for 6 hours and there are no GNOME haters commenting all kinds of terrible stuff yet.
Anyways good job, GNOME team.
I use Gnome, and I’m not a hater, but if you’re expecting some harsh criticism for it, here it is: Extensions breaking so easily should not happen. It’s an extreme pain in the butt every 6 months. They should establish an allowed API that’s frozen, while extensions that use private api calls, don’t get posted on the gnome website/extensions app, so they’re harder to find. Simple.
It wouldn’t really be an issue if you didn’t need an extension for every single basic functionality…
Because of how stupidly opinionated Gnome is I switched to KDE a year or so ago and have been extremely happy with it. And what do you know I don’t even need any extensions, because sane stuff like tray icons are builtin.
I do use an extension for distributing windows in custom areas though, and it didn’t even break throughout the (I believe) 2 large updates there were since I started using it.
I like the opinionated nature of GNOME, I don’t have time to configure my desktop, I just need to do work and get paid.
I may understand “opinionated” differently from you, but the main issue is that when you do want to change something, you can’t. Or it’s some unsupported hack, or (best case) you flip some hidden configuration variable (that will probably break with the next release).
KDE is well configured from the get go as well, you don’t have to change anything and it will work well. But if you do decide that you don’t like some of their defaults, you can tweak many aspects of it.