I really like gnome and how it looks. However every time I try it I find myself in need of more functionality and so I install a bunch of extensions. For example I can’t live without a dock and some sort of system tray that shows which apps are running in background.

Sometimes the extensions have small UI inconsistencies or use more memory than usual. That’s why I totally ditched gnome and switch to KDE.

Also I tend to think it’s been designed for people who are more comfortable using a keyboard. I’m mostly a mouse person.

Do any of you run pure gnome with no extensions? How do you cope with the lack of a dock and system tray?

  • FOSS Is FunEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    I use it without extensions*.

    Whenever I use KDE on my desktop (I installed KDE there because GNOME worked so well that I got a bit bored of it …), I miss the workflow that GNOME Shell provides. Dynamic workspaces are amazing (use Super + mousewheel or touchpad gestures to quickly switch between them) and I miss them on any other desktop.

    I also think that KDE provides lots of settings, but few of them do anything useful. Whereas GNOME mostly provides exactly the settings I need and few I don’t. I also love that I can script my GNOME setup completely via gsettings, whereas KDE stores everything in config files that are difficult to modify, especially while the desktop and apps are running (they may override the files when closing), and their settings are hardly documented. gsettings actually is somewhat self-documenting due to descriptive schemas and descriptions.

    In general I just enjoy the elegant, simple, unique and focused experience that GNOME provides.

    *Well, “used to”, as I recently switched from Geary to Birdtray + Thunderbird and needed to install an Appindicator extension to make Birdtray work, which I think is very unfortunate, as other applications that use a system tray, like Electron messengers, stay in the background without any extensions. I actually might go back to Geary because of this and the fact that I have to run Birdtray and Thunderbird with Xwayland to get any kind of tray functionality / background notifications …